Being patient provides peace.

33 When I was still young, my parents used to tell us how our family had been deported by the government from Ruhengeri to Nyamata in 1959, when massacres based on ethnic conflicts happened for the first time in Rwanda. My father also told us that the whole region of Bugesera had been a forest and that there were many animals there. Most of my relatives who had been forced into the forest by the government at that time died due to a sleeping sickness caused by tsetse flies. In 1965, six years after my family had been displaced and forced to live in what is currently known as Bugesera District, I was born. The hardships that Tutsis faced when they were first brought to Bugesera continued. When I was only eight years old I observed it with my own eyes. In 1973, as we were coming home from school, I saw people burning houses on the side of Gitarama. Many people from there took refuge in Bugesera. Even though the 1973 war calmed down at one point, the unfairness towards Tutsis continued, especially in schools. Because of this, I stopped my studies after completing primary school. I have good memories of the period before the genocide, being with my parents and siblings. My life changed during the 1994 genocide, during which I saw many people die. My parents and seven of my siblings were killed in that time. In the period following the genocide, I sometimes felt very lonely because I had no one to talk to. The genocide took my peers and neighbours. No one from my extended family escaped. Before the genocide happened , I never thought that it could happen as it did. What surprised me was the wickedness with which it was performed. On April 6, on the night of the death of President Habyarimana, we observed some of our Hutu neighbours change their behaviour. That same night, they started burning Tutsi houses. Our father, who was an old man, told us that our lives were finished. We did not know what he meant by this. Over the next few days he ordered us to spend the nights in the bush and come back home in the morning. After only two days, young Interahamwe started slashing the cows of Tutsis with knives and machetes and eating them, and beating up Tutsis. On the other side …