“The genocide took everyone I loved.”
Paul, forty years old, explained that things were good when he was a child in Rwanda. His mother remarried when he was young, so he grew up in his grandparents’ middle-class home. They had a big farm with crops and livestock. There was so much nutritious food and milk that he grew very quickly. His teachers used to even joke that with his height, he could be the father of the other students. It used to make him cry back then to stick out, but looking back, he knows he was lucky. His father was a chief and teacher in the village. Paul was his tenth and youngest child and the first of five for my mother.
Everything was good for me until the violence of 1994. Two of my uncles had gone to Burundi to encourage refugees there to come home. When my uncles didn’t come back home, we started to worry. Then we heard their bodies were found outside of a school near the border, on the Rwanda side. I knew I had to leave. I grabbed a 30 kg bag of groundnuts from my grandparents’ storeroom to take with me, hoping I could sell them in the camp across the border in Burundi and survive for some time. I sold the groundnuts for about $5 USD, which only lasted a few days. But then we got word that the camp was to be bombed. We found someone willing to help us cross to Tanzania, but we needed $2 USD each for the trip, and we didn’t have it.
A friend and I decided we would secretly cross back into Rwanda. The land near the border was fertile, and we could harvest some cassava to sell and get enough money to pay for our journey to Tanzania. It was a risky plan. This area was being patrolled 24/7 by the Rwandan military. We walked for three hours to the border and snuck across just after nightfall, around 7:00 pm. While we were doing our harvesting, we saw a military truck heading toward the river with the lights off. Throughout the night we heard the cries of people being attacked by the military for doing like us, harvesting from these fields close to the border. We were terrified at daybreak and hid, unsure of what to do. Then, we started seeing others making their way back to the river with their own sacks of harvested food and decided to try our luck. As we made our way down to the river, we saw a man standing with a blood-soaked machete and froze, terrified. He told us to hurry down to the river. We didn’t ask questions and kept running, unsure of what or whom he had killed.
At the river, there were no boats, but there were fishermen on the other bank. As we surveyed the situation, we saw two men in uniforms with guns running our way. With no other choice, we jumped into the river. Fishermen were shouting, trying to coach us across: “Don’t lift your legs, just drag them in the water!” I finally reached a boat, climbed in and hid in the bilge. I was holding tightly to my harvest. It was my ticket out of the camp.
Once we sold our goods, my friend and I left that camp for Tanzania having paid our $2 USD fee. I was leaving my aunt behind. I didn’t have enough to finance her journey or even leave her some pocket money. A week later, that camp was bombed and destroyed.
The genocide took everyone I loved. Within a few months, I lost my parents, many aunts and uncles, and most of my siblings. My grandparents were not killed, but they died within the year. They were already old, and it was so much stress.
In Tanzania, we first stopped at a UNHCR reception center. I was hearing horrible things about the camp in Tanzania, and while waiting to be moved, I decided to see if I could find work in that town. I found a family who agreed to pay me $2 USD per month to take care of their cattle. I did that for about eight months, until I decided to go ahead to the camp where I could at least go to school.
I settled in the camp with my new friends, three Burundians I met along the way. We hustled to make ends meet selling beans, rice, and maize. It wasn’t much, but it sustained me.
At 16, I became incredibly sick, shrinking from 67 to 38 kilos and suffering from diarrhea. A doctor joked that I must have gotten HIV, though I knew it was impossible since I was still a virgin. The camp hospital couldn’t figure out what was wrong and sent me to a German-run hospital in another camp. There were so many tests you would not believe, and finally they discovered I had tuberculosis, but without the usual coughing symptoms.
They gave me a prescription for medication and special foods, but I was so weak that I couldn’t walk or even take myself to the washroom. There was no one to take care of me back at my camp, so I asked the hospital to help me find transport to another camp, where I heard my brother was staying. There was no local transport, so one day they agreed to let me ride with the ambulance driver who would drop me after he took the hospital’s corpses for burial. They loaded up the dead bodies with me on top. After the burial, the driver helped me look for my brother, and we found him after a couple of hours.
My brother was working for an NGO that ran a local hospital. He arranged for me to stay at the hospital and get therapy every day at the rehab center next door. The staff were all so kind to me. What I remember most is a woman who came to the hospital with her son, who was about my age. Realizing that I was an orphan and alone, she decided to look after me like her own child. She fed me, showered me, helped me to the washroom, and took me out into the sun. But after two days her son—in the bed opposite my own—died. She disappeared and I was an orphan again.
After several months, I was strong enough to leave. I knew I had to go back to my own camp. I wasn’t registered here and couldn’t get most services. Plus, all my friends were in the other camp, probably thinking I had died. My brother and I hadn’t been close. He wasn’t reason enough to stay.
I carried some vegetables with me from the camp to see if I could make a living selling them in the camp. I had found something unique. These veggies are prized by Rwandans and Burundians, but no one else was selling them. The trouble was it was a 7–8 hour walk between the two camps, and refugees were not allowed to be traveling. I had to risk it for survival, making two or three trips per week. These long walks helped me fully regain my strength. Soon I was strong and making money. Things looked much more hopeful.
The calm did not last. In December, the Tanzanian government announced a forced repatriation of refugees, and the refugee leaders declared that they would not go back. They started a mass movement almost overnight, all of us walking towards Kenya. The Tanzanian military came out in force. There were heavily armed vehicles and helicopters meant to intimidate us. No one condemned this. They just echoed the line that all these people—almost half a million of us—were genocidaires planning an invasion of Rwanda. Many people died along the way. It was horrific to see wild animals devouring human remains.
After a week of walking, we were surrounded by the military near the border of Rwanda at Rusomo. When my group reached Benako, I decided to part and try to find my way towards my former camp. I ran through the forest and when I reached the camp, I hid myself among the Burundian community, because at some point, though I was Rwandese, I’d been registered as a Burundian and had a Burundian ration card. The friends I stayed with knew my identity, but still protected me. Things calmed down after about a month and Rwandan refugees were reinstated.
A few months later, everyone in our camp was relocated, and that’s when I started going to school again. I entered into Form 1, the first year of high school. I had to support myself at the same time, so I would borrow a bicycle to run as a taxi after school and on weekends, making about $0.40 USD per day.
I started longing for a supernatural force to take over my life. I had a neighbor who invited me to his church. When I thought about the worth of my life and the fact that I was still alive, I realized God had been gracious with me. I surrendered and became a born-again Christian.
As I turned 18, I developed an urge for a change. I learned that there was a French curriculum school run by Burundian refugees in Kenya and made up my mind to go. I started saving more from my bicycle taxi and saved up $30 USD for a guide and bus fare to get to Nairobi. It took us three days to reach Nairobi, and when I asked my guide for directions to the Adventist church, he refused. He said his work was done, and I was to sort myself out from there.
So I started asking around. I knew God’s people couldn’t turn me away. The first person I asked for help actually took me to the Ministry of Defense! The soldiers were shocked to see me and locked the gate. But even before I could explain myself, some well-dressed man asked where I was going and offered to help. He asked me if I was coming from Kisii (Western Kenya). I wasn’t sure why he was asking, so I said yes. By that time my Kiswahili was good enough to blend in thanks to all those years in Tanzania. He walked me all the way to the church gate. The pastor agreed to ask the church board for support and gave me directions to the school and $8 USD to buy food. Back then, in 1999, it was enough money to last about two weeks.
At the school I found some familiar faces, including some Burundian young men who I’d known back in the camp. These friends hosted me for a time until a church elder and women’s ministry leader began to look out for me. They treated me like family, making sure my needs were covered. The church board also eventually helped pay for fees, which were $35 USD per term. I also set up a small kiosk selling water, soft drinks, and snacks to other students. I got about $70 USD per month from this, which I used on the rent ($20 USD) for my one room house, food, and other expenses.
I finally finished school in 2006 and started applying for French teaching jobs. I got several clients as a French tutor and was charging about $2–5 USD per session, which was bringing me $70–200 USD per month. With this work happening, I needed a bank account. I didn’t have a full ID at that point, so I went to Refugee Affairs and asked for a letter to the bank manager giving me permission to open an account. They gave me the letter, and I added my ID details later. It is much harder to get a bank account now.
As I was earning, I moved to a better neighborhood, near Kilimani, where I started paying $40–60 USD per month. I started a side hustle ordering from Congo batches of clothing costing $500 USD each, then selling them at office buildings. I could earn about $250 USD in profit from each batch. But, after the terrorist attacks in Nairobi, security checks at offices had become more routine, this became harder to do. I did a one-year training in interpretation and translation in 2008, and that helped me get some new jobs doing translation for companies and conferences.
This income was really good, and that made me think it might be possible to go to university. The fees of $1500 USD per semester but I thought I might be able to afford them. I saw a light on the horizon and felt like maybe there was a reason I had survived all those dark times. I applied for a programme in community development in 2009. I paid my first term fees with income from a translation job that had brought in $3000 USD. But the second semester, I couldn’t pay all the fees. I asked for help and the Financial Aid office, trying to be patient. I missed a whole year of classes, but then, out of the blue, I was notified that an anonymous donor paid my fees and arranged work study plus a stipend of $30 USD per month. I studied and helped out in the library and with administrative work until graduation in 2015.
I went back to my part-time contracts doing interpretation and translation. The pay can range from $500–2000 USD per gig. Most of the work was for interpretation at conferences, and all of that stopped with COVID-19. I tend to live on debt and pay it off as soon as I get a job. I’ve tried some other things, too, like food delivery and even a bakery.
Once I was in Mombasa interpreting for a conference, and the more I looked at the place, the more it seemed I could start a business there. There were some other refugees from Burundi and Rwanda, and we were thinking we could start a bakery making bread with Rwandan technology. I put in $2000 USD and others put in about $5000 USD for this project. At first, things were good. We were the only ones selling this kind of product. But with time, the workers started their own bakeries and trained people to do what we did. We started facing challenges and brought in a new manager. But the new manager put the business into debt to our Somali suppliers. I’ve been in Mombasa for six months trying to work out a solution. We’re getting close.
It’s not official, but I’ve now had a Kenyan partner for ten years, and we have two kids. It’s a long time to be apart. My partner isn’t working, so through this pandemic, things have been really difficult. There is no translation work, and I have to pay rent in two cities.
Ideally, I would earn a living from community development work. That’s my training from the university. Some friends and I have started a Community-Based Organization (CBO) in Nairobi meant to empower refugees. We want people to be restored and to be made happy again. We’ve been trying to partner with other organizations to get some more programs up and running for urban refugees, including training other CBOs to become more professional. At the moment, I’m just a volunteer, but we hope we’ll be able to get enough funding to cover administrative costs.
There has to be a reason I’m alive, a reason God has led me to this place and given me these gifts. I think this work could be the reason I survived.