Nyarubuye: the name is synonymous with everything that is horrible and tragic about genocide. Nyarubuye is a town, with a church of the same name, where over twenty thousand people were killed for no other reason than that they were Tutsi.
We were honoured to speak with a survivor, a woman who had fled to the church with her baby on her back, looking for sanctuary. She didn't find it. She ended up by being one of only a handful of survivors among some 22,000 people who were killed. Her baby was killed when she fell down in a crush of people and people fell on top of her. She was slashed across the head with a machete but was not killed and was also slashed in the thighs. During the night she managed to escape and ran down the valley to the home of her parents, but when she got there she found that everyone in the home had been killed. She then went to the house of a former neighbour and looked for help there even though she knew that the man and one of the sons in the house were members of the militia. She knocked on the door and a different son answered. This son was in the seminary, training to be a priest and so he took her in and hid her and rescued her, and managed to smuggle her into Tanzania, where she spent the rest of the genocide.
Her husband survived the genocide because he had taken their cows into the valley to hide them, but neither of them ever expected that she would be in danger in at the church.
She looked desperately sad, and who could blame her? I watched her as she was talking and I wondered how she could possibly continue in her day to day life, having experienced what she did.
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