Kim Marie Claire Umutesi’s story is remarkable, but it is not unique. After all, her two sisters had the same experience, surviving Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. (Much of their family did not, including their parents and two brothers, as well as aunts and uncles.)
“I am sure there are other kids, other orphans who lived the same story,” Kim said.
My stepfather’s work in tourism often brings him to Africa. “I know your Dad because I’m a member of the Africa Travel Association and I met him in Kenya.” She wound up telling him part of her story and he in turn asked her to tell me.
“I always wished to share my experience,” Kim said.
Quick overview: The trigger for the Rwanda genocide came when a plane carrying Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana and Burundi President Cyprien Ntaryamira was shot down on April 6, 1994, killing both leaders.
The massacres began almost immediately—literally on April 7. It was asserted that Tutsis were responsible for killing the President, who was Hutu. In response, members of the Hutu ethnic group slaughtered approximately 800,000 people (mostly Tutsis) in just 100 days in a manner systematic yet frequently horrifyingly primitive: machetes were often used in the killings.
By July 18, the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) had taken control of Rwanda, declared peace, and installed Pasteur Bizimungu as president. (Paul Kagame succeeded him in 2000 and remains in power to this day.)
There is much, much more to be said about these events. This ranges from the slow investigation into the real reason the plane was shot down (in 2010 a Rwandan government-commissioned panel found that Hutus had actually shot down the plane, apparently as an excuse to justify the slaughter of Tutsis) to pointing out how little was done by the U.N., the U.S., or anyone else to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths.
This article, however, will focus on Kim. She was still months from her fifth birthday when her parents were killed. While she was willing to discuss that tragedy, she also wanted to look beyond it. As Kim said, “We don’t have so many books/stories talking about life after the genocide. What the survivors lived after the genocide.”
This is just one chapter in Kim’s story of the struggles that came next: her time in the orphanage.
Reaching the orphanage alive was a borderline miracle. Kim and her family lived in Gisenyi, a small city in the northwest on the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She survived the attack along with two sisters: one 11, one just two. As noted, her parents, her two brothers, and many, many others did not.
Kim recalled leaving their home and facing a world gone mad: “We were jumping bodies of people.”
They found a friend of their mother who hid them in her cellar. They assumed in time she would come back and get them, but she never returned. They were “terrified of the noise we heard outside of people crying and dying.” But they could only stay so long: there was no food, no water. After three weeks, they decided to leave.
They were lucky—they met a priest who was a friend of the family. He took them to the Nyundo orphanage. The orphanage had a staff of 45 to deal with at least 700 orphans. (Kim’s sister thought it may have been closer to nearly 1,000.) Kim recalled life there “wasn’t good” but it was an improvement on the cellar in two major ways: it had food and there was “no noise of people dying.”
Which is not to say the struggle was over. Food was by no means plentiful: “Sometimes you know you are going to eat and you are [still] going to be hungry.” At times what was served was basically inedible: “Bad, spoiled.” There were also times you needed to fight just to get the little that was available: “Some kids are gonna eat their food and come to eat your food. When I remember that, I think, ‘Oh my God how I lived this life?’”
Of course, aggression by the other children made sense—they’d suffered too. Indeed, their brutalization was often all too visible: “There were kids who lost their legs, lost their arms.” Everything came to the surface at bedtime: “It was so hard to sleep during the night because of the children in the orphanage dreaming their parents dying.”
Kim grieved like everyone else, often thinking of the loved ones they’d lost: “Anyone with the same hair as your mom, you want to follow her.”
There was also an unexpected trauma. “The orphanage consisted of multiple houses, split up by age. For instance, I was sleeping in house #5. My older sister was in house #8. You wish to see your older sister, but you don’t have permission to go see someone who is not your age.”
Their mother’s final words to them were, “My daughters, I am gone, but I want you to stay together, don’t be separated and love each other.”
The cruel irony was that somehow the three sisters had survived and stayed together… only to be separated anyway: “Sometimes you miss your sister because you can’t see her even though she’s staying at the same center. There’s another kind of pain I got at that time.”
It is understandably difficult to articulate these experiences. Indeed, for a time Kim gave up on talking altogether: “I spent between six months and one year when I wasn’t able to talk. I just used to write. I thought my life was finished. I don’t think I’m born as an artist, but the bad period I lived, the experience I had with other orphans gave me a way. Any time I want to share, I’m good in writing. I’m always writing poems. I’m always writing songs. I can draw something. I can draw something to express to express what I’m saying.”
Things began to improve: “After that period, I met a psychologist from Italy. Helped me so much at the orphanage. That period… you think if you die you’re going to go somewhere and meet your parents.”
Besides the psychologist, there were other positives: “I start my primary school at the orphanage.” It was a chance to learn French. (Today Kim speaks French, her “mother language” of Kinyarwanda, Italian, and, as a fourth language, English.)
Perhaps most importantly, the orphans bonded. Some were only infants, less than a year old. Kim recalled older children, including her, being required to care for them: “[They] teach you to take care of babies. So if the babies crying you can give them milk or do something.”
In this way, she gained a new family among those who had also had theirs taken away: “For me they are my sisters, they are my brothers. After the genocide lost our parents, I think of them as my sisters and brothers.”
Kim and her sisters’ time at the orphanage ended when they discovered an uncle was living in Italy and trying to find any surviving family, a quest that finally led him to them.
They could go to Italy and seemingly a better life… but in the process be adopted by different families and split up, breaking their word to their mother.
Or they could stay in Rwanda and figure out how to remain together.
When called upon to make this decision, Kim was still only eight.
Kim and her sisters faced many more disappointments and dangers in the years to come, encountering both unexpected betrayals and kindnesses she will never forget. Kim wound up on a good path, eventually finding work and earning a bachelor’s degree. She even founded Rwanda AFD Village. (It stands for Arts Food and Dance—“We will show you Rwanda through art work, great food, and traditional dance.”)
Kim said she was inspired to start it when she realized, “After the genocide, people used to come to Rwanda, but Rwandans were not people to smile. Nowhere to go in the evening and have fun.” Now she wants to celebrate both her culture and “enjoying life.”
Sadly, many kids who left the orphanage had experiences almost as grim as the ones that sent them there: “Such strange stories. If you listen to them, my story’s nothing. Like nothing happened in my life. Staying with the bad people. Some of them… Crazy things like, ‘Okay, you gonna be my wife.’”
In recent years, Kim received unhappy news about the place she and her sisters spent three years. “One thing that was crazy and make me sad was the way they closed the orphanage.” The government announced they want all orphanages shut down by 2020—in theory at least, each child will be placed with a family.
Kim said she understood why this was done: “Rwanda want to show that they’re independent” and no longer a place needing assistance from abroad. She still regrets it: “There’s no reason to close the orphanage.”
Even though the orphanage is gone, Kim keeps in touch with the sisters and brothers she met there: “Sometimes when it’s the weekend we organize a kind of lunch. We talk about our life. They were saying last time, ‘What do you think: we write a book, a movie about what we lived?’”
When asked for photos, Kim apologized she could not provide more: “I am sorry I would like to send many pictures with my sisters when we were kids but they burned everything during the genocide.” Still, she was kind enough to share one of the three of them today:
And one of a painting of hers:
Below, you can listen to “one of my poems that I like. It is in French and it was the time of 20 years of commemoration of Rwanda Genocide.” This 2014 recording is by friends of hers who are Senegalese artists. While Kim hesitated to translate it to English, she offered this explanation: “In the poem I was asking what I will tell my children when they will ask me [about] their grandparents, aunts, and uncles.” The music’s moving even without understanding a word.
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