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8 The Death Camp at Tingi-Tingi I arrived at Tingi-Tingi during December 1996, with Bakunda, Assumpta, Virginie, Marcelline, my nephew Gisimba, and my cousin Mukunzi. We had nothing left to eat, but we had two sheetings, with which we built two blindés, one for the three boys and another for the three girls and me. The three unaccompanied children I had picked up at Irangi decided to stay with the Kumu family because they could eat there. Each child who came with me to Tingi-Tingi had his or her own story. Bakunda was the youngest. He was thirteen and came from Kivuye in Byumba prefecture, where the guerillas began their incursion into Rwandan territory in 1990. When war broke out, he was seven years old and had just entered primary school. Following the massacres of the civilian population that happened when the RPF passed through their area, Bakunda and his family and their neighbors had to leave their houses and all their belongings and find safety in areas not yet touched by the rebellion. From 1990 until 1993, he had only known life in the camps, first at Cyumba, and then in Miyove, Tumba, and Nyacyonga. Since 1990 he had not set foot in a classroom. He and his friends spent all their time running after the vehicles that belonged to the humanitarians and asking for money to buy beignets or peanuts. I met Bakunda at a military checkpoint at Nyacyonga in February of 1993. After the fighting started again, the camp for displaced persons at Tumba, where he had been with his parents since 1992, was destroyed. 138 The camp at Nyacyonga had just been set up, and most of the shelters were still made of branches. The “humanitarians” had not arrived, and the main food for the people was sugar cane. What struck me about Bakunda was his relative cleanliness in comparison to the other boys, and his sweet expression. We liked each other immediately. Every time that my car arrived at the roadblock, he would come running. He never asked me for money like the other urchins did, and as he himself did from the other drivers, and he never climbed on my spare tire, which was the favorite sport for the street children of Nyacyonga. When the other boys asked me for money, he told them to go away. He didn’t want me to be bothered. Every time I saw him we spent five or ten minutes talking together about his life in the camp, his family, his interrupted schooling, and his plans. After a few weeks, we decided that it would be better for him to come live with me in Kigali where he could start school again and where he would have the comfort of a house and a real home. In short, he could learn to live like a normal boy of his age. He had lost all trace of his mother after the RPF destroyed the camp at Tumba, and was living with his father in Nyacyonga. I therefore went to see his father and proposed taking Bakunda to live with me for a while. He wanted to know who I was and what I did, where I lived and what I wanted to do with his son. Apparently he was satisfied with the information that I gave him, because he decided to trust me with his care. That is how Bakunda became my adopted son. When the war reached Kigali, we fled first to Cyangugu and from there we went to Bukavu. Bakunda was a very intelligent boy, and despite the fact that his education had been interrupted by the war, he adapted to school right away. When we fled Bukavu, he had just finished primary school. My first meeting with Assumpta dates from 1995 in the camp at ADI-Kivu. She was sixteen years old and had been taken in by my mother after having been sent away by the family with whom she had fled Rwanda in 1994. She was my younger sister’s classmate, and they often came together to my mother’s house in Byumba. When the war broke out in Byumba, Assumpta and my sister fled together. They wandered around the mountains for several days before being rescued by the people in charge of an agricultural project in North Kigali and were evacuated, along with other students from Byumba, to Butare. When my sister stopped to stay with a friend...

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