What if you survived a genocide? [Rebroadcast - #113]
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This Is Actually Happening features real experiences that often include traumatic events. Please consult the show notes for specific content warnings on each episode and for more information about support services.

Today's episode will be the last of the summer rebroadcast series, featuring one of the most haunting stories ever aired on the show, about a woman who survived the Rwandan genocide. Next week, August 3rd, we return with all new episodes to kick off Season 11. Join us for announcements, updates, and engagement with the community of listeners on Instagram at ActuallyHappening, or on the This Is Actually Happening discussion group on Facebook.

and go to thisisactuallyhappening.com to find out more about the show, submit your own story, and shop at the store. I cannot wait to share the upcoming season with you all. See you next week, and thank you for listening. No one even can understand. You can't measure the magnitude of that pain. You can't measure the pain that we went through. From Wondery, I'm Witt Misseldein. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening.

Episode 113. What if you survived a genocide?

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I was born towards the end of the King's era in Rwanda and the beginning of the independence.

Rwanda was ruled by the kings for many years. The Tutsis were only 14% and the Hutus are 84%. And then we have another small tribe who are Tuar, it's 1%. So 84% wanted independence.

In 19, I think 1959, the last king, he was expelled out of the country and they had their own president, which ruled over 45 years. So a lot of Tutsis were scattered around Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Burundi and Congo. And most of the time they are pleading to come back and partake to the leadership of

but they were not given the right to do so. And that's what caused the civil wars. I am a Tutsi. My father and my mother were Tutsis. My father was working with the missionaries, and he was given a chance to go to school to Zimbabwe. There was a missionary school where he wanted to study. One day, I heard that he had died in South Africa.

He had had a heart attack, so he died there and was buried there. My mother and I could not go there. So no family member buried him up to now. We don't know where he was buried. I was almost four because he died in '63, I think.

We went to Burundi. I was told that we stayed there in Burundi for some, like almost a year because we could not go back to Rwanda. There was still war. My mother was not educated. She asked to go back to Rwanda where everybody was coming out. Most of the Tutsi tribe was coming out of Rwanda. They are running away. Herself, she asked to go back.

thinking that she would go there and find her relatives and her parents there. But when she reached there, she found that some had died and others had run out of the country. So she started drinking. She became an alcoholic and she could not raise me up.

My mother was offered a job to work at the local hospital, it was a mission hospital. And then she worked there for a few months and then another war broke out. So a lot of Tutsi were expelled from the hospital, including one of my uncles who had stayed behind.

He was a medical assistant and then he was kicked out of the hospital with my mom and other people. So fortunately, my uncle decided to go to Congo. And going to Congo, he asked my mom if he could take me because he knew that if I remained behind, it would be hard for my mom to raise me up. She was totally alcoholic.

I went with them up to Congo, and then from Congo, he sent me to Uganda, where was another aunt, his sister, my father's sister, who was in Uganda. So I was raised by my father's sister and her husband, and they had a big family of their own. She had 12 kids, and I was the 13th one, though some of them had died, but we were many. But she offered...

the love that my mother could give me. And I was able to go to school. And I grew up in Uganda until when I finished high school. In that gap, I had never heard about my mother, had never seen her. The only thing I knew that I was told she was drunk in those hills far away. And it wasn't far away from Rwanda, but because of the political situation, we could not go back. And she could not cross over to come and visit us.

I pleaded with my uncle that I needed to go and see my mother because all the time I blamed myself that I was the one who would save her. My uncle at first, he said, no, that's crazy. You can't do it. And I was very stubborn. I said I wanted to see my mother. So he says, you don't have any travel document or passport. And I asked, I checked with the other students. They told me there's a way you can come in. Just sneak in. So I sneaked in.

At the border, I had to go through the back door and I sneaked in the country. I remember when I came there that night, my mother was put in jail because of me. They said I was a rebel and I was only 17.

When she was put in jail, it was really overwhelming. I could not even imagine that my mother looked like that way. She was so beautiful. But the first night I saw her, she was drunk.

So it was really shocking to me. She was put in jail, drunk, and she was trying to tell them the truth. She said, this is my child. She's not a rebel. She lives with her uncle in Uganda who is helping her to go to school, but they could not understand. She said, I was accused that I was cutting messages. So my mother and her friends, they advised me to go back. So I went back the following day, back to Uganda.

So I went back, finished my high school, and then when I wanted money to go to college, there was no money. So I decided to go back in Rwanda, and my friends promised they were going to help me find a job. They told me it was safe. A classmate of mine was from Rwanda, and his father was a pastor, so he promised to help me and find me a job, which he did. And he

Eventually, he became my fiancé and then we got married. I thought that if I stayed and get married in Rwanda, that I would be able to help my mother better because all the time I blamed myself that I went away and that made her upset and that's why I became drunkard. I loved my mother. I wanted to know her better, but she never gave me a chance because she was all the time drunk.

And I didn't want to see her that way. But then I decided to stay in Rwanda and help her no matter what. So my aim was to go in the city, find a job in the city of Kigali, find a job, and then rescue her, maybe buy her a house, which I did, in the village, and then try to, you know, try to help her to come back together.

But it was hard until when I decided to get married so that maybe with my husband we could help her. We decided to go back to Rwanda because he told me it was safe since I was married to him. He was a Hutu, nothing would happen and things were stabilizing.

But to be frank, that time when I look back, I find that I didn't know what love was. It was like a business to me. It was just, this guy is going to help me. Without him, I can't survive in Rwanda. So he was like a friend. He wasn't really like a lover. There was no love. And in Rwanda, they believed that's all. Just to get married, have children, that's all. Love will develop. Eventually it did. We had three sons together.

That would be my prayer. I said, "God, why didn't I have a father? Then why didn't I have a proper mother? Why didn't I have siblings?" But when I got my children, I think the whole love and questions that I had went to my children. And I love to be a mother and a true mother, good mother to them. It was hard all the time when I could get a job.

Like I remember one job, the guy who was interviewing me, he says, no, no, no, I wasn't speaking proper Kinyarwanda, which is my mother tongue. I only spoke the Ugandan languages and English. And he said, no, we can't hire you. You are a rebel. You're a Tutsi. And that's when I started understanding really the actual meaning, the heavy weight of being a Tutsi.

We were posted. We got jobs with Seventh-day Adventists, and we were posted in the south side of Rwanda. We had really a good family. We were working for the church, again, for the Seventh-day Adventist church. My ex was in administration. He had a good job. I was working. We had a stable family, and everything was good.

So I thought life was good and continuous until 1993 when the genocide was starting. Those who have been in exile for, I think, for 45 years, they were tired of being refugees. They wanted to come back to their country and be part of the country, but the Hutu government refused until when there were negotiations.

The rebels were on the side of the Tutsi who were negotiating to come back to Rwanda. Treaties after treaties, there were still some treaties being signed, but the final treaty wasn't signed. So they were negotiating, and if the negotiations could fail, then they were trying to attack and come by force.

A lot of Tutsis were being accused to have been working with the rebels and they were put in jail. A lot of Tutsis were jailed in different jails.

So before that, the final treaty, the rebels decided to sneak in the country and came and opened the doors of one of the big jail in Ruhengeri. It was one of the major ones where a lot of prominent Tutsis were in prison. So one night, the rebels came from Uganda, crossed over the volcanic mountains,

came and opened up the prison doors and fought and took away a number of prisoners back to Uganda. So one night, the soldiers came and took every man. They knocked at the doors and took every man that was suspecting. My neighbors were taken, my co-workers at school were taken. That night when the campus, the mission station was attacked,

We heard from the villagers that a lot of people, the Tutsis were being killed, that everyone who was not born in that area was like a traitor that had been working with the rebels. Every Tutsi was a target.

I remember my coworkers, I was working at the school, my coworkers, some of the teachers were killed that night. The mission station was raided by the former soldiers.

the former government soldiers, and people were abducted. And even my ex was on the list to be abducted, but my ex was lucky he just had moved the previous day to go to work in another area. Most of his colleagues, they were taken and died.

He went, he could not even come back to that area. We remained there for almost six months, just locked in the houses. We were a target. Every day, I was a target. They could come and ask me questions. I was accused that I was speaking English, that I grew up in Uganda.

So I remained there for some months. We were locked inside the house. We were not even allowed to get out and get food. Some good friends would come and bring us food, but we were not allowed to go out. The whole campus was surrounded by soldiers.

And most of that time, the neighbors would come and sit in front of my house, and everybody was saying, we are going to kill you. I'm going to take your sofas. They were dividing my assets in front of my house, and I was inside with my kids and my mother. Until one day, when myself and other women were

We were told to go and report ourselves at the headquarters in that small town. It was like a one-hour drive, and someone offered to drive us there. When we were about 10 minutes away, there was a big roadblock. Anyone, any car, anyone who was walking, you could be checked whether you were Tutsi or Ahutu.

Within that small city, it was chaos. There was war everywhere. You could see soldiers. You couldn't see even other people walk. It was just soldiers. So when we reached that roadblock, they asked everybody. We were like 20. They asked everybody to get out of the car. They put us on line and said, bring your identity cards. I showed my identity card. It indicated I was a Tutsi. And then they said I had three sins.

Sin number one, being a Tutsi. Number two, they called me a cockroach, that I was a cockroach. Number three, I was speaking English and I grew up in Uganda. So they said they put me on the line of the people who were supposed to die.

It was so quickly that I couldn't even focus, I couldn't even think. I said, "What do I do? Do I pray?" And then all of a sudden, there appeared a car, a Red Cross car. And in my mind I said, "I have to do something, otherwise I'm going to die like those people around me." So I shouted.

And I said, "Please, I need help. I need help. They're going to kill me for nothing." They heard me. I was speaking English and they heard what I was saying. So the Red Cross people intervened and they came and the soldiers were trying to hit me. They said, "No, no, no, she's a rebel. You see, she speaks English." Immediately they intervened. They said, "No, let's hold on. Let's hear the story." So I explained why we're there and why we've been called the police.

And up to now, I didn't even understand. And I told them, these guys want to kill me. These soldiers want to kill me. You see all these dead bodies. They were trying to cover the dead bodies, but the tombs were fresh. You could see them just around us. They told the soldiers that let's go take her to the police and see what the police wants from her. And then we are going to return her to you. If she's to be killed, you kill her. But let's first investigate why the police wants her.

When the police saw the Red Cross, they didn't even ask us many questions. They said, oh, we wanted to make sure that you are safe, you guys. We heard that some of the husbands are taken to the rebels. We want to check that you are safe. But it was a trick.

So the Red Cross told me that we are going to take you back to the mission station. And I asked them to call our headquarters in Kigali if they could come and move us. So after a few days, that's what happened. But we had to go out of that area through the Red Cross convoy. We could not do that without them.

So they took us up to Kigali, to the city, up to the Seventh-day headquarters. And then later on we were taken to my husband's village. We reunited and then eventually he was given a job in the city. And then there was another transfer. He was transferred to the central part where his home area is, where his parents are. But there's another big mission station there.

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It wasn't very safe because there were some riots, there were some hand grenades were sent in taxis, in buildings. People were being prisoned for nothing, being accused that they were connected to the rebels. So there was rumors of war. There was a radio that was started by the government, and there was news. It was so scary, you knew that something was coming up.

I remember the first thing that I heard that got me so scared. They were saying there were 10 rules about men who, men that, who to men should not marry the Tutsi women. They had established 10 rules. These were incited every day on the radio. You should not marry the Tutsi women. They should this and this and this. 10 rules.

And then the actual genocide started in 1994. When the president of Rwanda, President Habia Rimana, was coming from signing the last treaty from Alusha, Tanzania, his plane was shot down and he died. So that's where the massacre started. That's when the massacre started.

When we heard that the president's plane was shot and the president had died that night, I remember it was around 7, between 7 and 8 o'clock at night, and we heard on the radio that a curfew is established around the country. No one was allowed to move from his house. No one was allowed to move out of the country until further notice.

Jobs were stopped. No one was supposed to do anything. And then we started hearing houses being burnt around the villages. Men were killed and boys. We could see on the hills people running, mostly women and children trying to hide everywhere. And everything had to stand still. The only thing was starting to kill and run.

This was the Hutu group. This was the young men and men trained. They were trained in secrets because it was like a surprise. These were young men who were trained to kill with the machetes. They had made sticks that were made of, we had big knobs, and on top of the big knobs they had put some nails. These were killing sticks.

So at the beginning, they started burning houses, rooting the houses, killing men and boys, and then they would let the women and children to wander. And in my mind I thought maybe they won't touch the women and children, but they waited them until when they would get tired and they started killing everybody.

On the radio, you could hear them kill them. They are cockroaches. They are snakes. Don't leave even a single soul to tell the story. There were no markets. There were no schools. There were no hospitals. Nothing was functioning except to wake up and go and kill. Burn the houses, kill, and steal the things you find in your way.

Every day we are listening to this. Even if you didn't want to listen to this, around you there were cries, there were burnings. You could hear people that so-and-so is being killed. You could, yeah, whatever you could be hiding, you could never run away from it. It's beyond. It's so scary. It's beyond what you could imagine.

I was like a crazy woman. I said, I wish I can save my family. But I knew that I was a target because everybody was saying, oh, you came from Uganda and anyone from Uganda is in trouble. So that was my fear. I knew I was going to die. I started hiding.

And most of the time I could move every night here and there from my house to my in-laws, then from living in the ceiling, then moving to neighbors' houses. The mission station had two big schools, high schools, and then it had a clinic, like a small local hospital.

And then they had running water and the electricity was like a small city. And we had also some missionaries who were working there. They came in big numbers to our house at the mission station. My husband was hiding a lot of his co-workers, the pastors and the believers who are Tutsis. They had come to the mission station to hide there.

And this was, I think it was the plan because people starting to come where there were churches and mosques to hide there. The refugees, who are Tutsi refugees running away from their villages to come and hide in churches, thinking that when you come to church in previous wars, the church was safe. No one would kill you in the church. But this time, no. The churches were not respected.

They waited until they were in big numbers. And this was planned very well. They would come to each location when they had big numbers and surrounded. And they started screening who was a Hutu and who was a Tutsi through by identity cards. If you didn't have identity card, you were counted to be a rebel. We are more than almost between 1,000 and 2,000 people.

and they were screening, they were screening everybody. So one day the mission station was attacked. They gathered everybody at the church.

And I had my children, my husband, I couldn't even know where he was. Then when they screamed the Tutsis, I had my three kids. They snatched away my kids and I saw my husband coming and said, they shoved the kids to him and said, "These are our kids. She doesn't belong to us. She is to die. You guys have to leave." So they told him, "Walk away. If you stay, we are going to kill you with the kids." So he ran away with the kids.

and I didn't know where he was, but he was in that mob which was being sent towards Congo. They took everybody inside the church. They told us, "Sing your best songs you want, say your prayers because this is the last one." Before they could kill, they would strip everything away from you. Starting, they could say, "Give away the money."

it belongs to the government give away those who had glasses they took the glasses away those who had shoes they took the shoes they watched they said this belongs to the government you don't deserve to have anything then because we were inside the church i said how can this happen inside the church and that god is watching and most of some of the people were church members who are doing this they knew they knew us well they were neighbors

Even one of the pastors, I remember, they told him, you go up front, do the job you've been doing. Lead these people in prayer. Sing your last songs. Pray your last prayer. It was like a normal church. We were singing. People were, even I could watch the kids, they were just calm. We were singing, and then all of a sudden, they started throwing hand grenades everywhere.

At first, there was hand grenades, then shootings, and then macheting whosoever who was still breathing. Some people fall on top of each other. I remember I said, "God, if you're still there, just help me so that I die quickly. I won't feel the pain."

Everybody was down and there were cries. There was a lot of blood. It was beyond what I can even put into words. It was beyond what you can imagine. I thought it was the end of the world. So I laid down under the pew and that's how I survived under there.

So I think I was a coward. I went just down and I sat down near between the two pews. And everybody, when they started killing, everybody was falling on top of the other. And I went under many people and that's how I survived. I was covered with a lot of blood when I came up, but I didn't have any wounds. No one cut me that time.

I don't remember much because I woke up later with hearing someone saying, "Whosoever can walk, let's walk away because they're coming back to finish us." There was one teacher who had survived standing on the corner. So he said, "I'm safe. I'm okay." He went around trying to wake up everybody, said, "Let's run. They're coming back."

We were only three. The rest of the people were half killed. They could talk but they could not walk. So he says, "We can't do anything. Let's run."

I asked him, "Where do we go?" Because everywhere they are going to find us. He said, "The only place where we can go and receive us is at your in-laws." My in-law was a pastor. He was living around the mission station. He was retired. And we went there and that's where my kids were and my ex. So we went and knocked at the door.

They opened for us. They couldn't believe that we are real people. They thought we were demons because they had thought no one survived in that massacre. And they cleaned us. They gave us food. But they said, walk away because they're coming back. And if they come back, they're going to kill everybody, including their children.

My in-law had a lot of cows, so they had grown the cow grass and we went under that grass and we found inside there were many people hiding there. The following day, they came to search the whole place, the whole house, every corner, ceiling, everywhere.

We survived in that bush under the cows when they were grazing. Then at night we were told to move away and go farther in the bushes, in the big bushes where they could not come and find us. So we kept going under those bushes. We went actually, we went in the valley where there were reeds and we stayed there for many days. It was almost three months when we were there, we were moving.

During the night we could move farther away and during the day we would stay and come until when it was dark. Inside myself, I couldn't even think straight. I could say, "I wish I can be a normal person again." Because we were not eating. The most thing that made us survive, it was raining season, so we were drinking a lot of water and dirt.

And I think that's helped us. The mud and water, we drank a lot of that. Some people told me later that that helped you to survive. Until one day, one morning when we had a lot of shoutings, we had a lot of shootings. It was chaos. And all of a sudden we saw everyone in that village moving one direction.

So we joined, we decided to join the mob because where we were, there was a lot of shootings coming our way and we decided to walk away and follow everybody. So in the middle of that mob,

They started screening and when we reached the roadblock, we were screened. They said, oh, these are rebels. And they put us on the side. There were other people, so we were put on the side of the roadblock. And I remember there was a guy. He used to work for me. He was my gardener. He used to work in my gardens. I recognized him and I started pleading. I said, you are the boss here. You have to help us.

He says, "I am the boss now. You don't have any say."

So I told him, please, I begged him, I said, don't kill me. Go back and take anything that belongs to us back at the station. He said, you don't have anything. Even your husband has deserted you and children. You are rebel. Now that proves what we used to say. So he said, I'm the one going to kill you. So he pushed me on the side. He said,

I'm the one to kill you. You've been a bad master. And he raised up a machete and I started pleading with him. I said, please go back and take anything that belongs to me. And even I know my husband's going to give you more, but shoot me. Don't machete me. So he raised up a machete and I knew that was my end.

He slashed my right hand. He has a big scar. And then I fell down. When I fell down, he macheted my left leg. So I fell backwards without knowing what next. What I saw, I just saw a lot of blood. And I knew that I was dying. I said, "How do, how do, how do, what is going to happen?"

In that moment, I heard him pulling me and shoving me behind the house where they're standing, said, "Run." I was with my mother and other people, so he macheted my mom on the head and other women, and then he shoved us. He said, "You run, because if I didn't do this,

Someone else would have killed you. You forgive me, go, but run. You go, you're going to be safe. Run back to the village. So that's how we survived. This season, Instacart has your back-to-school. As in, they've got your back-to-school lunch favorites, like snack packs and fresh fruit. And they've got your back-to-school supplies, like backpacks, binders, and pencils. And they've got your back when your kid casually tells you they have a huge school project due tomorrow.

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We said we can't move ahead because they're going to kill us again. So we moved back to the mission station. The whole village was empty. There was not even a soul. It was just the rebels and the government army fighting. When the fighting subsided, we moved back to the village. And when we reached the village, it was empty again.

No one, you could not even hear a soul. You could hardly see anyone, any living soul. There were very, very few people. Most of the bushes were full of people killed. You could walk on the roads, there were piles of dead bodies. And houses were piled up with dead bodies.

Until when the rebels, we had them saying, "Whosoever is hiding in the bush, come out. We are here to save you. It's safe. The killers are gone. Come, come out of the bush." So a lot of people started coming out of the bush. And even some of the Hutus, they brought them back. So they started coming. People started coming, filling the villages again. But it took like weeks when there was no movement.

A few weeks later, I saw a lot of people coming back, and that was among those were my family, my husband and kids and his brothers and his parents. They came back to the village. We went to my in-laws' house. There was no more killings. The rebels were around taking care of everybody. They said the city was being, now the country was being liberated.

Not a few months later, we went back to the mission. They cleaned the mission. Most of the houses were broken down. Everything was gone. So neighbors were killed. Friends were gone. Family members were no more. It was like a bare country. Everything that you owned just perished.

And it was so hard because you could hardly see any people you knew. There were very, very few. Most of the people are gone. So imagine that pain that no one can take it away. No one even can understand. You can't measure the magnitude of that pain. You can't measure the pain that we went through. I remember one time after the genocide, one journalist asked me,

How do you go on living and laughing? I said, I don't know. But I asked her, I said, have you ever lost anyone, even one person that you loved dearly? She said, yes, I lost a sibling and a grandmother. I said, okay, how did you feel? She says, it was terrible, so painful. I said, find that pain times a thousand and thousand times.

that we have. But through God's mercy, I'm here. It was mixed emotions because you could see you have a family and you know that other people don't even have one single person.

So to me, I felt like I wasn't even, it wasn't clear to me because I said, why did I survive? What's the point of living when you no longer have any relative? Because most of my relatives died except the few who had been in Uganda and in Congo. And you ask yourself, what's the point of living? Where is God? Why did it happen?

It wasn't fair because other people had everything together and you could find some children, young, young children remaining alone, somewhere wounded, couldn't comprehend. Up to now, it's hard to understand. But then a few months later, my husband was accused to have betrayed all the people who died at the church.

and he was put in jail by the rebels, by the Tutsi government. He stayed in jail for 13 years until when he was released in 2008. The church expelled me from the church house. They told me, "Your husband is a traitor. He's in prison. He belongs now to the Hutu killers. You are the killer's wife."

So the Hutus would say, I am a Tutsi. I belong to the Tutsi. When I got the Tutsi, they said, no, you belong, you are the killer's wife. So I found myself that I didn't belong anywhere. And I wished, that's when I had emotions. I said, I wish I had courage to kill myself.

I wish I had died with other people. And I started questioning God where He was. God, you have to do something because I can't kill myself and I can't leave my children. But what's the point of living? And I started asking myself, is this the real God? I started questioning myself about God and why is all this? And if He's real, why such things are happening?

Until some years later, it's when I came back to God. But I resented him for some years. Every week we could take food to the prisoners. And that was another torture because I could go there and sometimes soldiers could beat me.

They would say, what are you doing here? You are not a Hutu. You are Tutsi now, a survivor. But what are you doing here? I said, he's my husband. He said, go. So most of the time I would be beaten. I did this for six years. He was saying, you go talk to the Tutsi leaders to plead for me. You know the truth. And I didn't have any power. No one could listen to me until one day when...

When one day I came to, I brought food and he said, no, get away. I don't want to talk to you. I don't want even to see you. So he gave me a 10 page letter, which was like a divorce. And I was told no, never to come to see him anymore. And I, yeah, and I walked away. This was, I think in 1999. And from that day, I've never seen him again.

It's through pain and tears. But at the end, I got resilience. When things were so hard after the genocide, I brought a chair in front of me. I didn't even have a meal to give to my kids. I didn't even have clothes on my shoulders. And I didn't know where was the next day we are going to stay. So I got tired and I asked God,

I need an answer. And I said, God, if you are the real God, you need to answer me. I need just three things. One, are you real? Two, if you are real, prove yourself to me. Then three, use me if you are real and prove yourself to me. So afterwards, after a few months, he really revealed himself.

He revealed himself to me in a mystery way up to now I don't understand. After praying my three requests to God, God used some people from nowhere. I got a job in the city after the genocide.

I just summoned one lady who was working for international organizations. I used to interpret for her and one day she just came to the village where we were in the mission station. That lady came from nowhere and she offered me a job and I went and started working with women organizations. Through there,

Later on, I got another job to be a consultant for the women, Rwandan Women in Leadership Conference. The women leaders up to the top were trying to bring together so that they can come and share their stories. And at that conference, this was just a few years after the genocide.

There were more than 100 journalists trying to hear what these women were saying and were offering to the world. And I identified one young, I thought it was the youngest of all,

In my mind, I was thinking that maybe she's young, she has passion, maybe she will cover the story. I asked her, "If you work for any magazine, can you cover our stories and hear the side story of women like me?" She said,

Sure. I shared her my story. And then I said, she said she wanted to capture the stories of five women who are on a panel. And we started from there. And I was their interpreter. I connected them with these women. We traveled to their villages. We heard their stories, different stories.

And eventually the story became a documentary which is called God Sleeps in Rwanda.

They didn't focus on my story, but I was in the documentary as an interpreter, and I connected the journalists with their women. And this documentary was my key. I never knew. I wasn't even working for a salary. I was working as a volunteer to help them, but I wanted our stories to be heard. Eventually, in 2003,

I was told that the documentary is finished if I would come and help them to tell their stories here in America and share my own story. And I accepted. And I came and shared my story. And I stayed. I thought...

I was coming for a few months because I had responsibilities. I was taking care of my kids and my wounded mother. And at first it was so hard to decide to come. I was torn between the two. But they promised me if I come, I'll be just for two months and I'll come back to Rwanda. And I came when I started sharing my story with

These journalists who are working with Amnesty International, and they told me that if you want, there's another way to leave. You can apply for asylum, and if you get it, your children will join you later. And this is what happened. Yeah, I got my asylum in 2005, and my children joined me in 2008. So we are all here. We are now citizens, and we are safe.

That's where I said that God revealed himself to me using these other women to change my life, to give me another chance. It's been a blessing to be here. So many people, so many lives touched me and made me whole. And I'm very grateful to be here because I've seen kindness. I've seen that not everybody's bad.

There are some people who have big, Americans have big hearts that I can't even explain. They showed me that I can move on and live again. So by that, I realized that I need to do something, that I need to give back. And I started a nonprofit called, we started it calling Rwanda Women in Action.

Our mission is to bridge the new refugees in Columbus by connecting them to other resources. And we also were doing the after-school programs for the children and then ESL classes for the women. And especially we're focusing on single women because we find there were

They had more challenges than the complete family. So two years ago, we changed the name to be broad and called it Refuge Women in Action. Sometimes I remember. Sometimes I have dreams, repeated dreams. Sometimes I feel sad. I've been sick. I've been getting sick and sick. And I think it's because of the trauma and the pain.

I haven't gone to proper counseling. I just went to one, and I found it wasn't working for me because I found that no one understands my pain. Sometimes I'm good. I speak about it. I've done a lot of speaking engagements, but I'm still shedding tears. Why? Why do I shed tears after almost 20-something years? It's something that you can never have medicine to eat. It's something you can never forget.

My children are really happy. They are grown up men. My oldest got married last year. Now I have a grandchild who is a granddaughter. The older one is working and the middle one has his own business. And the youngest just finished nursing school just this year. So we are now

moving forward like anyone else which I never knew I would do. So things are coming up and I'm very grateful. If I can survive, if I can make it, everyone can do it. Suppose each one of us is given another few years to live, what would you do? That's my plea.

Look back and see if you are given just few minutes to live or for some more years to live, what would you do?

From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening. If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, the Wondery app, or wherever you're listening right now. You can also join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app to listen ad-free. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our shows for free.

I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Andrew Waits and Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper. You can join the This Is Actually Happening community on the discussion group on Facebook, or at Actually Happening on Instagram.

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Thank you for listening.

The missiles are coming.

What am I supposed to do? Featuring incredible performances from Tracy Letts, Mary Lou Henner, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, Paul Edelstein, and many, many more, Incoming is a hilariously thrilling podcast that will leave you wondering, how would you spend your last few minutes on Earth? You can binge Incoming exclusively and ad-free on Wondery+. Join Wondery+, and the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.