BEAUMONT — As an assistant professor of history at Lamar University, Dr. Rebecca Boone knows, and has taught, the timeline of events of the Rwandan Genocide. Now she has a face to put with the stories.

Boone was one of hundreds packed into the Montagne Center to hear Paul Rusesabagina, the latest speaker of the Academic Lecture series. Rusesabagina was pivotal in saving 1,200 refugees during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide that took the lives of nearly one million Tutsi and moderate Hutu Sympathizers in only 100 days.

“I was just blown away,” Boone said. “It was so inspiring for me to hear him tell what I’ve been teaching. He was trying to find humanity in such cruelty and he conveyed that.”

Boone said she was amazed at Rusesabagina and his message of the power of words.

“With words we can survive and with words we can kill,” he said during a question and answer session before the lecture.

Rusesabagina repeated to guests that words are what saved him and raising awareness is the only thing that will help in the future, a thought that Boone echoed.

“People need to know that history does repeat itself,” she said. “The first step is dehumanization and we need to catch that before it happens.”

Hoping to do just that, Stephen and Rachel Gault attended the lecture with several teenagers from the youth group they led at Cathedral in the Pines. Some of the youth recently returned from a mission trip to Uganda, near Rwanda.

“I came here wanting to hear this,” Stephen Gault said. “We met children who were orphaned by this (genocide), their parents were the first ones attacked.”

Jeff McFarlin, a youth member, said the events Rusesabagina talked of are very real and he has seen firsthand the effects of genocide and war. His recent trip to Africa deepened his belief that the only way to stop this from happening again is to support people who are working in Africa to educate the people there, a problem that Rusesabagina said is the cause of most of the problems.

“Africans have several problems and one is education. About 70 percent of Africans are illiterate, they can’t read or write. It is very easy to influence young persons who never went to school and stay in the same rural area where they were born,” he said, which only leads to more problems.

Rusesabagina explained that the uneducated youth only grow to become uneducated leaders, who are given guns and told to rule.

“They come from the jungle to the throne,” he said.

The rural people, Rusesabagina explained, aren’t held responsible for their actions either.

“People kill their neighbors, take their cars and their farms and no one says no. The leaders don’t say no.”

Rusesabagina told his guests that getting in touch with diplomats and convincing leaders to freeze the assets going to the rebel leaders will help save future generations from genocide.

“They believe they are untouchable and we need to let them know they are not above the law, above regulations, above rules.”

Inspired by Rusesabagina and his story, a group of students from Texas High School in Texarkana drove six hours to be able to hear and meet the hero of Rwanda. The students have spent the last eight weeks studying the Holocaust and contemporary genocide

As a gift, the students pressed their thumbprints into a bowl and presented it to Rusesabagina as their signatures that they will not let his story die.

“It puts it into perspective,” Cannon Ball, 16, said. “We’ve learned about him and saw the movie, but seeing him is incredible.”

Paul Rusesabagina started a foundation to help the women and children affected by the Rwandan Genocide. For more information about his foundation, The Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, visit www.hrrfoundation.org.

For more information about Darfur, Sudan where a genocide very much like the one that claimed almost one million lives in Rwanda is raging today, visit www.safedarfur.org.