“I didn’t want to leave,” she said with her intense, bright eyes wide, “And if I’d had the moral conviction that I have now, I wouldn’t have. But I was young. They told us we had to close the embassy. They told me I had to get all of the US citizens out. If we hadn’t been made to close we could have helped so many people….”

For the majority of our conversation my mouth hung open with my hand clasped over it in shock. The atmosphere felt surreal—we sat in a cozy coffee shop on the Studio lot, surrounded by cartoon characters and other studio paraphernalia. A man edited a script nearby.

Are you listening to this? I thought to myself as I stared at him. It’s probably ten times more fascinating than whatever it is you’re editing.

Today I met with the woman who spearheaded the U.S. Embassy evacuation of Rwanda during the 1994 genocide. The US Ambassador to the region had a mental breakdown, she alluded, so she and her husband were left to arrange the convoys of Americans out of Kigali to Burundi. At twenty-seven she and her husband evacuated 240 American citizens and left only one behind. That man, she said, refused to leave.

“I was on the phone with his wife in the states and she just kept begging me to convince him to leave. But he wouldn’t,” she said.

She described the way classical music was piped through the streets of Kigali while killing squads systematically slaughtered people. She described her own very heroic rescues almost obliquely—focusing instead, on the people she DIDN”T save.

“I wrote notes to every single one of our Embassy’s Rwandan staff. I left the notes on their desks. I said ‘we have to close the embassy but we’ll be back. I’ll come back for you. I promise I’ll come back.’ Only one of my staff….only one woman survived to read my note.”

My eyes misted up at the sight of hers—they were filled with emotion.

“One family had eleven children—the father was my friend. I kept calling him—even when we were out of Rwanda—and he kept saying ‘you have to send a UN truck or something to help us. You have to help us get out,’ but I couldn’t. The UN wouldn’t go in…and then one day he stopped answering the phone. He and his whole family were slaughtered except for one daughter who they thought had been cut up as well but she hid under the bodies of her dead parents. She was eleven. She made it to the camps somehow, and when I returned they said that she couldn’t have the survivor benefits because she had no proof.”

My face fell even further. Bureaucracy. The government was afraid of fraud.

“What did it matter if there was fraud? The survivor benefits were a mere pittance anyway! These children were all left without parents to survive by rummaging through trash…and they weren’t going to give this girl her benefits….”

“Well what happened?”

The clearly strong and athletic (but tiny) woman said “well of course I got them for her.” I nodded. Of course she would. She also had her placed with a family who would care for her in the region. But she said this softly—as if it hadn’t meant anything in the face of failing to save the girl’s family.

Despite the fact that this woman now holds a senior position at a prestigious financial company, has an impeccable track record in trade negotiations, had an impressive seven year tenure with my current company and is currently involved in great charity work--- what stood out the most in our conversation was what she said she DIDN”T do.

“I just wish we would have stayed,” she said again.

I was touched by her regret and her humility even more than her very evident bravery. What guilt seems to haunt her—even as she trots on tucking success after success under her belt.

When we were finished talking she hugged me and said simply:

“Do good things. I see it in you.”

I take her words more seriously not because of the great good that she did (and she did do great things though many condemn the embassy and its workers for closing) but because of the great evil she has witnessed. Despite what evil she endured in the days she watched the systematic slaughter of human beings by hateful other human beings—her parting wish to me, was to do good.

Were that we all had that kind of optimism.