Seven years ago, when he was 18, Rwandan born Eloge Butera had a big shock. It was February 9, 2002, and Eloge was arriving in Winnipeg as a political refugee. Nervous, relieved, even excited, he was greeted by -40ºC temperatures. “Mentally, this doesn’t really process,” he says with a shy smile. “It never goes below five degrees in Kigali. It was quite a change.”

As Eloge talks with a wry fondness of “Winterpeg,” his first Canadian home, you can’t help but think how tame the typical Canadian weather conversation must seem to him. This is, after all, a man whose youth was hijacked by one of the worst atrocities of the 20th century – the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

Eloge sets a typical scene: It’s a placid, cloudless day. A mother is hanging her colourful laundry. Her children are playing nearby. Suddenly, word spreads that a Tutsi has been sighted. And just as suddenly, seemingly average people drop their banal, everyday activities to hunt down another human being.

In the space of three months, the prolonged nightmare claimed the lives of over a million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda, including Eloge’s father, aunts, uncles, and a hundred members of his extended Tutsi family. In 2001, when 161,000 Hutus who had confessed to genocide were released from jail , what remained of Eloge’s family thought he’d be better off far away from the only home he’d known. The Canadian government agreed.

“One of the hardest things for me,” he explains to a group of riveted McGill Law students hanging out on a sunny autumn day, “has been to regain social trust.”

Eloge has spent the last six years doing that while learning a new country, making new friends, “and learning to think in a totally different paradigm.” In completely new surroundings he’s been hard at work putting his harrowing experience to good use. It’s no longer just a part of who he is; it drives what he does.

He has traveled as a political activist across Canada, not just describing the genocide, but giving it context as he addresses primary school children, university students, and the general public. He also challenges his listeners to extend their empathy and assistance to people suffering around the world as the result of oppression, violence and genocide. He spoke last year at McGill with Sierra Leone native Ishmael Beah, author of the acclaimed book A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. He also helped organize the Echenberg International Conference on Genocide Prevention and a Rwandan Tutsi Genocide Awareness and Remembrance Seder.

But to arm himself properly in his fight for justice, Eloge has also set about studying international law at McGill. “It is a process of learning the language of making order prevail,” he says, calm reason spoken like his mother tongue. “So I’m looking forward to taking in as much as possible, learning every legal concept and principle and decision I can get my hands on and my mind around because, at the end of the day, if I am to prevent another genocide, it won’t be enough to say ‘these guys are bad.’ I need to be able to go after their money and Swiss bank accounts, to prevent their Chinese machete-dealing transactions. I need to be able to get the whole package.”

Despite his ordeal, Eloge counts his blessings, his countrymen weighing on his mind daily. “I look at the survivors who are struggling with their health, who are destitute. It is also my responsibility to be able to advocate for them and make sure that the end of their lives are far better than the beginning.”

Given the opportunity to work toward all this every day, Eloge’s smile returns. “I am the luckiest person in the world.”