On September 21, 2001, Rais Bhuiyan was working behind the counter at a gas station outside Dallas, Texas when a man named Mark Stroman walked in brandishing a sawed-off shotgun.

Stroman was a self-proclaimed white supremacist in the midst of a deadly hate crime spree. Seeking revenge for the recent September 11th attacks just days earlier, he roamed the area looking for what he believed to be Arabs to kill. In that killing spree Stroman took the lives of an Indian immigrant named Vasudev Patel and Waqar Hassan, a Pakistani immigrant.

Stroman shot Bhuiyan in the face. But Bhuiyan, who was a former Bangladeshi air force pilot, survived the attack. Stroman was eventually arrested, convicted of murder and sent to death row.

As Stroman awaited execution, Rais Bhuiyan embarked on an improbable campaign to spare the life of his attacker. 

This story was masterfully told in the 2014 book The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Ghirdiharas. A major hollywood movie based on the book is currently in production.

Today, Rais Bhuiyan is the founder and president of the NGO, World Without Hate. When we caught up, Rais had recently returned from a trip to Canada, sponsored by the US State Department, where he told his story. That trip also included a visit to the Islamic Center of Quebec City which was the scene of a mass shooting hate crime just one year ago. We kick off discussing this trip and Rais’ work with the State Department before entering into a long and powerful conversation about Rais’ experience.

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Maggy Barankitse is the founder of Maison Shalom, an orphanage and school that was created in Burundi in the wake of the Civil War there in the 1990s.

Like in neighboring Rwanda, the conflict in Burundi involved acts of genocide pitting ethnic groups against each other.

The conflict came to Barankitse’s town on October 24th, 1993. At the time, she was working as a secretary in the local catholic diocese in her hometown of Ruyigi, Burundi. What happened was an act of unspeakable cruelty. This description of events is from the website of Maison Shalom:

“In the autumn of 1993, an atmosphere of uneasiness had settled over the country. In Ruyigi, disaster struck on 24 October. To exact vengeance for the killing of members of their ethnic group, the Tutsi hunted the town’s Hutus, who were hiding in the diocese buildings.

Maggy was also there. She tried to reason with the group of Tutsi driven mad by hatred. She tried to convince them not to use violence. Her efforts were in vain. To punish her for what they considered a betrayal on the part of a Tutsi “sister”, they decided to strip her and tie her to a chair. They forced her to remain in that position and watch as they first set fire to the diocese building to force those hiding there to come out, then as they mercilessly hacked her friends to death with machetes.”

As she tells me in this podcast episode, it was this experience that lead her to create an oasis of peace and hope in the midst of such conflict and tumult. Today, Maison Shalom has served tens of thousands of children since its founding.

Unfortunately, Maggy now lives as a refugee in Rwanda. She was forced to flee the country after she spoke out against an illegal power-grab by the country’s president. But even from Rwanda, she is continuing her mission and has established a Maison Shalom to serve refugees and others in Rwanda.

For her work, Maggy Barankitse was awarded the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity, which is a $1 million prize awarded to individuals who commit extraordinary acts of humanity. The prize is awarded by the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative, which was founded by the decedents of the survivors of the Armenian Genocide.  A few weeks ago, I spoke with one of the initiative’s co-founders, Noubar Afeyan.

This is a powerful and inspiring conversation with an individual who has helped to save thousands of lives after her own life was shattered by genocide.

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Joseph Kaifala was just a child when civil war broke out in Liberia and Sierra Leone. The war came to his town in 1989 and as a seven-year-old was imprisoned with his father. They were eventually released and Joseph and his family spent much of the next decade on the run from a brutal civil war that seemed to follow them everywhere.

Kaifala recently published a memoir of these experiences titled Adamalui: A Survivor’s Journey from Civil Wars in Africa to Life in America. He is also the subject of a documentary film titled Retracing Jeneba: The Story of a Witness, which is poised to debut at film festivals.

Joseph Kaifala is a Humanity in Action Senior Fellow and the story of how he went from that prison in Liberia to this prestigious fellowship, and then onto law school in the United States is truly extraordinary.

We kick off discussing an NGO he started long with another Humanity in Action Senior Fellow Liat Krawczyk called The Jeneba Project. This is an organization dedicated to providing high quality education for children in Sierra Leone. Liat Krawczyk is also the co-director and co-executive producer of the documentary film, along with Anthony Mancilla.

This is a very powerful episode. We discuss Joseph’s unique personal journey and have digressions about the causes and effects of the civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia.

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Noubar Afeyan Credit: Aurora Humanitarian Initiative

Noubar Afeyan is a business leader, entrepreneur and philanthropist. In 2015, along with other decedents of survivors of the 1915 Armenian genocide, he co-founded the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative.  This initiative, as Afeyan explains, seeks to empower modern day survivors of genocide and mass atrocities through a variety of projects. The most high profile of these programs, the Aurora Prize for Awakening Humanity,  is a $1 million prize for individuals who are saving lives and promoting humanitarian values in the face of extreme adversity.

Noubar’s own family history and life story is one of survival. He was born in Beirut in the early 1960s, but his family took a circuitous route to get there, escaping the genocide and then subsequent persecution. Much of this history was relayed to him by his great aunt,with whom he lived growing up in Beirut.

This is a very interesting conversation not only about Noubar’s life journey and that of his family, but also how communities remember and honor historic atrocities visited upon them. We discuss his family’s experience during the Armenian genocide and how learning about that experience compelled him to become a philanthropist and civic leader.

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Lidia Bastianich is a chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, TV personality, entrepreneur and for the purposes of this conversation, most importantly a refugee.

She was born on the Istrian Penninsula to an ethnic Italian family. This is a region on the Adriatic Sea, in modern day Croatia. Following World War Two it was ceded from Italy to the control of Yugoslavia, which was under the communist rule of Marshal Tito.  As Lidia explains, policies that Tito enacted lead to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Italians, including her family.  Historians now refer to this as the Istrian exodus.

I include all this historic background because we kick off discussing a new philanthropic initiative in which Lidia is engaged that seeks to raise both funding and awareness for the education of refugee children.

The initiative is called Adopt-A-Future, and it was launched by the United Nations Association of the United States and USA for UNHCR, for which Lidia is a celebrity ambassador.. Lidia is asking people around the country to hold dinner parties which will serve as fundraisers for the cause of educating refugee children. Lidia is asking people around the country to hold dinner parties which will serve as fundraisers for the cause of educating refugee children.

In our conversation, we discuss at length Lidia’s refugee experience, which includes living for a time in a converted World War Two concentration camp in Italy before coming to the United States as a resettled refugee. Lidia offers some interesting insights on the salience of culinary traditions to immigration and the refugee experience.

This is a powerful and lively conversation about a lesser known side of a world renowned chef.

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Since 2013, the government of Australia has enforced a policy of sending any refugee or migrant who arrives who arrives by boat to detention centers in Papua New Guinea or the remote island nation of Nauru. They do so without exception.

Daniel Webb is an Australian lawyer who is fighting that policy.

He is the Director of Legal Advocacy at Australia’s Human Rights Law Center and he represents asylum seekers who are stranded indefinitely in Nauru and in Papua New Guinea.

In 2016 Daniel Webb helped lead a campaign called Let Them Stay, which petitioned the government to allow a few hundred of these asylum seekers who were transported to Australia for medical treatment to remain in the country.

For his work on behalf of these asylum seekers Daniel received the 2017 Global Pluralism Award. The award, “celebrates the extraordinary achievements of organizations, individuals and governments who are tackling the challenge of living peacefully and productively with diversity.”  He was one of three finalists.

The award was conferred by the Global Pluralism Center, which is a partnership between the Government of Canada and the Aga Khan, the religious leader, philanthropist and head of the NGO, the Aga Khan Development Network. The Aga Khan and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada were on hand to present this award at a ceremony in Ottawa in November.  I was in the audience, and after seeing his acceptance speech and learning more about his work I knew I had to get him on the show.

This is a powerful conversation that shines a light on a profoundly unjust and ongoing situation.

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