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Literacy programs help the women rebuild their lives, while giving them the skills to earn a living and create a better future for their children and, in many cases, their adopted children. "I'm happy to be here," says Fabrice Rukundo, 13, with a smile. Orphaned by the genocide, he has been adopted by a woman who lost all of her children. They moved to the village in 1997. Fabrice, like most of his classmates at the village school, remembers little of life before. Many of the children are not told if they are Hutu or Tutsi, so that they can answer the question truthfully. Fifty-six-year-old Tutsi Edisa Barakagwira remembers the past, however, and she wishes she could forget. She lost two sons and a daughter to the unimaginable violence. The Ntarama Church just down the road still contains the bones of her sisters and her neighbors. "It's too much," she says, sadly shaking her head. "The older children were the ones who could help me now and they were killed." Her remaining daughter was so traumatized by what happened that she can barely function, so Edisa must take care of her two younger sons by herself. She says that knowing the past makes it difficult sometimes to live together with Hutus, especially since the mother of her sons' killer also lives in the village. "She cannot look me in the eye," she says. "She knows what her son did." But when asked if she would mind if her children married a Hutu, Edisa says, "It's not a problem." She says that while she cannot forget the atrocities, she cannot afford to bear grudges, because it would make it impossible to continue living. She accepts the Peace Village's efforts at reconciliation. And when Edisa is asked if she is Hutu or Tutsi, she responds now like her fellow villagers: "I am Rwandese."
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Updated September 21, 2002 |
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