My Story

I am a survivor of the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi.
I am also an author, a public speaker, and the founder of Umunyana Brand, a Rwandan coffee atelier roasted in Los Angeles. One body of work, told in different forms.
I wrote my first book, Embrace Life, in 2016, a memoir of survival written when I was still finding the words. It has since been published in Spanish, and a second book is forthcoming.
I speak at universities, museums, and convenings on memory, survivorship, and the practice of storytelling, at the Museum of Tolerance, the Harvard Kennedy School, Talks at Google, TEDx Cornell, and partner institutions across the United States and Colombia.
I founded Umunyana to bring something of home into the daily ritual, and to make a way for the women who grow the coffee to be paid fairly for what they do.
Everything I make comes from the same belief: that what we carry, we can carry well.
— Dydine