University of Pennsylvania Board of Overseers

But you've talked about Rwanda when we were off camera, about that being a significant assignment for you. And I think we were looking at your photos I think. Am I right--wrong about that? I think (unclear) (simultaneous)--$$(Simultaneous) Yeah, yeah, ra, ra--Rwanda was the genocide. There were close to a million people massacred in a very short period of time and--$$And tell why.$$This was a conflict between ethnic groups, the Hutu, majority, and the Tutsi, minority. And in so many African countries, post-colonial--on a post-colonial situation, what, what the colonizers often did was they would take a minority group and essentially conspire with them to run the show to keep the majority group or majority groups in check. And this happened in many places in Africa, and it happened in Rwanda. And then the lid blew off that when the president's [Juvenal Habyarimana] plane crashed, and over years and years of, of the Hutu, majority, feeling like they were being taken advantage of by the minority, Tutsi. So this war broke out, and, and all these people were massacred. And we were--when, when all this started we are in South Africa, it was 1994, and South Africa wa- was just having their first democratic elections. Nelson Mandela was becoming president, and I believe this is April of '94 [1994]. And that is one of the most memorable things I'll--I've, I've ever experienced as well, just seeing the South Africans voting for the first time. I'd been to South Africa a, a number of times up to that point, and when I moved to London [England] one of the first things I wanted to do was get to South Africa because apartheid hadn't ended. And I wanted to see, and experience, and understand what this place was. And I'd studied a bit about it in school [University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania] and for the obvious reasons. And the morning of the election, the enduring images of long lines of people standing in this misty morning waiting forever, if they had to, to go vote. Some (unclear) really didn't understand what they were doing. I was in a place, KwaZulu-Natal [South Africa], which was you know, a fairly rural area. Most people are illiterate, you know, they had no real concept of democracy and all that. But this is what they were doing, and they were told it was gonna make life better, and so here, here it was. And, and that was one of the most profound things I've ever seen as well. So after the election, there are these rumblings about this refugee problem, these people fleeing this country north of South Africa--in the middle of Africa--to Rwanda. Who knew--who--what's Rwanda? Nobody really--I mean, people knew, but I didn't really know about it. And so when it really started, the numbers started getting bad, and people started appearing in camps across the--across the border in Tanzania and in Burundi in the other direction. And so we hopped on a plane and flew first to a, a little remote part of Tanzania, and that's where the first camps were of refugees forming. And people are telling this horrible, awful stories about what was going on inside this country. And you couldn't get in from there. You didn't wanna go in from there because it wasn't safe. The borders were sealed off, and people were just living in, in this, this misery and awful conditions in these camps, because all of a sudden it's--you know, there's like hundreds and thousands of people living in the field where there's nothing to sustain them. You know, there's no--you know, they're just there because that's the safe place the way you could walk to across the border. And then we--at, at one point, after doing that for a while, we flew--we flew to Uganda to the north, and we embedded or hooked up with the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the RPF, which was the, the rebel group--Tutsi led rebel group that was gonna try and liberate the country and, and fight the majority Hutu. And so we came--we came down into, into the capital with this military unit, and we were amongst the first to actually see what was going on inside the country, and it was horrific. I mean, it was just everywhere you looked there were--there were people who--dead bodies.$And then the, the next morning, we were presented--we had to appear before a judge, a court--(air quotes) was a financial court of some, some kind. And in, in my case what they found, in my baggage was--there was a--I was getting all my mail shipped to me because I was in Baghdad [Iraq] so long from the London [England] office. And as part of my 401(k) plan with the company, there's a disbursement of savings bonds that you get, and that, that you--they literally send you a chunk of bonds, and, and that was in my mail, and it came to me in Baghdad. And so when they went through our stuff, the border guards saw these things that had [President] George Washington and Ben Franklin's [Benjamin Franklin] picture and said 100--you know, savings bonds that looked like currency. So that was illegal currency that I had brought in. My colleagues, meanwhile, had, you know--well, greenbacks. They had--you know. Because we were leaving, we shut down the office and everything was done in cash, so they had--they took, you know sixty--we had lots of money. And we had these satellite telephones that they--were illegal there too as well. So, make a long story short, when I appeared before the judge, these are financial people, and they knew what this was, and they knew this was my money. And they said, "Oh, okay, you're fine; that's--you're, you're not guilty. We understand that's your money and we're not gonna penalize, but your colleagues however, they're guilty. They're guilty of smuggling--," or whatever and bat- and so we ordered to pay this huge fine. And we scraped the money together from our colleagues who were still in, in, in, in Baghdad, and NBC sent some money here or there or something and, and, and we got out. The whole thing probably took about thirty-six hours or so. And then the war started like the next day. But that--that's one reason. There have been a couple of close calls along the way and a couple of very tense moments. And I guess, not to over--not to be overly dramatic, but I've always believed that there are--you only get a few of those, and I don't know whether it's three or four or nine lives, but I know there's only a limited number of them. And I kind of felt like, okay, this happened. There are--there were other incidents. There was a, a moment in Rwanda when we were pinned down at--near a border, and there was gunfire going in different directions over us, and there was--there was another moment in Zaire, I think where we were. I think there was a, a soldier didn't like something and took us into detention and--I think it's one of the few times I've actually had a gun to my head, where they were--they were sort of pointing it at me. And so and there have been just bad times (laughter). So the combination of the traveling, and getting married [to Adaora Udoji], and being away from family, and these bad experiences--all of the wonderful experiences as well--we decided we needed to move back to the states. And I also wanted to know, okay, so what do you--what do you cash all this in for? You know, what do you in a--in a job professional sense--what is all this worth, all this stuff? And I--and I wanted a different life than I--than I had. Sometimes we--to honest with you, I've been back not ten years and I wonder why I came back (laughter). I know why I came because the travel just became--after 9/11 [September 11, 2001], we were expected to go places and spend six weeks in Kandahar [Afghanistan] or six weeks in wherever, and it just became too much. So, so that's why we moved back.