The following is part two of a three-part series. See part one here.

With faint screams and smoke coming from the forests and villages surrounding, Simon Mudahogora, his sister, and his friend’s family all loaded up into a canoe, which had to be sunk to hide from the Hutu. They were heading to a refugee camp in Burundi, where many other Tutsi fled.
The border between Burundi and Rwanda was marked by a river — a river so dirtied with death that they had to move carcasses out of the canoe’s way to get across the river.
Simon knew he had to stay tough: “There was no crying.”
Crossing into Burundi, however, didn’t mean safety. The group then had to travel through two hours of swamplands, where the Hutu were often hiding and killing fleeing Tutsi. The thick vegetation and knee-high mud trenched and brushed across their fear-riddled bodies.
Simon’s sister was a teary mess; at the tender age of 7, she was fleeing from her family and everything she knew, knowing that it was virtually impossible for things to return to the way they were.
“There was zero hope that (my family) would make it,” Simon said. The group finally arrived at the camp after two hours of silently sloshing through the marshes.
For about six months, Simon and his sister slept in U.N.-provided white tents.
There were no blankets.
There were no pillows.
There was no soccer.
And every meal was identical: corn flour soup — for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
“It was fucking disgusting,” Simon said, nodding his head in disapproval, “Everyone was hungry 24/7.”
During his stay at the camp, not one family member was ever found. They had all been slain.
All 60 of them.
Simon’s tone takes a more somber, careful tone whenever he brings this up. The thought of his family’s murder puts a cold look on his face: “I’m still kinda bitter.”
Recognizing their absence permanently changed Simon’s role in life. His childhood was practically over — before he had even hit puberty.
Simon had an aunt and uncle who left Rwanda in 1975 for school in Sacramento, Calif. Somehow, she learned that he and his sister were alive, and she began to coordinate efforts to get them out of Africa. She connected them with her friend who lived in Bujumbura, the capital of Burundi, and he allowed them to leave the camp and stay with him and his family for a while.
“His wife didn’t like us,” Simon said. He had to do all the chores in the house, while her children did nothing. But Simon stuck to the lesson his mother taught him while he was attending school in the midsts of a war: “No bitching, no crying; you had to do what you had to do.”
Shortly afterward, the family moved to Rwanda. It was Simon’s first time back home in more than a year.
While in Rwanda, Simon went to the area his family had once called home. The jungle had consumed the long-vacated and burned down houses.
The farmland was no more; decades of blood, sweat and tears that his family put forth to make a living were wiped out in a matter of moments.
“It was depressing” Simon said, “That’s where I grew up. That’s my whole life right there …”
He stops mid sentence and looks down: It still haunts him.
“Everything was gone.”
To this day, he hasn’t gone back to the village.
Simon and his sister moved to his grandmother’s house. Because she was married to a Hutu man, she had received help escaping and survived the genocide.
While Simon was living there, he discovered that one of his cousins in the village actually survived. They saw her picture at a local orphanage.
The little girl had been smart enough at age three, to call every passerby mommy or daddy and make them feel bad enough to carry her along to wherever they were going.
Somehow she ended up in safety, but no one knows how she did it.
It had been three years since the genocide. Simon’s aunt in America was still working out ways to get them to Sacramento, and they found their cousin just in time. Shortly after, his aunt successfully found a family capable of taking in the three young refugees.
Finally, the three of them were escaping the war-tattered lands of Rwanda. They were heading to America — where a whole new series of challenges lay ahead.
Be sure to check out next week’s In These Eyes for the conclusion of Simon’s story.
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