American Dreams

When I was 6 years old, I knew that I was going to die. It feels as if you are in a nightmare, as if you might wake up any minute now. But you soon realize that this is a lie, because you can hear the screams as if they were right next to you, and you can hear the gunshots as if you had fired one yourself. The thought of sleep does not even occur to you. Any sound could be the last one you hear, and you even mistake your own heartbeat for a bullet blast.

Fifteen years later, I am revisiting that feeling for the first time. After 15 years of trying to forget as much of it as possible, I want to remember.  If I am to ever gain closure from what happened, I will have to revisit my past.  I want to know what happened back in Rwanda. I want to know what happened to my family. I want to know what happened to me. If I am to ever gain closure from what happened, I will have to revisit my past.

I drove from Western Kentucky University, where I am a junior journalism student, to my parents’ home in Louisville. It has been three months since I last visited my family, and this time I am after more than just a chat.

On a cloudy Sunday evening, my father sits down with me. He offers to tell me the story of our life in Africa to the best of his knowledge, and I pull out my laptop and voice recorder. In my mind, I am a journalist on assignment interviewing a stranger. I do not think about the fact that this stranger is also telling my story.

“We had a simple but good life," my father, Joseph, began.  "I was an assistant principal in high school and taught math. My students loved me and I loved my job.”

My mother would get a break from work around lunch time and share it with us and then my father would take a nap with us on occasion.

“In the evening, I would go out for a beer with some friends and then come home to grade my students’ assignments,” my father said. “Like many other Rwandan families, we would go to sleep around nine in the evening.”

My father usually had three months for summer break,  and my mother had two. So we used the free time to go visit my grandparents. My father’s family originated from Gitarama, Rwanda and my mother came from Ruhengeri. They both went away to college at the National University of Rwanda and ran in the same circles. They were later married shortly after my mother’s college graduation and had me a year later.

My father tells me that I slept a lot as a baby, even when we lived in one of the noisiest neighborhoods of the country. He says that I was a very skinny baby, laughed a lot and rarely cried. One day after preschool, I decided to go home on my own. I took the wrong turn and ended up one hour away from our house. A man later found me and asked me who my father was.

I said, “Professeur, ” in my little French accent.

I guess it never occurred to me at the time that my father had a regular name like me. Luckily, he was a well-known man, and with some help, it was easy to find my way back home. That would not be the last time we were ever separated.

LIFE AS WE KNOW IT CHANGES FOREVER

On April 6, 1994, President Juvénal Habyarimana’s plane was shot down in Rwanda and my life was changed forever. I was 6 years old.

That day started out like any other for me and my family. My father went to work and later met a friend for a drink. He came home around 8 in the evening and first heard the rumors. He didn’t sleep that night.  Around 5:30 a.m., the crash was confirmed, and my father then knew that nothing but disaster would come from this.

“As I heard that, I walked to my bedroom and hugged you, your mother and you sister,” he said, “and told you that I have no idea who will be able to survive this.”                

Around 2 p.m., my god-parents came to seek shelter at our house thinking that it would be safer for them to be with us. My father later found out that there would be some U.N soldiers at the school to protect whoever gathered there.

We all decided to head to the school around 4 p.m. and seek shelter in my father’s office. The women and children stayed in the office as the men kept watch outside.

At 5 p.m., the next day, the U.N. called the school and advised us that they would not be sending any soldiers.  We were on our own.

On April 8, around 9:30 a.m., my father decided to move us to a more secluded part of the school and then returned to his patrol.  This may have been the first time we dodged death.

“I saw a man whose arm was cut,” my father said, “and I ran to hide in the bushes.”

After the attack, my father came out of hiding and came face to face with the body of his best friend, my godfather. He then tried to make his way back to the office where he had left us. He ran into a man and asked him if there were any survivors left. The man assured him that “every room was searched and everyone was killed.” To my father, this meant his wife and two daughters.

For three days, my father found shelter in a neighboring house and thought he had lost us forever. For those same three days, I thought I would never see my father again. After the first few hours of the attack, as I waited for my father to return, I felt like it had been eternity since I had last seen him. We thought he had been killed, and he thought the same of us and it was one of the most terrifying feelings. I can still remember that feeling today. 

I had lost the one person who was keeping me alive. I was certain that I would be next.  I don’t remember sleeping during those three days, but tears and constant worry had exhausted my 6 -year-old body.

For those few days in the office, the feeling that I was going to die was at its most intense. And at 6 years old, you worry about what it going to feel like when you were killed. Would they just shoot you or hack you to death? Would it hurt when they cut into your body?

I started making promises with God. I promised that I would be a good girl and listen to my parents and do better in school. I thought it was all a punishment and I did not understand how it could have been deserved.

At the end of the third day, my father decided to call the school. Luckily, someone answered the phone, and he found out that we were still alive. Learning my father was alive was one of the few moments of joy I could muster up in a time like this.

My father’s next plan was to get us out of there as soon as possible. For the next few days, we lived like nomads. Like thousands of other refugees, we were trying to get to safe places. We went to back to my father’s village but quickly left after it was attacked. We walked 40 miles to an aunt’s house and stayed there for three days before we crossed into the town of Kibuye, once again on foot. This is where I saved my father’s life for the first time.

No one knew my family there, and when they saw my father wearing glasses, they thought he might have had money.  Not everyone in Rwanda could afford medical coverage, so those who had glasses usually had cash. The villagers were desperate and suspicious of anyone they did not know. And now here was my father, a man they had never seen before, a man who looked important and who might bring trouble. 

They attacked my father, thinking he was the enemy, and questioned him wanting to know who he was and why he was in their village.

They held my father to the ground and held their machetes and spears to his head. That is when I cried out, my father said. I knew they were going to kill him.

According to him, my cries were so piercing that it distracted them. My cries bought them to their senses and that gave him time explain. After they had heard his story, they left him go. That was the first time my tears saved my father.

THE SEARCH FOR A BETTER LIFE

 We moved on. My uncle gave us a car ride into Zaire, also know today as the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we stayed for a little over 9 months.

Life in Zaire was better, but not ideal. My father did not have enough money to support us. My mother got a job doing secretarial work for Doctors without Borders, and with that money, we were able to rent a small room and share it with my uncle’s family of three.

I went back to school and made friends and learned to sleep through the night again. But my parents were not happy, and we knew that we had to leave, since Zaire itself was unstable.

In January 1995, one of my mother’s best friends arranged for our relocation to Dakar, Senegal, and this is when I saved my father’s life for the second time.         

At the airport in Kinshasa, the capital of Zaire, the guards took all the money we had. This was common at the time and no one could stop them from taking what they wanted.  The guards questioned my father and harassed him to give more, and when there was no more money to get, they proceeded to throw him on the floor and beat him. At this moment, I cried for them not to hurt my father and it worked.

“Your cries saved me,” my father told me.

I had completely forgotten about that day and hearing my father tell the story had me in tears once again.

Senegal is where my childhood really happened. We lived in a small one bedroom apartment in Grand Dakar. I went to Anne Marie Javouhey, a catholic school, and my father went back to teaching at the same school. My mother went back to work as an administrative assistant at a Belgian company.  By this time, I barely ever thought of where I came from. It was too painful to remember, so I just chose not to.

Life was peaceful once more, and we all moved on. But we could not stop worrying about those members of our family who were not so fortunate.

In May 1998, my baby sister Jennifer was born. By this time we had been chosen for a refugee relocation program and in September of the same year, we moved to Maryland in the United States of America.

THE LAND OF DREAMS

 For the first time, I knew what real winter felt like and what “chapped lips” were. I didn’t understand how it could get so cold that you could see your own breath in bed. I think I may have slept for three days straight when we first arrived. But this was still better than our old life.

I went back to school and was now in fifth grade. Surviving school in America suddenly seemed tougher than surviving Rwanda.

The kids did not understand me and why I looked, talked and acted differently than they did. I did not make any friends, and I wasn’t the teacher’s popular daughter anymore. I could not understand how people could be so cruel to one another, especially those who had never done anything to them. But time passed, and I adjusted. Like all humans being are programmed to do, I evolved. I turned my losing situation into a winning one. After all, I had been through worse.

We moved to Louisville, Kentucky, about a year later to better our lives. The cost of living was lower, my parents could find work and they had friends there. Once again, I had to be the new student in school. I was bullied as usual and regarded as a kid from outer space. But this time, I was fluent in English and was enrolled in all of the advanced courses. On the outside, I looked like a normal American child. But on the inside, I was a small, Rwandan girl who still had no clue why her godfather had to die.

I think that it was also around this time my relationship with God started to weaken. I had seen evil at its worst and what hatred could do to human beings. I had seen more dead bodies than I wished. The screams for the children and women were still haunting me at night, and it seemed like I could never get away. My school life was deteriorating. It was hard to make friends in Louisville, and I felt myself sinking into a deep depression.

Keep in mind that I had never been to counseling and never had time to find closure about Rwanda. I had been moved from one extreme situation to the next, and it was affecting me. I could not talk to my parents because they had other things to worry about. I couldn’t talk to my friends, because as kids, we just did not talk about stuff like the war. Once again, I tucked away these emotions in a little box with a sign on it that said “do not open”.

I knew that more and more people were still being killed all over the world. I was mad about all the loved ones my family had to lose and how many still suffered. I was mad at God for letting it happen. If he loved us as his children, how could he let this happen? How could he let so much blood be spilled? But that is the world we live in and it is an ugly one sometimes.

At that point, my father stopped the interview and asked if I needed to hear more. I didn’t think so because I was old enough to remember after that.

That’s when I realized that I had been crying so hard during the interview that my eyes hurt. I remembered what it is like to know you are going to die. And I realized that I have always chosen not to talk about what happened because that is a feeling I never wanted to feel again.  As my father told me about the times that I saved his life, I couldn’t help but cry, because for that brief moment I was that small girl again.

My father had tried to tell me our story before, but I always told him I did not want to hear it. I wanted to put those days behind me forever.  But no matter how hard I tried to forget, I couldn’t.  

Today, I am a student at WKU for one main reason. I feel that the Rwandan civil war could have been avoided or stopped before it got too bad. At a time when we needed the world to pay attention, it turned away. For a while, it was hard finding anyone in America who really knew much about my country. The movie “Hotel Rwanda” helped stir some curiosity and attention from the Western world but it was more than 10 years too late.

As journalism major, I want to one day shed light on issues like this. I feel like it is my duty now to tell the stories of those who did not survive, but more so to tell the stories of others. And I want to do it in a way that will reach the masses and cause change. I believe that journalists have more power than they realize and that journalism could move mountains. I want to be able to speak for those who can’t speak for themselves. And WKU was the only school in the country that would help me do so.

Today, I am a 21-year- old college student living out my “bonus years,” as I like to call them. I could have died back in Rwanda, but I didn’t. So every year that I am alive is more of a bonus to me. I lead a normal life and not one plagued by the constant fear of a machete against my body. I have learned to stop telling people whether I am a Hutu, Tutsi or a Twa, because it was those same ethnic divisions that led to the war. It does not matter in my eyes and it never will. I am Rwandan, and once more people start to think like this, that then what happened in Rwanda will never happen again.