From his second-floor bed at Porter Adventist Hospital in Denver, Marcel Mutuyeyesu could see the future: “When this is over, I want to go to school . . . to be an engineer . . . or a doctor,” he whispered in broken English, his deep brown eyes fixed on the ceiling as the IV sedative took hold.
Moments later, as Marcel lay on the operating room table, his surgeon pulled a thin plastic sheet across Marcel’s face (a hole exposing his left eye), propped his lid open with a stainless-steel speculum, marked a blue line around his cornea and began to cut.
The Jan. 5 procedure, magnified in vivid detail on an overhead video screen, looked almost barbaric — like a scene out of a horror flick. But in reality, it was the second of two such surgeries and the culmination of a kinder tale. It is the unlikely story of a Rwandan boy who lost his parents to genocide and his sight to an insidious disease, but gained it back when a Somali eye surgeon, a Boulder teen, a Rwandan refugee and a phalanx of generous strangers came together on his behalf 9,000 miles from his home.
“When they told me there were people in Colorado who could help me, I couldn’t believe it,” recalls Marcel, 19.
It was almost two years ago that Marcel stood before a breakfast table full of Colorado nurses and doctors who were on a medical mission to the remote jungle-shrouded outpost of Mugonero Hospital, in rural Rwanda. He was frail, hunched over with nervousness and couldn’t speak a word of English. But he had come to ask for help.
Beside him stood John Hodgson, a recent Boulder High graduate who had postponed the luxuries of American college to instead spend the year volunteering in a hilltop orphanage near the hospital. As the group (including John’s father, Greg Hodgson) listened in, John translated Marcel’s native Kinyarwanda.
“Marcel works very hard and is very interested in his studies, but there is something wrong with his eyes,” John said. “He says he can’t see the blackboard or the books, even when he holds them up close to his face. Can you help?”
The room was quiet as the sympathetic but skeptical team of women’s health specialists privately wondered: What can we possibly do? But the conversation didn’t end there.
Orphaned at a young age
Accounts vary as to how old Marcel was when he arrived at L’Esperence Children’s Village Kigarama. Orphanage records say he was 6. He says he was 4. But one thing is certain: His parents were gone.
In April, 1994, Hutu extremists had filled the Rwandan airwaves with a call to “exterminate the minority Tutsi cockroaches,” igniting a 100-day bloodbath in which 1 million people were massacred, mostly with machetes and nail-studded clubs, in a country the size of Maryland. The region of Kibuye, where Marcel lived, was hit particularly hard, with an estimated 25,000 people killed in a matter of days inside the Mugonero medical complex. Those who survived the genocide often succumbed to disease, leaving behind legions of orphans.
Among them was Marcel, who was brought to L’Esperence after his father was killed and his mother died of cholera. Perhaps mercifully, his vision had already begun to slip away. When asked about his parents today, he says only: “I can’t remember.”
He would spend the next 13 years among 100 other children there, caring for the younger kids as if they were his siblings, and trying to study, and play soccer with friends, despite his deteriorating eyesight.
“I had a good life. They were the only family I knew,” he says.
But by age 17, he would be virtually blind and possess only a sixth-grade education — a recipe for a grim future in an impoverished, overcrowded country where land to cultivate is scarce, and job prospects hinge on education.
Enter John Hodgson, who saw Marcel’s promise and became intent on helping him.
He accompanied Marcel on a crowded bus ride to a Rwandan hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with “late-stage” keratoconus, a blinding disease in which the corneas become increasingly misshapen. His only hope was a cornea transplant — an impossibility in a nation where tissue donation is rare, specialists are almost non-existent and hospital conditions are primitive at best.
“I know this sounds crazy . . . but could he come to America with me when I come back?,” John e-mailed his father, director of medical missions for the Denver-based hospital chain Centura Health. “Tell everyone who knows me that this is what I want for Christmas and my birthday for the next 10 years — for him to have the gift of sight.”
A doctor connects
Back in the United States, things began to fall into place.
Upon hearing about Marcel from the returning medical team, Denver ophthalmologist Abdulfatah M. Ali felt a sense of kinship. He had emigrated from Somalia as a teenager just before that African country fell into chaos. He offered to provide Marcel’s surgeries for free.
“He’s just like any other teenager. He has aspirations. and he wants to conquer life,” says Ali, 39. “I wanted to be a part of making that happen.”
South Denver Rotary Club stepped up with funds for a plane ticket. Rocky Mountain Lions eye bank agreed to donate the tissue. Porter Adventist pitched in with the operating room fees. And a Rwandan security guard at Avista Adventist Hospital invited Marcel to live with him for the year it would take to complete, and heal from, two major eye surgeries.
“So many people helped us when we came here,” says Kimonyo Diojene, 26, whose family of 10 fled the genocide amid, as he puts it, “mass killings and churches full of dead bodies.”
They walked for days to reach safe haven in Tanzania, ultimately landing in a modest split-level home in Longmont. Even after he lost his job at Avista, opening his home to Marcel — and serving as his mentor and translator through months of doctor’s visits — was a given. “It’s just one human being helping another,” says Diojene.
Meanwhile, Greg Hodgson embarked on the colossal task of getting Marcel a passport and visa.
“It was like an answer to a prayer. Everything just started coming together,” he says, well aware of the impracticalities of amassing roughly $70,000 worth of donated services to help one boy. “I realize you can’t help everybody like this. But you can’t use that as an excuse to help nobody.”
On May 22, after a four-day odyssey that took them from Rwanda to Uganda to Europe to Chicago, Marcel stepped off the plane in Denver, one small tattered sack containing all of his belongings, with John Hodgson guiding his way.
The surgery begins
The first surgery was July 13. Start to finish, each operation took less than an hour.
During the January procedure, after the scarred cornea was removed, Ali used 24 tiny nylon stitches to replace the damaged part with that of perhaps Marcel’s most generous benefactor: a complete stranger with the foresight to become an organ donor.
Just weeks after his first surgery, he could see well enough to enroll in an English as a second language course at a local community college. “Not only will he go home able to see, but he will have a skill,” said the senior Hodgson. “Without any intervention, he would have been a drain on the system there.”
With his stitches healing, his bandages freshly removed, and several English classes under his belt, Marcel in January enrolled in high school at Vista Ridge Academy in Erie.
On a recent morning at his adoptive home, a markedly changed young man opened the door to visitors: still shy, but sporting a strong build, a broad smile, and — for the first time — eye contact.
“Now is better than before,” he said, fingering a copy of “Lord of the Rings,” that he hopes to soon to be able to read. “Now everything is clear. I’m so thankful.”
Lisa Marshall is a freelance journalist who spent a month traveling in Rwanda in February 2008. She met Marcel there and has followed his progress ever since.
