Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire

4 Survival in the Camps at Kivu

4 Survival in the Camps at Kivu While these events were unfolding on the other side of the Ruzizi River, I was trying to survive with my family at Bukavu. We spent the first week at a primary school. There was no room in the classrooms, so we slept in the dust of the courtyard. During the night, those who slept inside urinated on us. In spite of these miserable conditions , I slept deeply, something that hadn’t happened to me since April 6, 1994. Fear of the rebels and the militias no longer kept me awake until dawn. The second day after our arrival I got to work. I knew Bukavu well and had addresses of contacts, principally among the NGOs, in my head. I very quickly found members of the Collective of Rwandan NGOs. There were about twenty of us, and later we heard that other members of the Collective had been seen on the other end of Lake Kivu at Goma. We spent a lot of time in meetings, looking for things to do, looking for ways to make ourselves useful. We contacted the local NGOs to try to assess the situation together and establish a minimal aid program for the refugees who were crammed by the hundreds of thousands—the census had not yet been made—into the streets of Bukavu, without food, without health care, without adequate sanitation. First of all we had to find housing because, like everyone else, we had to take care of our families. The NGO ADI-Kivu (Action de Développement Intégré du Kivu) let us use its training center in the village of 71 Kavumu, about thirty kilometers from Bukavu. In the beginning each family had one room, but as the number of families grew, we needed to squeeze more in, and several families had to share the same room. In the meantime, my brothers and sisters, from whom I had been separated since Kigali, had rejoined me. Even though there were around fifteen of us in one room, we were happy to be together again safe and sound. Few Rwandan families had the same good luck as we did. In spite of the overcrowding in which we had to live at ADI-Kivu, our situation was far better than that of other refugees, who lived in the courtyards of public buildings and the streets of Bukavu with no shelter from the sun and rain. They defecated in broad daylight in holes in the ground over which someone had thrown a couple of boards to stand on. I can still see these young girls and old mothers who had to answer the call of nature in public, trying to hide their faces. Once housed and assembled at ADI-Kivu, the Collective was able to begin work. Supervision of the thousands of unaccompanied children living in Bukavu was one of our first accomplishments. Most of the time they ate garbage and slept in the gutters or on the roofs of cars. Caritas and UNICEF, which were ready to put money and expertise to work for these children, tried to count and assemble them. Caritas negotiated with the local authorities to find land, and the Collective equipped it and organized the reception. It was comforting to see these children, brought from Bukavu in a state of unspeakable misery, covered in rags and filth and ulcers, their hair full of lice and traumatized by all that they had lived through in Rwanda, become the children that they had been before knowing the horrors of war, genocide, and exile. To see them play something besides war games; to hear them laugh like children should laugh, without the blank stare of those who have watched their families slaughtered; to see them run, gamboling like young goats, warmed our hearts, although at the beginning many of them hid in corners and didn’t even want to open their mouths. At the same time we laid the foundations of a program for the reuni fication of families. Most families were separated at the time they crossed the border between Rwanda and Zaire. Every day mothers in tears searched all through the town, going from one group of refugees to another, calling the names of their children and asking passersby if they 72 Survival in the Camps at Kivu p had seen a child of a certain age, a certain height, dressed in a...