Local hero

``Papa!"

``Comment vas-tu?"

Father and son embrace in a tight hug, separate, and embrace again, speaking a few words in French, then in Kinyarwanda before switching to English.

To people around the world, Paul Rusesabagina is the man who saved 1,268 lives in his ``Hotel Rwanda" during the 1994 genocide. He has received numerous humanitarian awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, delivers hundreds of speeches a year, and recently wrote his memoir, ``A n Ordinary Man."

To his 13-year-old son, Tresor, who is a boarding student at the Fay School in Southborough, Rusesabagina is just Papa.

``That was an amazing thing he did. He's a hero to me, but as my dad," Tresor says. ``He's always calm. I have never heard him yell."

That outer calm during utter chaos was a key factor in Rusesabagina's ability to keep the murderous militia and Rwandan army at bay. The genocide took 800,000 lives in 100 days. During the bloodbath, the Hotel Mille Collines, which Rusesabagina managed after the Belgian director fled, became a haven for the hunted Tutsis and moderate Hutus. As a Hutu married to a Tutsi, Rusesabagina was a marked man himself, but because of his friendship s with those in power, he was able to bargain, beg, and bribe for the lives he ultimately saved.

Though he now lives in Brussels, he travels extensively and says he considers Boston his ``second home." There's Tresor in Southborough, of course, and there's his speaking agency, American Program Bureau, which is based in Newton. His literary agent, Jill Kneerim, is in Boston, as is his law firm, Burns & Levinson. His charity , the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, is also based here.

The Boston connection began when Perry Steinberg, the CEO of the speakers' bureau, saw a trailer of ``Hotel Rwanda" and asked an intern to track down Rusesabagina even before the movie was released. The business relationship soon morphed into a personal relationship between APB employees and Rusesabagina. The agency helped set up his foundation, select a school for his son, and enlist Kneerim to assist with the book.

``He has made a tremendous number of friends here," says Bob Davis, a senior vice president at APB. ``It wouldn't surprise me that he might someday move here if the kids decided that this is where they wanted to be. He is a Bostonian." In June, Rusesabagina will return to Boston to put his nieces into a summer English program at Fay.

Amber Bobin, a lecture agent at APB, has become a mentor for Tresor. She checks up on him at school, has introduced him to a French-speaking family, and takes him to Celtics and Red Sox games. ``Mr. Rusesabagina quickly became like family to us," she says. ``We have provided love and support across the board to him."

For his part, the former hotel manager says he loves Boston and its people. ``The people are better than the weather," he says, laughing.

The Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation raises money to support those orphaned by the genocide, nearly half a million children including the ``enfants du mauvais souvenir" -- ``children of bad memories." Their mothers were raped and impregnated by the enemy and could not or would not parent their babies, many of them born HIV positive. The charity is run out of Rusesabagina's lawyer's offices in Boston; it has no employees and simply funnels money to programs. It also provides medical treatment and education for the children ``so that they may know some hope and not become a part of a future surge of evil in Rwanda," he says.

Tresor was 18 months old during the genocide, Rusesabagina's youngest child and the only offspring of his marriage to his wife, Tatiana. There are three older children from a first marriage, and two nieces that he and Tatiana took in after their parents were murdered. In the acclaimed film version of his heroics, the nieces were portrayed as older -- perhaps 4 and 6 -- when they were found in a refugee camp. In real life, one was 2 years old, the other only 9 months, and they were ``nearly dead," he says. They were raised as the Rusesabaginas' children -- a couple of years ago the couple revealed the truth to them, and to Tresor.

The news came as a shock to the three, who had thought they were siblings. But when the film was about to be released, it was time to tell. ``They didn't want to accept it," says Rusesabagina, who is 51.

``I was upset," adds Tresor. He says he had thought little of the fact that one ``sister" was only seven months older than he. His father grins. ``How can you have three children in two years?" The girls are now 12 and 14 and live in Brussels with the Rusesabaginas .

Tresor's parents had also tried to prepare him for the premiere of the film. ``I knew about my father and all that stuff. I know the genocide was even more awful than the movie could show," he says. The lanky seventh-grader has recently inched above his dad, who smiles with obvious pride at his trilingual son, who, like him, is wearing nice trousers and jacket with a turtleneck while his classmates are in sweats.

Last summer, Tresor came to camp at Fay and enrolled in school in September. He arrived not knowing a word of English, which he now speaks flawlessly. He likes the number of international students at Fay -- his roommate is from Mexico, his best friend from South Africa -- and he loves the sports. Football and baseball are new to him; he plays the former but considers baseball a bit slow. There's a Yankees cap hanging on the wall over his bed, which he quickly removes when company from Boston arrives. ``Someone gave it to me," he says sheepishly.

As father and son make their way down the hall of the dormitory, a wide-eyed student stops to shake the man's hand. ``It's an honor to meet you," he says. A faculty member pauses to tell Rusesabagina that he saw him on the news, speaking at the recent Darfur march in Washington, D.C.

Rusesabagina is used to all the fuss, and he handles it as befits a manager of a five-star hotel: with grace and courtesy. He dresses impeccably and wears a Rotary Club pin in his lapel; he is a member. And though on a recent evening he says he is not hungry, he fusses over the fact that his son must eat something. A father's concern or a former hotel manager's quirk?

When he moved to Brussels in 1996 following an attempt on his life, Rusesabagina gave up his beloved hotel business; his wife gave up her pharmacy. ``We left everything behind," he says. When he began driving a cab, friends worried that he would go into debt. The next year he bought a second cab, and the third year he started a trucking company , which he still has .

Though quiet and low-key, he has become a public speaker passionate about his cause: his country's future and the Darfur genocide. During lunch recently at Henrietta's Table in Cambridge, he spoke at length about the bitter history between the Tutsis and Hutus. Though the genocide was carried out by the majority Hutus against the minority Tutsis, it is clear that Rusesabagina, the son of a Hutu father and Tutsi mother, remains deeply bitter toward the Tutsi rebels -- who effectively ended the genocide but, he says, killed many Hutus in retaliation -- and the international community that ignored the massacre.

For the past six months, he has been in the United States giving speeches, sometimes six a day. Many of his speeches center on the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan, where members of a government-backed militia are killing civilians. Though the international community intervened in the ethnic slaughter in the former Yugoslavia, he says, no one steps in to help Africa. ``I believe it is a forgotten continent."

But Rusesabagina hasn't forgotten the hills he grew up on, and he hopes someday to return for good. He can't see himself growing old in Brussels, ``just moving around with a small dog." No, he sees himself sitting atop those hills, watching the sunrises and the sunsets and the volcanoes that are said to make Rwanda the most beautiful country in Africa.

Tresor Rusesabagina, like his dad the son of a Hutu father and Tutsi mother, says he does not want to live in Rwanda, though he'd like to help his native country in some way. He wants to finish high school and college in the United States. If he is any indication of the country's future, it's encouraging. Ask him if he considers himself Tutsi or Hutu and he replies simply: ``Rwandan."