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spent most of his early life abroad, was now making a fire with<br />
wood and making tea for sale? It all seemed unbearable.<br />
However, through it all, I was amazed at God’s hand of provision<br />
amidst our darkest moment. I am thankful to God for sending<br />
those angels. First it was Claudia and then my sister-in-law’s<br />
friend. With that rice, sugar and my jewelry, we survived that<br />
dark moment.<br />
At the refugee camp, everyone was trying to make the best of<br />
the situation, hurting people trying to comfort more hurting<br />
people. While trying to settle in, I met my Aunt Charlotte, my<br />
mother and my sister Helena. They had been evacuated to the<br />
camp with many other Rwandans. It was from them that I heard<br />
of the painful end of my dear father, my grandmother, my nieces<br />
and many other very close family members. They told me that a<br />
total of one hundred family members had been murdered. I lost<br />
my father, brother, my maternal and paternal grandmothers,<br />
nephews, nieces, cousins, uncles, unties, etc. My mother<br />
recounted how it had happened. Since the genocide happened<br />
during the Easter holiday of 1994, some of my nieces and<br />
nephews had gone to spend the holiday break from school with<br />
their grandparents.<br />
On the night the genocide broke out, my mother had left my<br />
father with my sisters’ children and several other grandchildren<br />
in the house, having gone to visit her own mother, my<br />
grandmother, in the neighboring village. While she was away,<br />
armed Hutu soldiers stormed my father’s compound and left<br />
everybody dead. They would rape the women and mercilessly<br />
murder them. They would just go to a compound and slaughter<br />
whoever they found alive. On her way to my grandmother’s, my<br />
mother had passed by my sister Helena’s home when the<br />
shooting started and that was how they ended up at the refugee<br />
camp. Many of people who could not make it to the camp did<br />
not survive. Although to the outside world it was 100 days of<br />
killings, to Rwandans it was an eternity of hell. Our families went<br />
through untold horrors that cannot even be adequately<br />
described within these pages. For instance, I lost more than 100<br />
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