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Rwandan genocide Immigrants recount torture, death and survival

Sunday, April 27, 2014

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Marie Carine Boggis, 28, of Dover, became a U.S. citizen last year. Twenty years ago, as an eight-year-old she escaped the genocide in Rwanda by hiding in a swamp. Her parents and most of her siblings were killed. (Connie Eppich photo)

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Editor's note: Today's stories are Part I of a two-part series. Part II will appear in Monday's Foster's Daily Democrat.

By Connie EPPICH

Marie Carine Boggis, 28, of Dover, became a U.S. citizen last summer. A self-assured woman with sparkling eyes, she works as an admissions counselor for the University of New Hampshire.

Twenty years ago, she was an eight-year-old child, struggling to survive, hiding in a swamp during the genocide that killed her parents and most of her siblings.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, when extremist Hutus murdered between 800,000 and 1 million Tutsis along with Hutus who refused to participate in the slaughter, were mistaken for a Tutsi, or were married to a Tutsi. (ID cards identified everyone as Hutu or Tutsi, ethnicity passing down through the father.)

In 1996 Foster's Daily Democrat covered the story of Christina Mukankaka, now 46, who settled in Dover that year with her daughter, younger sister, and two nieces. Mukankaka had a brother-in-law living in New Hampshire when the genocide broke out. He helped his surviving siblings emigrate, starting a chain reaction that brought Mukankaka and other survivors to the Seacoast area.

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This 1989 photo shows Christina Mukankaka and her husband Gaspard Turahirwa at their wedding, five years before the Rwandan genocide. Her husband was taken from his yard by militia and never seen again. Courtesy photo

Boggis and Esperance Uwambyeyi, 49, were part of that chain reaction. Uwambyeyi came to Dover with her nine-year-old son, Serge, in 2000. Boggis had to wait until 2004 to join her adopted family, by then living in Nashua.

Uwambyeyi and Mukankaka met for an interview in Uwambyeyi's modest apartment, the walls decorated with pictures of her family from Rwanda. Asked about their experiences during the genocide, Uwambyeyi and Mukankaka both laughed.

Whenever they get together with other Rwandans, said Mukankaka, “No matter where we are, we're always talking about the genocide.”

“The way we survive,” Uwambyeyi said.

“It's part of our lives and who we are,” Mukankaka said.

Uwambyeyi was living in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, with her husband, 3-year-old son, and baby daughter. On April 7, 1994, the Hutu militia came into her house, then left, saying they'd return. She and her husband knew they needed to hide; it would be safer if they separated. She took Vanessa, their daughter.

“Serge wasn't home, thank God,” said Uwambyeyi. He was visiting relatives outside the city.

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Esperance Uwambyeyi, left, and Christina Mukankaka of Dover shared their stories of surviving the Rwandan genocide 20 years ago with the author. Connie Eppich photo

After spending a couple weeks at the home of a Hutu friend, Uwambyeyi was searching for another refuge when she ran into a Hutu militia ambush. She was held prisoner, tortured daily.

Her voice calm, she offered no details, only, “One day was like a hundred years.”

Uwambyeyi begged her captors to kill her. They had many ways to kill, she said. Being shot was a blessing. Often, death was with a machete.

Most Rwandans did not know how to swim.

Uwambyeyi and her daughter were taken through the bush until they came to a river, “full of dead people, dead Tutsis,” she said.

Her captors grabbed eight-month-old Vanessa from Uwambyeyi's arms and threw her into the water, and then Uwambyeyi. It happened so quickly, the current was so strong, and bodies were everywhere; Uwambyeyi never saw her daughter again.

“I was being suffocated,” she said, swimming among the dead bodies. She didn't expect to survive. “I cannot say I was saved because I knew how to swim. It was just the grace of God.”

When she finally pulled herself out of the water, Uwambyeyi was near the village of an aunt and her aunt's husband, both Hutus (Uwambyeyi's mother was a Hutu), and found shelter with them. When her relatives left for Zaire [now the Democratic Republic of the Congo], to escape the civil war that had by then overtaken the country, Uwambyeyi went with them.

When the killing stopped, Uwambyeyi learned her husband had been shot taking refuge in a church. Her father, a brother, aunts, uncles, cousins, in-laws, all dead. Four sisters, a brother, and her mother survived.

Uwambyeyi found Serge in an orphanage.

“No one can explain how any of us survived,” Mukankaka said.

Mukankaka's home was in Butare, a city in southern Rwanda, where, she said, the Hutus and Tutsis were not against each other. She was a Tutsi, her husband a Hutu. They had a 4-year-old daughter, Gabriella.

People who escaped massacres from other parts of the country came to Butare. Her brother's four-year-old daughter, Carine, came to stay, to be safe.

The radio aired propaganda encouraging Hutus to kill Tutsis. They called killing “work,” Mukankaka said. They would say, “Get out and work.” Still, no one knew how bad the genocide would be, how random the killings.

On the afternoon of April 24, her husband was in the front yard when the militia came by and grabbed him. Mukankaka thought he'd come back; she never saw him again.

That night she heard the sounds of killing. The militia came, took her outside, then back inside, ransacked the house, and left.

“You had that doomed feeling you were going to die, you just didn't know when,” Mukankaka said.

A Hutu neighbor hid her and the two little girls. Mukankaka said Hutus endangered their own lives helping Tutsis. So Tutsis who found refuge with a Hutu friend would stay for a short while, then move on.

Hutu friends took Gabriella and Carine. Mukankaka hid in one place and then another, staying for several weeks in a hospital.

When the genocide ended, Mukankaka's parents, three brothers, and one sister were dead. Two brothers and one sister, Anne Marie, 13, survived. Mukankaka can't explain why Anne Marie survived when almost everyone else in her hometown died. The genocide was like that.

Mukankaka found Gabriella and Carine, as well as Carine's 3-year-old sister Aurore. She has since been the mother of her two nieces, legally adopting them after coming to the U.S.

When she returned to her house, everything was gone, except papers scattered on the floor. She found letters her husband had written her during their courtship. Someday she'll give them to Gabby.

Mukankaka left Rwanda with the three little girls to stay with a sister-in-law in Kenya.

“Family is dead, friends are dead, it feels like it's not your country,” she said.

When the genocide arrived in her town, Boggis' parents sent her and an older sister and brother to her grandmother's house, intending to follow with the other children. But the situation quickly grew worse and the rest of her family didn't make it out.

When it was no longer safe at her grandmother's, Boggis and her siblings fled, taking refuge in a church school. When the militia attacked, they fled again.

For the rest of the genocide Boggis spent days hiding in a swamp with many others, foraging for food in the surrounding farmland at night. Every day the militia searched the swamp. “For some reason babies didn't cry much,” Boggis said. “I don't remember hearing people coughing or sneezing.”

The militia found her brother and killed him.

Eventually the militia stopped coming. When soldiers from the Rwandan Patriotic Front arrived, Boggis said, everyone knew the genocide was over.

She went to a refugee camp with her sister, spending days wandering around, talking to the soldiers, and getting food, buckets of rice and beans.

Then for a while Boggis lived with an aunt. After she almost died from malaria, she began living with Christine and Jean Bosco Rutagengwa. Christine's sister was a friend of Boggis' sister who had died.

Legal adoption was not really established in Rwanda at that time, said Boggis. When the Rutagengwas came to the United States in 2000, they couldn't bring her with them. “No piece of paper said I was their kid,” she said. She would have to wait.