This book is a picture of truth, because it is literally true, non-fictional, and real. Deo is a real human being who ate food and breathed like the rest of us, but instead of being born somewhere else, Deo was born into a broken nation that quickly devolved into open, public racism, until finally the hatred and violence caused by systemic injustice and brokenness turned into real murder. 800,000 Rwandans died, and Deo only survived by the skin of his teeth, and by the help of strangers.
The point of the book is to be the kind of stranger who would have helped Deo (even when other people's suffering seems hypothetical and distance from our own). Without the people who let Deo have a place to stay, he would not have survived. Without the Rwandans who were not consumed by racial hatred, there might have been no one to spare his life, to save him from the people who were pursuing him to kill him.
Another central point of this book is that the Rwandan crisis shows that history can repeat itself, since this genocide was very similar in nature to the Nazi Holocaust. There are serious differences though, in both public opinion and historically; one of the major differences was that the whole world rallied to see some justice done for the Holocaust. For Rwanda, there was no public outcry to help those people, and no one every stepped in and did anything, because the public did not demand it from their politicians.
To be loving means to offer our lives for other people, by listening to their stories like Kidder listens to Deo, by opening our homes to those who need a place to stay, and to remember the suffering of all human beings. It's hard work to remember that the planet is covered with real humans, but alas, the planet is covered with real human beings, and everyone one of them is important.
