Meet Abdoul Salam Nizeyimana, 27-Year-Old who Launches Drones That Deliver Blood to Rwanda’s Hospitals......
In the spring of 1994, Abdoul Salam Nizeyimana’s executioners
arrived. It was about two weeks after the Hutu majority-controlled
government stepped up its
decades-long persecution of the Tutsi
minority, calling on citizens to slaughter all Tutsis. Nizeyimana’s
family was Tutsi, and it didn’t take long for the killers to come
knocking. Nizeyimana, who was three years old at the time, hid under the
bed with his mother and two siblings. The father stepped out, probably
in an attempt to convince the militia that his family wasn’t home.
Nizeyimana heard them talking briefly, and then he couldn’t hear his
father talking at all. Having hacked the father to death with their
machetes, the men moved into the bedroom and found the rest of the
family. The men swung at them, including Nizeyimana, who was struck at
the top of his head. Everyone died. Everyone except him.
Nizeyimana
remembers the following years only in staccato moments, like
disconnected dots on a graph. At one point he was at a homeless shelter
for survivors, and at another point his grandmother found him there. She
took him in and remembers a studious boy but Nizeyimana remembers it
differently. “I was a stubborn kid at school, and I caused a lot of
trouble for my grandma,” he says. “The first couple years of school were
really, really hard.”
Things
changed in his teens when his uncle and chief benefactor pulled him
aside one day. “He told me, ‘I can pay your school fees, I can help you
grow, I can build a house for you, but I cannot be a man in your
place,’” Nizeyimana recalls. So he studied hard, obtaining his
associate’s degree in renewable energy engineering first, then his
bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering, all the
while working various jobs.
The hard work paid off. Today, Nizeyimana leads a team of
young people in Rwanda who launch and retrieve autonomous drones that
deliver blood to remote hospitals. As such, the 27-year-old Rwandan may
know more than anyone else on the planet about what it takes to run a
drone delivery operation day to day. His job is the subject of the third
episode of Bloomberg’s mini-documentary series Next Jobs, which profiles careers of the future.
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