Gatera Rudasingwa was born into a hardscrabble life deep in Rwanda's lush-green countryside. His family's home had no electricity, not even a proper bathroom. He attended no schools because there were no schools to attend. Gatera could only hope to imagine of one day having a real bed from which to sleep in and cast his dreams.
Infected with deadly malaria at 6-months-old, a nurse's misguided syringe injected him with a single dose of a simple quinine curative. She accidentally pierced his sciatic nerve. His right leg began weakening, his muscles withering and wasting away. Within days he couldn't stand. He could only crawl, dragging his right leg behind him.
Everyone knew that Gatera would never walk. But Gatera wasn't everyone. And Gatera could still dream.
Torn from his parents during the Rwandan civil war, he was forced to live under the guardianship of his grandfather, who put his disabled 4-year-old grandson to work shepherding his cows. With only a makeshift wooden stick as his crutch, Gatera labored for ten years, all the while questioning why other children, both able-bodied and disabled, were allowed to go to school and better their lives but he was not.
And so Gatera escaped to Gatagara, Father Fraipont's school for disabled children. There, with the horrors of the Tutsi genocide ravaging his country, and the deaths of his family among the thousands of atrocities, he felt embraced in love, wisdom, faith and inspiration for the very first time in his life.
The discarded boy who so many believed was fated to only being able to crawl soon discovered his life's calling ignited: Gatera would dedicate himself to learning all there was to know about creating artificial limbs. He'd help others like himself, and the survivors of the Tutsi genocide so much less fortunate, to walk surefooted, stand strong and tall, and even dance.
This is the inspiring true story of the man part visionary, part philanthropist, part entrepreneur, and part philosopher. Joining hands in marriage with his beloved Mami, his kindred spirit and soulmate from Japan, they dedicate the next 23-years of their lives creating Project: ONE LOVE, an artificial limb factory and non-profit charity built brick-by-brick by hand atop a plot of government-donated swampland.
Together, their sheer strengths of character, their unwavering belief in their mission, and their ever enduring faith that the sun also rises are put through an ultimate test when on Christmas eve a thundering, unrelenting six-hour torrential downpour floods, consumes and completely destroys their entire life's work.
