This photograph never fails to make me smile and fill me with the deepest humility and gratitude. Here I stand among the distinguished members of the Kurdistan Region Parliament in Northern Iraq, having been received with extraordinary honor and having reserved a VIP seat among some of the most powerful leaders in the region.

Just a few years earlier, I was a young man fleeing the hills of Rwanda, running from genocide, uncertain whether tomorrow would come. And yet here I was being welcomed, honored and seated among parliamentarians as a distinguished guest in a land far from home.

I did not deserve it. I want to be clear about that. No personal achievement, no diploma, no title brought me to that seat. It was nothing less than the grace of God , the same grace that carried me out of Rwanda, through the war zones of Kosovo, Bosnia, Macedonia, Nepal and Yemen, and ultimately into rooms and halls I could never have imagined.

This is why I say and why this memoir is titled “It Takes More Than A Man.” Because no man alone could have walked this road. Only God.