To a full venue, humanitarian Paul Rusesabagina invited all in attendance to join him in taking a ride -- a ride to a genocidal Rwanda, 14 years ago.

Rusesabagina, the first speaker of the semester in the Distinguished Speaker Series recounted his harrowing experience during the 100 days of the Rwandan genocide.

"The whole country smelled of death," he said. "It changed my way of perceiving human beings."

Rusesabagina's heroic story was immortalized in the Academy Award-nominated film Hotel Rwanda. He saved 1,268 people by safeguarding them in the hotel he managed in the nation's capital of Kigali.

Rusesabagina told his story starting from the first night of the killing. He had been eating dinner with his brother and sister-in-law when he received a frantic call from his wife.

"I then told them goodbye, shaking their hands for the last time," he said.

Rusesabagina never saw them again. After that night, he said, his whole world turned upside down. He and dozens of his neighbors made it to the Mille Collines Hotel, where they would stay for the entirety of the genocide.

"Once involved in such a thing, you don't think twice about risking your life. You think only of doing the right thing," he said.

He said throughout the genocide, his only tool was his voice.

"What do you do when your neighbors are dead all around you?" he said. "Opening up a window of dialogue was the most important thing."

Toward the end of his stay at the hotel with the refugees, he made a decision to send his wife and children away to safety.

"I made the toughest, roughest decision," he said.

But their truck made it only a few miles before it was attacked. Luckily, Rusesabagina's wife and children were unhurt physically.

But by July 1994, the killing was coming to an end, and peace was restored.

"I learned one of the most important things in life. I learned how to deal with evil," he said.

Since then, Rusesabagina has started the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation to help those brutalized in the Rwandan genocide.

He looked to the present, decrying the fighting in the Darfur region of Sudan.

"We have closed eyes and ears to Darfur. It is a pity and a shame to mankind," he said.

But Rusesabagina pointed to the youth to work to find a solution to the killing.

"It is your turn, your turn to stand up," he said.

Rusesabagina earned a standing ovation from the crowd.

"I wanted to hear his story first hand," Christina Fabian (sophomore-international politics and African American studies) said. "I was very moved by the courage he found in himself to save all those people."