From Rwanda to Harvard: after losing his parents in the Rwandan genocide in 1994 and living as a beggar, a young man achieves his dream.

• Author: Wines, Michael
• Position: INTERNATIONAL - Justus Uwayesu - Interview

Nine years old and orphaned, he was living in a burned-out car in a garbage dump. During the day, he was a street beggar. He hadn't bathed in more than a year.

In 2001, when an American charity worker, Clare Effiong, visited the dump in Rwanda, a small country in eastern Africa, other children scattered. But Justus Uwayesu [oo-wah-yeh-soo] stayed put. And she asked him why.

"I want to go to school," he replied.

He got his wish.

Last fall, Uwayesu completed a remarkable journey when he enrolled as a freshman at Harvard University on a full scholarship, studying math, economics, and human rights, and aiming for an advanced science degree. Dressed in jeans, a sweater, and sneakers, Uwayesu looks like just another of the 1,667 first-year students on Harvard's campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

But he isn't. Now about 22 (his birth date is unknown), he's an example of the potential buried even in humanity's most hopeless places--and a reminder of how seldom this potential is mined.

Born in rural Rwanda, Uwayesu was only 3 when his parents, both illiterate farmers, were killed in 1994, in one of the most brutal genocides since the end of World War II (see box). As many as 95,000 children were orphaned.

Red Cross workers temporarily rescued Uwayesu with a brother and two sisters. They cared for them until 1998, when they were overwhelmed by the growing tide of parentless children. That's when they returned Uwayesu and his siblings to their village in Rwanda's Eastern Province.

They arrived as a drought, and then famine, began to grip the region. "My brother would tell me, Tm going out to look for food,' and then he would come back without it," Uwayesu says. "There were times we did not cook the whole day. "

In 2000, he and his brother walked 12 hours to Kigali, Rwanda's capital, in search of food and help. They wound up at Ruviri, a sprawling garbage dump on the city's outskirts that was home to hundreds of orphans and herds of pigs.

Uwayesu found a home with two other children in an abandoned car with smashed-out windows.

"There was no shower, no bathing at all," he says. "The only thing was to keep something warm for the night, something really warm."

He learned to spot trucks from hotels and bakeries that carried the tastiest castoffs, and to leap on them to grab his share before they discharged their loads to less nimble orphans.

"It was a really dark time because I couldn't see a future," he says. "I couldn't see how life could be better, or...