the adults in church realized we kids were serious about giving our lives to God, they assigned a teacher to support us. They also gave us a room in the mission compound to use for our meetings. We always sang when we got together. Soon nearby villages started inviting our youth group to sing for them too.
I prayed in private now, no longer depending solely on our family devotions. I started reading the Bible myself as well, finding within it everything I thirsted for. Its last section troubled me, however. There I read that one bowl of wrath after another would be poured over the earth, and still the people would not repent. Would I experience such a “bowl of wrath” in my lifetime? It was a fearsome thought, and I decided to leave that part of the Bible until I was strong enough to handle it.
I turned thirteen during this children’s revival and requested baptism. Following a brief preparation course, I was baptized on Christmas Eve, 1977.
KALAMBI HAD NO high school. So when I finished eighth grade in 1978, my parents sent me to Lycée Bideka, a Christian girls’ boarding school with an excellent reputation.
Papa had earlier hoped I might become a nurse, to assist him in his work. But he and Mama realized the futility of this dream when I freaked out at the sight of blood after a child gashed his leg falling from a tree. So my parents suggested I train as a teacher. Gaining a diploma after six years at Lycée Bideka would qualify me to teach elementary school.
Although Bideka was only fifty miles from Kalambi, I rarely went home. The trip, in an open truck with thirty or forty others plus a load of freight, could take up to three days in the rainy season.
These were mind-stretching, enjoyable years. But it was at Lycée Bideka that I first encountered hatred between Hutu and Tutsi. Initially there was no division among us. I made friends with girls from Rwanda, Burundi, and different regions of Zaire, as the Congo was called during this period.
Since five of us shared the name Uwimana –“belonging to God” – the others renamed us to differentiate. I was La Petite Uwimana, because of my short stature. My classmates admired my hair, which is unusually soft. Some of them combed it out into what Westerners had started calling an afro.
When we performed dramas, my role was to sing behind the curtains. Some of our productions were hilarious, although they weren’t meant to be. We laughed till we cried, seeing girls act the parts of wise men in the nativity play.
One lunchtime, the head girl was indignant to discover insects in our beans and pebbles in the rice. “Our parents pay a lot of money for us to attend this school,” she declared, “and this is the food we get?” When she initiated a hunger strike, everyone enthusiastically joined in. Our three-day demonstration was good fun – and the food improved as a result.
Then some new students came from Rwanda. Since they needed help with their French, a classmate, Aurelie, and I agreed to coach them. She and I soon realized, however, that this group was split between Hutu and Tutsi, their antagonism obvious through spiteful comments and the dark looks they exchanged.
Aurelie and I challenged the new girls to accept each other. Some seemed to take our advice, but others did not. Their prejudice was too deeply engrained.
IN 1983 MY PARENTS MOVED to Bwegera, also in the Congo, where my father opened a small clinic. This town, on the road our family had traveled when I was seven, remained their home for more than a decade. I joined Papa and Mama there after my 1984 graduation. I was glad to support them in their many tasks, and I enjoyed getting reacquainted with my younger sisters and brothers.
A year later, Aunt Priscilla invited me to her wedding in Bugarama, in the southwest tip of Rwanda – in walking distance from both the Congo and Burundi borders. Accepting her invitation had life-changing consequences for me.
Priscilla’s bridegroom, Alphonse, gave me a tour of Cimerwa, Rwanda’s chief cement-processing company, for which he worked. As we walked, he explained that although Cimerwa belonged to the Rwandan state, Chinese specialists supervised the work, and some of the Rwandan engineers had trained in China. Jobs at this massive site ranged from quarrying raw materials and making cement to machine operation, construction, maintenance, landscaping, and office work.
Besides the cement factory, the vast complex included housing for six hundred employees, a school and nursery for their children, and a health center, to which six rooms and twelve beds were later added. There was even a resident doctor. I was impressed.
Later that year, I heard there was a job opening at Cimerwa. Determined to grab this chance, I returned to Bugarama.
There I found something better than a job. I found the man I was to marry.
5
Charles
PENDING MY HOPED-FOR JOB with Cimerwa, I stayed in Bugarama, in Alphonse and Priscilla’s house. One evening some of their friends dropped in, so I prepared a meal of ugari with fish sauce. After dinner, over milky tea, everyone relaxed and talked.
One of the guests told me that twelve years previously, he had been studying toward the priesthood at Nyundo Catholic Seminary, near Gisenyi on Lake Kivu’s northern shore. But when fellow Tutsi students were murdered in the 1973 wave of Hutu violence, he fled to the Congo and pursued a geology degree there instead. After graduating, he had returned to Rwanda and found a job with Cimerwa. He was in his thirties. His name was Charles.
I had no special interest in this young man, but he kept turning up at Priscilla’s. One day he offered to show me where Cimerwa quarried travertine, a form of limestone, and I accepted his invitation.
It was obvious that Charles enjoyed walking; he also enjoyed explaining everything we passed. Pointing out a spring beside the path, he had me put my hands in its pool. To my surprise, the water was hot.
We became better acquainted as we walked. Charles said he came third in a family of eleven children. Actually there had been twelve, but one died in infancy. In 1959, his family had fled their home village of Mukoma – on a peninsula near the southern end of Lake Kivu – by boat to Idjwi Island. Refugee life had been harsh, so his childhood memories of the following months were unhappy ones. When the family returned to Rwanda, he and his siblings were slapped and punched by Hutu classmates in Mukoma’s school.
Nyundo Catholic Seminary was one of the few places of higher education to accept Tutsi in Rwanda, so losing that opportunity, at age twenty, had been bitter for Charles. Even now, he told me, his presence at Cimerwa irked certain Hutu employees, who envied his university degree and his position in the company.
Charles said that all the discrimination and disappointment had made him disillusioned with religion; he was still Catholic, but only on paper. In contrast, my faith meant everything to me. I told him about my parents and family, my childhood, baptism, boarding school years – everything that had shaped my views. Although he could not comprehend my childlike faith, he said he respected it.
The more I saw Charles, the more I liked him. A peace-loving thinker, he was something of an introvert. He told me Cimerwa had shelves of science books, and he had read them all, because there was always more to learn. His direct manner, upright walk, and straightforward speech led me to trust him. He was strong and intelligent, of medium build, and sported a mustache. He was also constantly on guard, aware of the animosity of some of his colleagues.
Charles and I continued going for walks. One day, after watching the men and machines at work,
