Rwanda genocide: My return home after 30 years
BBC presenter Victoria Uwonkunda, who fled Rwanda aged 12, returns to face the past for the first time.
www.bbc.co.uk
I left my home in Rwanda, the country of my birth, 30 years ago at the age of 12 - fleeing with my family from the horrors of the 1994 genocide.
Growing up in Kenya and Norway and then settling in London, I often wondered what it would be like to go back and see if and how the country and the people had healed.
When offered the opportunity to travel there to make a documentary on that very topic, I was excited but also extremely anxious about what I would find - and how I would react.
Warning: Some people may find details in this story distressing.
I have lived with the emotional scars of these events in the form of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can be triggered unexpectedly.
Like many Rwandans, I lost many family members. In just 100 days, 800,000 people were killed by ethnic Hutu extremists targeting members of the minority Tutsi community, as well as their political opponents, irrespective of their ethnic origin.
The mainly Tutsi forces who took power following the genocide were also alleged to have killed thousands of Hutu people in Rwanda in retaliation.
Emotions were swirling within me when I landed in the capital, Kigali.
The joy of hearing my language Kinyarwanda being spoken all around me. But also the recognition that the last time I was in the city, chaos reigned, with millions of us running for our lives, trying to stay alive.
Seeing Kigali again brought a mix of emotions
A few of the places I yearned to see during my short trip were my primary school and my last home in Kigali - where I was sitting at the dinner table with relatives on that fateful night of 6 April 1994. This is when we heard that the president's plane had been shot down - a phone call that turned all our lives upside down.
But of all my worries, nothing could beat the sheer sadness that filled me when I could not find my family's former house. After four attempts, I gave in and called my mum in Norway so she could guide me.
Finally standing in front of the closed gate, I choked up remembering the sunny warm afternoons we had sat on the terrace chatting and just being carefree.
It also forcefully brought back the turmoil of our leaving - being calmly told to put on three sets of clothes and bundled into the car for a journey none of us could have imagined.
It was the Easter school holidays when the genocide began
I don't remember any of us speaking or even complaining, despite us children being crammed tight together in the back - and even when hunger hit like I had never known.
On the sixth day, we realised no safe place remained in Kigali so we joined the exodus - trying to be as unobtrusive as possible at the roadblocks manned by machete-wielding militia men. It felt like the whole of Kigali, thousands of us - on foot, bikes, cars, trucks - were leaving at the same time.
We were heading to our family homestead in Gisenyi, an area near the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo now known as Rubavu district.
This time when I did the journey, retracing our path to safety, the traffic flowed smoothly and there were no gunshots or roads lined with people fleeing. This time it was a quiet, sunny, beautiful day.
The family home in what is now Rubavu district has remained empty since July 1994
I found our three-bedroom house, which for some of the three months of the genocide sheltered about 40 people, still standing - despite the fact it has been empty since we left it in July 1994.
And I was fortunate enough to meet up with some relatives who survived, including my cousin Augustin, who was 10 years old the last time I saw him in Gisenyi.
Hugging him felt like a dream - those you wake up from smiling, your heart full. My favourite memories of him are of us running in the nearby vegetable fields, enjoying what to us felt like an extension to our Easter holidays - unaware of the coming danger.
He is now a father of four - but we picked up where we had left off, catching up on our journeys since we became separated after fleeing into DR Congo, then called Zaire.
"I fled alone without my parents and went through the countryside, while my parents passed through Gisenyi town to Goma [the city over the border in DR Congo]," he said.
Tens of thousands of people crossed the border from Gisenyi to Goma in July 1994
I can't imagine what it must have been like for him, a young boy alone without his parents in what became the vast refugee camp of Kibumba. At least I had my family with me when I fled.
Luckily some former neighbours he was with eventually got word to his parents - a time before mobile phones - and they then all remained in Kibumba for two years.
"In the first days, life there was very bad. There was a cholera outbreak and people got sick, thousands died from the disease because of poor hygiene and lack of proper diet," he told me.
His story mirrors mine to a point. I remember those first weeks as a refugee in Goma when bodies were piling up on the city's streets before my family managed to organise more permanent refuge in Kenya.
