The faces in our logos are people
who have lived through, and survived, human rights abuses. If there had been
an organization like High Road, mobilizing the voices of people throughout
the country to call for a major change in US policy, the abuses they suffered
and witnessed might have been avoided.
Louis Gakumba - Rwanda
Louis Gakumba is a 26 year old Tutsi from Rwanda living now in Salt Lake
City, Utah. During the 100 days in the spring of 1994 when 800,000 Tutsis
were slaughtered by the Hutus, Louis and his family lived in terror as they
watched their neighbors and friends being tortured, raped and murdered.
Perceiving the inevitable attack on
their own family, Louis’ mother
handed each of her children a small amount of money and told them to run
away, each child in a different direction.
Louis finds it hard to talk about the horror of his childhood in Rwanda,
especially with strangers. The painful memories lay very close to the surface,
and, talking about them is both vivid and painful.
Louis moved to Salt Lake City, where he studies international relations
at Salt Lake Community College. Louis plans to get a master's degree and
to return to Rwanda, hoping to work toward healing for Rwanda and its people.
Grace Fujimoto Oshita - America
Grace Fujimoto Oshita was 17 years
old when she and her family were "evacuated" by
the U.S. government to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War
II.
In 1942, Grace’s father, a Japanese-American
businessman from San Francisco, was taken to an internment camp in North
Dakota. Grace and the
rest of her family were taken to a temporary camp in California, where they
were housed for six months in a converted horse stable before being moved
to the Topaz Camp in Utah.
The Topaz camp was one square mile of fenced in barracks located miles outside
of Delta, Utah. The internees lived in one-room apartments lit by bare bulbs
in the dusty flatland of western Utah. In all there were more than 110,000
Japanese-Americans sent to 10 relocation camps across the U.S.; 70 percent
of these were American citizens.
Grace, now 83, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah and has spent the past 40 years
speaking to school children and community groups, in the hope that if people
remember what happened, it will never happen again.
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