That is a very difficult question for me. We have a lot to say about how the way the world works.”Īs travelers, one of the most common questions we get is, “Where are you from?” How do you answer that?
I wanted to reach them and let them know that we are still here. Writes Dogon: “I started writing my book because I wanted to reach other people-people who had no connection to us, who were not from Congo or Rwanda, not from Africa, who had never met a refugee or thought about what a refugee camp might be like. The end result? A new-as-of-this-month title, Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds (Penguin Press), coauthored with reporter Jenna Krajeski. Throughout it all, Dogon has been journaling writing his story. He has been in the United States for four years, but the memories from his childhood are never far away. Today, he works as a human rights activist and public relations specialist for a software company. In 2016, he would meet an American businessman who changed the course of his life by helping him apply to New York University, which Dogon attended from 2017 to 2019, graduating with an MA degree in international education. In time, Dogon would eventually flee back to Congo in search of his former life and become a child soldier before returning, once again, to Gihembe.īack in Rwanda, Dogon attended a Rwandan high school and graduated at the top of his class, earning a degree in French and literature from the University of Rwanda. (Tutsi are a minority ethnic group, and after a 1994 assassination attempt on Rwanda’s president, Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, “Hutu extremists launched their plans to destroy the entire Tutsi civilian population,” per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.) Then, Dogon and his family traveled to the Mudende refugee camp in western Rwanda, where they survived two massacres by armed groups from the DRC before being moved to a refugee camp in northern Rwanda called Gihembe. But there’s a voice missing, even among all those titles, says Mondiant Dogon: those of refugees.īorn in 1992 into a Congolese Tutsi family in the Bagogwe tribe, Dogon and his family were forced to leave their village when Dogon was three by this time, the Rwandan genocide against Tutsis had spread into the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each year, hundreds of thousands of books are published in the United States alone.
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