Over two decades ago, Rwanda was ripped apart by a cultural war between the Tutsi and Hutu people. The Tutsis were a cattle-hoarding people who migrated from Ethiopia in the early 1600s. The Hutus were predominantly farmers who lived in large family units. Prior to colonization, Rwanda operated as a peaceful monarchy under a Tutsi king. When Belgium took over the country after WWII, they favored the minority Tutsis for their more European appearance and created a discriminatory, race based class system and placed the Tutsis at the top.
The differences between the two clans were difficult to spot. According to the Belgians, the Tutsis were taller, lighter skinned, and had narrower noses, while the Hutus were shorter, darker skinned, and had broader noses. This discriminatory system created resentment among the Hutus, and they planned a violent overthrow of the Tutsis.
On April 6, 1994, the Hutu president was shot down in his airplane as it was landing in Kigali after his scheduled peace talks with Burundi. The blame for the assassination was placed on the Tutsis and the Hutus responded to the assassination with a three-month -long massacre that resulted in over 800,000 Tutsi deaths.
The plan was to make it seem as though the Tutsis had never existed; to kill all of them and to destroy all school, work, birth, marriage, and death certificates.
The Rwandan genocide was widely ignored by the international community and even the UN withdrew the few troops they had hastily deployed after just a few casualties. The UN didn’t return to aid the people until there was a clear victor in the war, the Rwandan Patriotic Front.
The following story is the story of a woman I met this month. She is a dear friend and survived the genocide at the age of seven.
Some parts of the story may jump unexpectedly or may not be smoothly connected. This is mostly due to non-fluent translation, and stilted memories from her traumatic childhood experiences.
In places where she is captured and then is suddenly free again without explanation, is because the killers assumed she would die from her wounds or starvation. The Hutu killers would continually capture her, only to leave her to die again. The killers returned to homes and locations they had already visited to make sure they had killed every last Tutsi. She is caught many times because they kept coming back to make sure not even a child survived.
These people are neighbors. They are coworkers. They are lifelong friends who, because of a made up class system, decided another group was a threat. They therefore sought to snuff out the light from a large portion of their own population. The men seeking to kill that seven year girl were men who worked with her parents, had known her for most of her life, or were even the parents of her friends from school.
As you read, you will learn about many graphic encounters that are true and that happened to a woman our team met, hugged every day, laughed with, and has grown to love.
“There were nine people in my family, and all were killed but me. They killed my dad and put him in a hole. The covered one of my brothers in oil and burned him alive. They killed the rest of my family and scattered their bodies in different places. I was seven years old…
The men who killed my family raped me, knowingly infecting me with HIV. They put me in a deep hole with about one-hundred other children. Two of us survived in the hole. I am humbled that I survived. The killing men took me from the hole and tied my arms and legs. They would throw me in a lake and then pull me from it again. Then, one man was going to take me home with him.
On the way, we came to a place in the road where they had killed one of my brothers. I was told to drink his blood or they would kill me. I decided I was going to drink his blood to live. Afterwards, I laid down beside his body. They left me there.
After a few days, I felt very hungry and went into a house searching for food. The house was full of dead people and had been burnt with fire. The killing men saw me go into the house and came to set it on fire again. I crawled into a hole in the floor and survived the fire. I stayed there for a few days.
The men came back to the house and got me out of the hole. They put me in a three-meter hole in the ground that already had dead and decaying people in it. I dug holes into the sides of the dirt wall to make a ladder that went to the top. When I climbed out, more men found me. They tied my legs and hands together again and cut my head with a knife.
I went to my older sister’s house. When I got there, I saw she was dead. They had also cut her baby out of her stomach and killed it. I took her blood and spread it on me and left to go to another house. With the blood on me, if the killing men were coming, I could lay down in the bodies and pretend to be dead. People found me anyway and beat me more.
After beating me they brought two drums of dirty water to me and another survivor. They said, “If you cannot drink this whole tank of water, we will kill you.” The other survivor and I drank all the muddy water we could. Then we helped each other vomit it up by pressing on each other’s stomachs and sticking our hands in our throats.
The killing men had my cousin. They told him to kill me or they would kill him. He refused to kill me and was murdered.
…I found food in someone’s house and stole it to eat. I went back to my old home and everyone I knew was dead there. All the homes around had been burned down. The one who killed my family came back again and locked me in the toilet room. I was in there for a week. When I got out I saw everyone was taking our crops from the fields. The men beat me so much.
One man was a student my dad used to teach. He took me to a home. He was a real killer. He let me go and then chased me to kill me. When he was chasing me, I fell down. He was running so fast that he ran pass where I fell. A big group of killers came and took me and tied cloth around my neck and beat me.
…. I went to take food from someone’s garden and was caught and beat. The man left me there to die, but someone came and picked me up to try to save me. The killers came and killed that man too. I went back where my mom and baby sibling were killed. 9,000 people had been murdered in that area. I spread their blood on my body and laid down there next to my mother’s body. When they came back around to check if everyone was dead they looked over me. They found a kid younger than me who was alive and burned him with oil. After burning him they took the oil and spread it over all the bodies that I was hiding in. When it reached me, I got up, not wanting to be burned and they saw I was alive.
They took me and locked me in a toilet room again.
There were maybe fifteen dead people in the room with me and one man who was alive. We took a piece of metal and tried to escape. When we got the door open the killers told us to help them kill people. When the man and I said no, they killed the man. They said they were going to take me to serve them in the house they all stayed in.
When we got there, they questioned me about my family, but they were all dead. Because my dad had been wealthy and well known in that community, many recognized me as his child. When they told me they knew I was Tutsi, I tried to lie saying that I had been adopted. Some of the men told me, “Run away, we do not want to see you die.”
I ran…. I had not eaten in days. I went a few kilometers and found a banana tree. When a man saw me eating from it he came and tried to cut me with his axe, but it bypassed me and cut his leg. I was so scared, so I ran and fell down in a hole that was filled with dead and decaying people. I spent a few days there. Then, the soldiers who were trying to rescue the country came through. Someone told them there were people still breathing in the hole I was in. They pulled me out with some others.
After the genocide, because of the many times I was beaten, I was vomiting blood all the time and spent a whole year in the hospital. I wanted to go to school but could not because I kept vomiting blood. So, I had to drop out. Ten years later, the doctor told me if I ever tried to deliver a baby I would die because my insides had been messed up from many beatings.
Years later, when I was three months pregnant, I vomited a lot of blood and had a bad headache. But I carried m son to full term, and at nine months, they c-sectioned my son out. He is healthy and does not have HIV.”
One of the men who rescued her from the hole was her uncle. She went to live with him. When he died years later, she and her cousin from Uganda decided to live together to help each other out. Her cousin is the woman who started the ministry we are working with this month. They share a village home just thirty minutes south of the Ugandan boarder.
I am living with both of them this month in Rwanda.
In closing her story, she said to our team, “When I can be with you all and smiling it is a good impact on my life. I spend so many days crying. When I am with people who are trying to make me happy, I am happy. Thank you for being a joy in my life. Another servant of God who came through here prayed healing for me. I no longer vomit blood and I have less headaches.”
(Thanks to Paige and Tate for historical information, and for typing up the transcript from her orally translated testimony, and Ashley for blogging about this.)
This woman has endured so much but her joy is overflowing and infectious. You would never guess she has the story she does. She lives her life knowing that God saved her, and is seeking forgiveness and reconciliation from her past.
This is one of thousands of stories like this. Though much progress has been made in the 24 years since the genocide began, Rwanda is still healing. People are seeking reconciliation for their pasts. Hutus and Tutsis (though they do not identify in classes anymore) live, work, and play together. They have been blessed with peace for the last two decades, but they hold their past hurts deeply in their hearts.
Please pray for this country as it continues to heal. Pray for survivors and killers alike. They all need healing, forgiveness, and restoration in their lives.
