I remembered that he made a sound-tcha, tcha, tcha-and chopped his hand in the air to describe his sister’s killing.Įdmond drove a Mercedes, one of the few that remained in Rwanda, and he was wearing a faded denim shirt and jeans and black cowboy boots. ONE DAY IN Kigali, I ran into Edmond Mrugamba, a man I had come to know around town, and he invited me to join him for a visit to the latrine into which his sister and her family had been thrown during the genocide. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.” “Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. Arriane told her what had happened, and the monitor was amazed. At midnight the dorm monitor came by and they spent nearly the whole night together. My daughter Arriane was in a very good boarding school in Nairobi, and one night she sat up reliving everything, and she cried. My little Patrick, he goes alone into a room, and he looks under the bed for interahamwe. It comes back all the time.’ The children don’t go out -you have to push them-they like to stay home. I said, ‘What are you thinking about?’ He said, ‘Those two guys who came with machetes. She said, “I was talking to my youngest, Patrick. If they see I’m married to a Hutu, that I have some old Hutu friends, they don’t understand. Among us it’s always tales of genocide, and they don’t like to hear about it. She said it was hard to make new friends among the returnees. So if they’re afraid once in their lives-I was afraid since I was three years old-let them know how it feels.” People will say I’m an extremist because I can’t accept or tolerate the people who killed my family. I don’t want to know you.’ Now whenever the Hutus there see a car coming to my nephew’s, they all hide. I said, ‘Where’s Thérèse?’ He said, ‘I couldn’t do anything.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘It wasn’t me who did it.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to see you. Where did you put everyone?’ One was married to a cousin of mine. “All the Hutus there watched us come, and some wanted to hug me,” she said.

She had visited him only once, to help bury the dead, who were numerous, and she did not want to go back. Odette had one nephew who survived the genocide in Kinunu, on the hill where she was born in Gisenyi. I dream more of my sisters and cry through my dreams.”

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