As an assistant professor of history at Lamar University, Dr. Rebecca Boone knows, and has taught, the timeline of events of the Rwandan Genocide. Now she has a face to put with the stories.

Boone was one of hundreds packed into the Montagne Center to hear Paul Rusesabagina, the latest speaker of the Academic Lecture series. Rusesabagina was pivotal in saving 1,200 refugees during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that took the lives of nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu Sympathizers in only 100 days.

“I was just blown away,” Boone said. “It was so inspiring for me to hear him tell what I’ve been teaching. He was trying to find humanity in such cruelty and he conveyed that.”

Boone said she was amazed at Rusesabagina and his message of the power of words.

“With words we can survive and with words we can kill,” he said during a question and answer session before the lecture.

Rusesabagina repeated to guests that words are what saved him and raising awareness is the only thing that will help in the future, a thought that Boone echoed.

“People need to know that history does repeat itself,” she said. “The first step is dehumanization and we need to catch that before it happens.”

Hoping to do just that, Stephen and Rachel Gault attended the lecture with several teenagers from the youth group they led at Cathedral in the Pines. Some of the youth recently returned from a mission trip to Uganda, near Rwanda.

“I came here wanting to hear this,” Stephen Gault said. “We met children who were orphaned by this (genocide), their parents were the first ones attacked.”

Jeff McFarlin, a youth member, said the events Rusesabagina talked of are very real and he has seen firsthand the effects of genocide and war. His recent trip to Africa deepened his belief that the only way to stop this from happening again is to support people who are working in Africa to educate the people there, a problem that Rusesabagina said is the cause of most of the problems.

“Africans have several problems and one is education. About 70 percent of Africans are illiterate, they can’t read or write. It is very easy to influence young persons who never went to school and stay in the same rural area where they were born,” he said, which only leads to more problems.

Rusesabagina explained that the uneducated youth only grow to become uneducated leaders, who are given guns and told to rule.

“They come from the jungle to the throne,” he said.

The rural people, Rusesabagina explained, aren’t held responsible for their actions either.

“People kill their neighbors, take their cars and their farms and no one says no. The leaders don’t say no.”