Sarah is a writer and journalist who worked with CAFOD for several years. During that time she travelled to Musha and met the women of Avega East. She made this film about her time there.
Tag Archives: rwanda
16 days of activism: Liberty Muhoza
- Liberty Muhoza
Liberty Muhoza was left orphaned by the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. His brother was also killed. With support from AVEGA, Liberty is finishing his education and has also become a community development worker.
I live with nine other orphaned children in my house. I am the oldest. They’re my brothers and sisters now. I am the head of my household.
I’ve been doing house building today. For me, it’s a charity action – a way of helping others in your community. It’s a way of putting energy into helping people who can’t help themselves.
I helped to build my own house along with other children AVEGA helps. CAFOD provided the roofing, doors and windows.
I was just five when the President was killed in 1994. I didn’t understand what this news would mean. I didn’t understand the consequences of death then.
But within a few hours a gang came to our house. They started cutting some of our relatives and burning houses. They killed all the cows that were in our compound. My parents ran in one direction and I ran in another.
I went into the bush and I saw my mum holding my baby brother. A murderer took the baby and threw him into the air and he was cut in two by a machete. When I saw that I ran into a maize field and hid amongst the tall plants. I sat down and stayed there all night. It rained and I got soaked to my skin but I didn’t move.
The next day I walked to my primary school and I saw lots of mothers and children inside. I stayed there the night and felt safe but the next day a gang of men took us and threw us down a toilet pit. They didn’t cut us or beat us, they just threw us away.
We were in the pit for about a week. We were asking the people who walked past the pit to kill us because we didn’t want to wait to die.
After the genocide, life made no sense. There was nobody there to take care of me, give me an education and love me. I felt like my life had lost all meaning.
I was taken in by a family but they treated me like a small slave. I knew one of my aunties was alive so I found her. She told me all her children had been killed. I moved into her house when I was ten and she took good care of me.
I went back to school but I was too numb with grief to learn at first. When I was 13 I started at secondary school. Then my auntie died and I was alone again.
At the beginning I wasn’t interested in AVEGA. I thought they would be like others who had come, taken our stories, then left without giving us any help.
But they continued to visit me and help me, and I realised they were doing good things – not like the others. I started to believe in them.
I am an orphan and AVEGA is always near me, giving me affection and help like a parent would.
AVEGA trained me to identify the signs of trauma in people and to listen to them. The training has helped me be tolerant and receptive to other people’s problems. I know I’m not the only one who has suffered.
The counselling I got from AVEGA has helped me feel less isolated and learn to trust others. It helped me understand that I am not the only one suffering. It gave me the energy to cope with my life. I was encouraged to take responsibility of my life and realise that my main wealth is to learn. So I must learn and continue learning until the day I die!
I work hard at school. I am first in my class for every subject. I hope I am a role model. I try to do my best so my brothers and sisters in my house can follow me and learn from me.
At secondary school I’m studying human sciences (sociology, economics) business and accounting and interpretation. I only have one year to go. I go back to school for my final term in January 2010.
Genocide happens because of a lack of love. Love, unity and hard work will bring people together and create peace. We must overcome our history. The colonial powers said that Tutsis were not Rwandese and did not deserve respect. This led to many, many problems.
I have been relieved from my sorrow. When we meet and talk together it makes us happier. We show love for each other and care about each other’s feelings. Most of us have been deprived this love. I feel love for everyone and I wish them peace. I hope everyone works hard and progresses in their life.
If we all work hard and put our energies together, we can build a strong future in Rwanda. We never want a repeat of what happened in 1994.
Each year, we support the global campaign, 16 days of activism against gender violence. This year, we’re telling the story of how we can work to end sexual violence from 16 different perspectives – be it from survivors of violence, the partners who work with them, the journalists who tell their stories, or the supporters and activists who fund and publicise our work to end violence against women.
Filed under 16 Days 2012, CAFOD
16 days of activism: Liberate Mukagihana
Liberate Mukagihana, Rwanda
Liberate is a counsellor and paralegal with AVEGA East. She does group counselling and one to one counselling and now trains other counsellors. Her door is always open – any hour of the day or night.
I know what it’s like to be grieving and traumatised and lonely. That’s why I decided to become a counsellor for AVEGA. Sometimes people come at night to tell me their problems; my door is always open. Sometimes, about ten people come to me at once. I want to help as many as I can but it’s difficult. AVEGA trained me as a paralegal. The training was so interesting. We learnt about the law and our rights. We also learned how to testify to tell the truth – not to tell lies out of anger from the genocide. Now I help those who have been acquitted from jail and try to arbitrate if there is a conflict.
Please help people like Liberate to continue their vital work. Give act and pray with CAFOD today>>
Luckily I knew my basic rights, so I took my case to the local leaders.
I wasn’t happy with the court judgement on the death of my son. My son was killed by many people but only one was there during the court hearing.
The man who went to court denied he knew anything about my son’s death. He claimed my son was killed by someone else – which was true – but this man was the chief of the area – it was he who ordered two people to kill my son.
When they killed my son he had a bible in his hand. They hit him on the head with a log. He was crying and kept coming to embrace me, but they kept hitting him until he died. I tried not to cry. I said: “May his soul rest in peace.” I told the killers, “May God bless you.”
I sat through two trials. I wasn’t happy with the first verdict so I pushed for the case to be heard again. In the first trial the chief got 13 years in jail but he’d already been imprisoned for 12 years. That sentence is normally given to people that confess, but he had not confessed.
In the second trial I was pleading against the chief and the man who was not holding a weapon was my witness. The chief said he wasn’t near my son when he died but the other man said: “No, that a lie. I saw him.”
My children ask me what their father looked like. I always tell them they look like him. The younger one looks so like her father. She is so happy when I tell her that. I tell her that they had the same eyes and hands, even her thoughts resemble his.
I do everything for my children. I didn’t remarry because I want to focus on them. At night we have family time. I meet my children and we talk and relax together. The children love this time. They ask me lots of questions. I teach my children how to behave.
Please help people like Liberate to continue their vital work. Give act and pray with CAFOD today>>
Each year, we support the global campaign, 16 days of activism against gender violence. This year, we’re telling the story of how we can work to end sexual violence from 16 different perspectives – be it from survivors of violence, the partners who work with them, the journalists who tell their stories, or the supporters and activists who fund and publicise our work to end violence against women.
Filed under 16 Days, 16 Days 2012, CAFOD
16 days of activism: Annie Bungeroth
Annie Bungeroth films Feza Mediatrice in musha, Rwanda
Annie Bungeroth is a photographer and film maker. She has undertaken projects with CAFOD on many occasions, and she visited AVEGA East in Rwanda on three different occasions. On one of those occasions she made the video with Feza, who describes how she was raped during the 1994 Rwanda genocide.
Photography and film are important – it personalises the statistics. Sometimes the numbers are so mind boggling you can’t cope with them – but a look, or a word can reveal the depth of a wound or the strength of an individual.
In Rwanda we made a film of Feza, a community leader in Musha. She told her story – which was about how rape was used against her as a weapon of war.
Please help us to support the survivors of rape and trauma. Give, Act and Pray with CAFOD today>>
The difficulty was trying to get the tone right. You just want to scream about it – but you can’t have people switch off.
But Feza speaks so frankly, she was so unflinching about what had been done to her. And she said some very important things. Men were free to rape because nobody was going to stop them. The rapists have nothing to fear.
How do you tell the story of a rape? How do you represent that? You don’t want to show a victim, when the woman is so strong and is such a survivor.
I used some very close up shots. I used abstract footage too. Rwanda is actually a very beautiful country. But that can feel sinister when you know what happened there. Ask any woman – it makes your hair stand up on your neck.
Feza never hid from the rawness of the rape or the bigger picture. She’s an educated woman – and now she’s nurturing others. She clawed her way back up, but she brought everyone with her.
Please help us to support the survivors of rape and trauma. Give, Act and Pray with CAFOD today>>
When rape is used as often as it was in Rwanda, it’s hard to make yourself listen to all the women’s stories. But the first time we visited, a woman called Liberate was doing quite a lot of counselling sessions and we were allowed to sit in and listen. I remember listening and thinking “You do need to get this out – you can’t keep it all locked up inside.” You can see how important it is to have someone to listen.
Liberate was trained as a paralegal and a counsellor. She bounced back. That’s the thing – some people will grow, but others won’t be able to.
So often the people who killed your family or raped you live around you. Men have been let out of jail – and they’re taunting their victims.
There’s a sense of solidarity, but then what happens is that people grow and change together, not with people from outside. It’s between you and a peer group, and it’s so, so important, it’s vital that you’re with other people who know what you’re going through.
Odette, AVEGA’s director had also lost her husband – everyone there was in the same boat. I think that’s important as she has the same story as so many of the women she is helping. She knows what they’re going through.
By the third time I’d visited AVEGA, there was a different feeling from before – I could see that with AVEGA’s help they were becoming strong.
Huge numbers of women were raped during the genocide. But it’s still happening. The repurcussions still go on.
How do you ever go back to normal after that? Especially if you have a child? Do you never have another relationship? Many women were mutilated.
One of the women at AVEGA told me that daughters growing up without parents are vulnerable to predatory older men. If you know you’ve got no-one watching over you, it can be easy to be taken advantage of. You’re responsible for the next generation. How do you allow your daughters to have a relationship? How do we stop it perpetuating to the next generation?
Relationships have to be formed on an equal footing. That’s why the counselling is so important – they can talk about things at AVEGA. All the women have been touched by trauma. Many are living with HIV. But they’re dealing with it together.
Rape is a terrible leveller. There are women who have gone through this in all walks of life and levels of society. Feza for example had a really comfortable life before. But everyone has to start from scratch.
When you photograph and film, you don’t expect the women to smile – but women all over the world will come together and find ways to build relationships. I spent time with them and we were laughing and joking – they thought it was really funny that I took pictures of farming tools on the ground and other objects like that and they were making fun of me! If you hang around and you’re not pushy, you’ll find a meeting ground.
I’d love to go back just for a social visit – just to hang out. They were such amazing women.
Please help us to support the survivors of rape and trauma. Give, Act and Pray with CAFOD today>>
Each year, we support the global campaign, 16 days of activism against gender violence. This year, we’re telling the story of how we can work to end sexual violence from 16 different perspectives – be it from survivors of violence, the partners who work with them, the journalists who tell their stories, or the supporters and activists who fund and publicise our work to end violence against women.
Filed under 16 Days, 16 Days 2012, CAFOD
16 days of activism: Feza Mediatrice
Feza Mediatrice, Community development worker, Avega East
I’m a community development worker for AVEGA: a go-between for them and the community. I identify the most vulnerable widows and bring them into contact with AVEGA.
I also co-ordinate one of the genocide survivors’ associations in Musha. I do all these things in my spare time and the people of the area have voted me into these positions.
Before the conflict, my husband was a civil servant, a judge. We had no problems. I was a business woman, selling food and clothes in Kigali. We had a three-bedroom house with electricity and water nearby.
But my husband was jailed in 1990 on allegations that he was collaborating with the RPF. Three years later, the conflict broke out and I came back to Musha. I knew my husband was dead because whenever they took someone you knew he or she would be killed.
I went back to Kigali and started up a business again, but because of the trauma I was suffering and my constant illness, it failed.
Then AVEGA constructed houses in Musha, so I moved back. They brought widows together, started teaching us how to work and encouraging us to form groups and associations.
AVEGA also asked us to go for HIV testing. I was raped by rebels during the war and found out I was HIV positive. After that, AVEGA kept on looking after me, giving me drugs and trauma counselling. Now, it’s as if happy days are back.
We live in harmony, we listen to each other, we help whoever’s sick, when someone is in hospital we visit them. If something is beyond our control, we ask AVEGA.
My role in this community is to inspire people not to lose hope, to live a normal life, to live in harmony and solidarity and to be integrated into society.
I love people who help us, so I will do whatever it takes to help other people.
Help us help survivors of rape and trauma to live again. Give, act and pray with CAFOD today>>
Each year, we support the global campaign, 16 days of activism against gender violence. This year, we’re telling the story of how we can work to end sexual violence from 16 different perspectives – be it from survivors of violence, the partners who work with them, the journalists who tell their stories, or the supporters and activists who fund and publicise our work to end violence against women.
Filed under 16 Days, 16 Days 2012
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