There is something
Janvier is a hotel manager in Rwanda. That’s his job and he does it exceptionally well. He has mastered customer service to perfection. So much so that even irritating failures to get breakfast on the time we have agreed for our early, daily meetings, or flicking light bulbs or a broken shower hose pipe, are met with such graciousness and instant remedies that you almost want to apologize for inconveniencing him. You could easily be seduced by his polished people skills into thinking that he is superficial and naive and has landed his management job by some accident of good fortune. But you would be very, very mistaken. This generation of younger workers are sometimes called the ‘snow flake generation’ because of their lack of resilience and grit in the workplace, or, as the famous comedian Harry Secombe once said, “they haven’t suffered enough”. Suffering and hardship not only reveal the truth of our character, they also strengthen it. Janvier looks like a snowflake, but that is only to hide the proven steel girder that is really inside him.
Janvier is 37 years old. That means he was 12 years old when the Rwandan Genocide killed almost a million people in a 100 days in 1994. Statistics and numbers don't have faces but Janvier’s story makes it all real again as he describes how his whole family were killed. There were 9 of them of now there is one – Janvier, so he lost his father, maternal mother, and six brothers and sisters. His father has two other wives and the day the sole surviving Janvier came out of the bush to try and find some food at one of his father other wives houses, she tried to trick him inside of the house while she went of to bring the killers back to the house to finish him off. He escaped but had absolutely nothing in the world other than the rags he stood up in.
What follows is a jaw dropping story of courage, resilience, entrepreneurship, lithe thinking and street wisdom. Janvier started by scrounging and then getting little jobs to earn a little cash to buy food. As his confidence grew he picked up small, casual grows in the growing reconstruction sector. The new Rwandan government ensured that every surviving orphan would receive a free education and this enabled him to get back to school while continuing with jobs in the evenings. Whilst his fees were paid he still needed cash to buy food and clothes. On completing school and getting to a college he took on a job as a waiter in a local hotel. He was embarrassed that girls he knew would see him wiring there and ridicule him for such a menial, unambitious job. He was so nervous when he started that he dropped a tray full of drinks. But he kept going. He used to watch how the bar man made cocktails for the expats rebuilding the country and worked hard to get as much knowledge on management from the head bar man as possible. The day the bar man suddenly left Janvier put himself forwards to replace him. Now as the head of the bar he had even closer sight of how a hotel worked. When a vacancy came up for a night duty managers job he didn't think twice and stepped up once again, increasing his income and his experience.
Unsurprisingly a local businessman who had just built a hotel in a nearby District saw Janvier’s potential and asked him if he wanted to manage the new place. Alongside all of this was his growing of a transport business. One night a guest had approached him with the request to hire a care first thing in the morning. Janvier spent the night hours chasing friends until he finally sourced a car for a fixed price. He added a fee on top for himself, offered the car at the full price to the guest, who didn't blink. The new car hire business was born that day. Using the money he could now save from previous jobs, the car hire business and his new management position, he saw that there was an opportunity to build a tourist camp site on the brow of a breathtaking mountain top nearby. So he bought the land and had plans drawn up for turning the rough ground into a camp site. He was awaiting the plans to arrive that very day we were speaking. His vision was that in a few years time he would build his own hotel with the adjoining campsite. As he concluded his story I had absolutely no doubt that he would achieve his dream.
But I couldn't leave the conversation there. I wanted to know what had shaped his entrepreneurial thinking from the utter hopelessness and poverty of this 12 year old boy. Did he have a mentor? No. Had someone schooled him in his full range of leadership mindsets? No. It had come from within, or, and this was the kicker – he pointed up to the heavens.
My experience of people who have suffered such extreme trauma is often an angry atheism born of “where was God in the depths of my horror?” The other extreme is where people who have suffered trauma somehow split the pain inside from he need for a faith that borders on a naïve magic. I wanted to know whether Janvier “did God?”. I knew that if I could find the courage and the right moment that I would get an honest answer. He had already told me that until a few years ago he did not believe in love. He could not. Only the experience of his first girl friend had given him hope in recent years that love actually existed, was possible . So when he pointed upwards I decided that was my moment and I cautiously asked him “Do you believe in God, a divine power, something, given all you've been through that has guided you through the darkness of it all?”
He paused. Then he said with complete conviction and humility,
“I believe there is something”
That was enough for me.