Nicholas Rutikanga

I was born in Belgium on December 6, 1988. My mother was working there for Sabena Airlines as an airline hostess. I have no memory of my father. My mother told me that he was Gabonese by nationality. He died in a car accident soon after my birth.

When I was 2 years old, my mother and I returned to Rwanda to live with my maternal grandparents on their farm. My grandfather made a good living as a farmer and we were considered the wealthiest family in our locality. I often overheard my mother and grandparents talking about the discrimination in Rwanda and the fact that we were hated by our Hutu neighbors. Many of them believed that my grandfather was a spy for the RPF [the Rwanda Patriotic Front, a party generally considered to be the Tutsi opposition party]. I also recall overhearing my grandfather's employees saying that given the opportunity to do so, they would kill him. Being as young as I was then, I did not fully grasp the severity of these words and thought that I would simply kill them if they killed my grandfather.

Things became more serious when thieves began to invade the farm. They ordered my grandfather to give them money and threatened to kill us all if he did not comply with their demands. During this time my mother gave birth to my younger brother. I did not know who his father was, but I remember having a close relationship with my mother. We would often talk alone and late into the night. One day, when I was about 7 years old and visiting the market with my mother, an Interhamwe soldier(the Hutu militia arm) armed with a knife approached my mother and I and forced us to a house and into a small room. I was left in that room with an attending guard, while my mother was forced into the adjoining room with several other soldiers. She screamed for me to help her but I was denied access to the room. I eventually managed to peep into the room and saw my mother being gang-raped by four soldiers. I tried to enter the room to help her but was beaten so severely that I still occasionally experience pains in my side. My mother was eventually pushed outside, and we went home. My mother instructed me not to tell anyone what had happened, especially my grandfather. For quite a while after this incident, neither my mother nor I left the house. This aroused my grandmother's curiosity but despite her incessant questioning, we did not tell her what had happened.

After a few months, my mother tried to find a way to return to Belgium, but the people at the airline and the embassy made it very difficult. They claimed that my mother intended to send her sons to the RPF's training headquarters. Instead, my mother decided to move all three of us to Kigali. She worked as a nanny for a European family, yet was subject to general hostility and often returned home unhappy.

Around this time, my mother found a tutor to teach me at home in the evenings. He was an RPF soldier and spy, and often talked with me about the domestic political situation. He was also the first teacher to get me interested in mathematics. In 1994, my second year of primary school, the president was killed and the genocide officially started. The radio instructed families to remain in their homes, and none of us left the house for several days. Shortly after the chaos started, a neighbor who my mom had helped on a number of occasions and who had a friend in the Interhamwe, came to tell her that my tutor and his family had been killed. This friend also said that everyone who had been acquainted with him was on an Interhamwe hit list. My mother was supposedly number 4.

That night, as we listened to the gunshots and screaming, my mother decided to take us to the house of the family my mother worked for. Being European, they had already been evacuated from the country but there were still guards on the premises to look after the family's property. The guards agreed to let us in and hide us for a while. After four days, and while we were praying, we overheard two soldiers asking the guards about a woman and her two sons. The soldiers knew that we were on the premises. They threatened to kill the guards if they did not provide this information.

The soldiers then forced their way into the room where we were kneeling in prayer and watched us for some time. They asked my mother to pray for them before they killed us. My mother refused to do so, which angered one of the soldiers greatly. At this point my mother offered to bless them, but to do so from the living room - not the room where we currently were. My mother later returned to the room and found my brother and I praying for her. She told us that the soldiers were leaving and would return the following day. We then went out into the yard to find that one of the guards had been killed, and the other was hiding in the dog kennel. The surviving guard told us that he was leaving because he was sure that the soldiers would return to kill us all the following day. At this point, my mother instructed my brother and me to return to the house and remained outside talking with the guard.

The next morning the two soldiers returned with four young men, armed with machetes. They found us in the living room and asked where the second surviving guard was. My mother could not give them this information so they beat her and she collapsed into a chair. The head soldier accused her of wanting to send her sons to join the RPF, and instructed the others to form a circle around my brother and I so that we could not get away. The soldier then instructed my mother to kiss him and she refused to do so. At this point, we heard either a small bomb or grenade (I'm not sure which of the two it was) landing very close to the house. The six men then fled, thinking that there was a possibility that the RPF soldiers might be in close proximity. A fragment of the shell lodged itself in the neck of one of the soldiers, leaving a trail of blood everywhere. My mother was convinced that God had been present and had saved us. We spent a second night there.

The following night we went to the house of a former colleague of my mother's who worked for the Interhamwe. He could not believe we were still alive. He had an army truck with boxes of food in it. My mother asked him to let us hide in these boxes and to drive us out of town. He agreed. We climbed into the boxes and he covered us with plastic packets to disguise our presence there. After a few hours the truck begun to move and after some time, it came to a stop. The man came around to the back and told us that we were in Huye, in Butare province [southern Rwanda]. He promised my mother that we would be safe there as he had brought us to an abandoned house, and that maybe the RPF would find us there and rescue us. He could not take us further because of the roadblocks, and left with his family.

We stayed for four days in that house. There were a few food items to eat, so my mother decided that we would stay put until the RPF came around. On the third day I went out to the yard to get some avocadoes, and was spotted by three Interhamwe soldiers. They were armed with machetes and ran after me. They caught up to me quite easily and asked me where I was coming from and who else I was with. When I refused to give him this information, one of them aimed a machete at my neck but missed and hit my leg. I tried my best to run off but could not get very far because my leg was bleeding. I made a tourniquet with my shirt to stem the bleeding and ran into a small, nearby group of trees where I spent the night. I heard and saw nothing but gunshots all night. As morning approached, I headed back home. My mother thought I had been killed. She made a makeshift bandage for me and we decided to leave that night. I took them through the small forest where I had spent the night, and we just kept walking. We eventually arrived in Gikongoro, where a nurse who tended to my leg drove us on to Kyangugu. While we were there, my mother found a man she knew who worked for Electrogaz there. The man was Congolese. He had a car and took us across the Congolese border by telling the border officials that we were his family.

However, while we were in the Congo, some people identified my mother as my grandfather's daughter. After two days, we moved to Burundi and met family members of the same friend who had brought us across the border. In Burundi, my brother and I resumed school. We were given financial support by the UNHCR, but when the war in Burundi started, we returned to Rwanda. We found that my grandfather had been decapitated with a hoe, my grandmother had been strangled and that five of my mother's seven siblings had been murdered. She decided to return to the family house on the farm but found that a Ugandan soldier had taken over the vacant house. Luckily, the soldier agreed to return the house to us.

My mother then set out to find the family's corpses - which we found in shallow graves in the compound. My mother wanted to maintain the house as a memorial site, but her surviving younger sister was against the idea. She wanted to keep the family home as her personal house. This sister then conspired with a neighbor to poison my mother, which they did. My mother's skin became extremely itchy and eventually numb all over. She couldn't be helped at SHK [a large referral hospital in Kigali] or by any traditional healers, who informed her that she had been poisoned and that there was nothing that could be done.

When my mother realized she was dying, she told me that the Congolese man who had helped us across the border was my younger brother's father. She then took us to an orphanage because she had become very weak, and could not look after us. I was 12 years old at the time, and in my fourth year of primary school. Some time later, someone came to the orphanage and told my brother and me that our mother had died. She was buried at my grandfather's house. After my mother's death, my aunt used my brother and me to collect money from my mother's debtors, and then sent us back to the orphanage empty-handed.

Funds and resources at that orphanage were grossly mismanaged. Over time, the size of the orphanage dwindled from 200 children to about 15 children. There was no adult supervision. Many of the kids resorted to unlawful means for survival - theft, and even murder. My brother and I studied hard, though. Because we performed so well, and because the school knew our story, we were permitted to study for free. I passed my primary school leaving examinations well and gained admission to a government secondary school. Just prior to this, a friend of my mother's brought us to the Gisimba orphanage in Kigali, where I lived throughout my secondary school years, and enjoyed it.

I chose mathematics and physics (my favorite subjects) as my principal subjects in my latter years of secondary school. I did well in my secondary school leaving examinations and was very happy to win admission and a scholarship to the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology, where I matriculated in January 2007.

I plan to study civil engineering and IT. I am very excited about this. My main interest has always been in aviation, but in Rwanda one has to join the airforce to study that subject, and unfortunately I dislike the military. Ideally, I would have liked to become a pilot and work for a commercial airline as my mother did. For now, however, I will focus on completing my university studies, after which I want to help other orphans as much as possible. I thank all the donors who have supported me throughout my studies and continue to offer me support. I would like them all to be proud of me and my efforts, and I shall work to ensure that they are.