The following is part one of a two-part series.
“Everybody got along,” said Simon Mudahogora, describing the Rwandan village he grew up in, “It was a poor and peaceful life.” The 26-year-old economics major’s hometown included about 60 of his family members.
Daily life was as simple as it gets: Simon and the other children in his family woke up at 6:30 a.m. and walked a mile to the river to fetch some water for the day. He’d get back, take a cold shower, have his morning tea and bread, and arrive to school at 8:30 ready for class.
For hours, young Simon sat on bench made of dirt, in a room stuffed with 35 students. His family farmed while he was at school.
“That’s the only life I lived. I had no complaints at all,” he said.
In the evening, when the blistering sun cooled down, all the kids got together for a game of soccer — with a slight catch.
“We didn’t even have a ball,” he said. The kids would tie rubber bands around plastic bags and do their best to shape the concoction like a ball. “It was the only sport we could play.”
Though they had far less money and minimal resources, Simon believes that Rwandans prior to the war were happier than Americans are today: “Here, you have to do so much to live a normal life.”
Rwanda was divided primarily into two tribes of people, the Hutu (85 percent of the population) and the Tutsi (15 percent of the population and the group that Simon’s family belonged to). They had a history of war, but at the time, they lived together tranquilly. They were neighbors, they were classmates, and quite often, they were friends.
But that peace Simon described was ruined when the civil war reignited in 1994. Tutsi, who were relocated in Uganda in the first war in 1959, wanted to come back to Rwanda. When the Hutu refused to let them in, the Tutsi in Uganda formed an army and began attempting to penetrate the border.
For Simon’s family, 60 men, women and children in a row of houses, everything began to unravel. Their lives were at stake every waking moment.
Fearing that the Tutsi residing in Rwanda would aid the invaders from Uganda, radio stations in Rwanda began telling Hutu to kill their Tutsi neighbors to prevent this from happening.
Simon’s family had to flee home at night and sleep in the jungles. They didn’t want to be slain in the night like many other Tutsi.
Not a wink of sleep came their way in those thick jungles — they were petrified by the humming of low-hovering military-grade helicopters.
When 6:30 struck, however, life continued regularly: He walked to the river, got water, ate and went to school — even though just the night before, he was silently tucked into an African jungle, wondering if he’d live to see another day.
At school, the Hutu children often told Simon and the three other Tutsi children that they were going to kill them, and that they were going to die soon. When Simon told the teachers, they did nothing about it.
They were Hutu too.
Obviously, during all this, school was the last thing on his mind. His life was threatened 24/7, but his mother never stopped sending him. He remembers being upset, feeling like she didn’t love him, but in retrospect, he understands.
“She was doing what was best for me,” Simon said, “Get over my fear, be a man, you know?”
And boy, did he need that fearlessness.
April 1994 was a rainy month in Rwanda. Not rain like Oregon, but rain like monsoon.
Roadblocks had been set up throughout Rwanda. They were checking IDs and refusing Tutsi access to the roads. Tutsi began fleeing south to the country of Burundi. Simon’s family knew they had to follow suit, but they didn’t know the conditions of the roads, or how difficult the roadblocks were to evade.
They had to send a scout — Simon was elected to do so, but he refused to do it alone, so they agreed to send him with his little sister.
There he was: carrying out a life-or-death stealth operation with his younger sister — before he was even 10 years old.
Sneaking through those farms and fields, avoiding the roads at all costs, he could hear the blood-curdling screams of his people, the infernos blazing their homes and bodies.
Entire families were lined up and impaled by a single stick.
They finally arrived to a friend’s house which was located near the border of Rwanda and Burundi, but his friend informed them that with that the only time to leave was right then and there — there was no chance later. Simon and his sister could either leave with his friend to Burundi right then, or go back home and be stranded for death with his family.
And so, with heavy hearts, he and his sister prepared to leave the country and family they loved so much, thinking that it was unlikely they’d ever see them again — and they were right.
Be sure to check out next week’s In These Eyes for the rest of Simon’s story.
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Leaving family, genocide behind
Daily Emerald
July 11, 2010
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