Foreign Correspondent By Sally Sara
Eugenie stands in her front yard, waiting for the sound of footsteps.
Her son Claude walks up the narrow dirt track and opens the galvanised iron gate.
Mother and son embrace. It’s a weekly ritual. Every Sunday Claude travels across the Rwandan capital, Kigali, to see his mum.
“What the world can learn from my mum is love, hard work and patience,” Claude says.
Claude, 24, works as a cook for a wealthy family.
For years he didn’t know about his mother’s painful past or the shocking identity of his father.
This Sunday is special. His younger sister Claudine is also home from college, where she is studying biofuels engineering.
Claude, Claudine and Eugenie sit together sharing a packet of biscuits, chatting and laughing.
“When I look at my children, they are my happiness and I feel peace in my heart,” Eugenie says.
The story of this family is the story of Rwanda.
A darker time
Eugenie Muhayimana is a survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. More than 800,000 people, mostly ethnic Tutsis, were slaughtered by ethnic Hutu extremists, in just 100 days.
On the night the genocide began, Eugenie was only 22 years old.
She was a country girl teaching French to the children of a family in the capital. But her life was about to change forever.
She was held captive by genocidal killers who murdered all day and raped through the night.
“They had no humanity in them … they had the hearts of animals,” Eugenie says at her home in a suburb of Kigali.
After several months, her captors took her across the border to neighbouring Zaire, because they feared they would be arrested in Rwanda for taking part in the genocide.
VIDEO: Eugenie’s son Claude visits his mum and sister (ABC News)
Bodies were piled by the roadside in the border city of Goma, as thousands of people died from hunger, disease and exhaustion.
In this living hell, Eugenie realised she was pregnant from the months of rape.
She gave birth to Claude while she was still in captivity.
At a time of overwhelming loss, she decided to love.
“My whole family had perished, so I said to myself, ‘This child will be my saviour’.”
Like many women who were raped and held captive, Eugenie’s suffering didn’t end with the genocide.
She was on the run in the jungle with her captors and held in refugee camps before giving birth to her daughter, Claudine.
Claude and Claudine grew up without knowing they were born from rape.
Their mother kept her secrets, and she was still deeply traumatised and depressed.
When her children were small, Eugenie would often take them to the nearby Nyabarongo River, saying they were going on a picnic.
“A spirit told me, ‘Go with your kids to Nyabarongo. When you reach there, throw your kids and yourself in the river. Your life will be done’.”
But as strong as the impulse was to end the lives of herself and her children, Eugenie’s deep faith kept her going.
The terrible truth
As Claude and Claudine got older, they had questions.
“It was in 2013 when I started getting curious to know what happened to my mother,” Claudine says.
One day Eugenie decided they were old enough to understand.
“I was scared of telling them the truth, I was just scared of telling them who they really are,” she says.
Eugenie told them about the genocide, the rapes, the jungle, the camps and the loss of everyone she loved. It all tumbled out.
“It was really hard for me at first, because I was still young. I tried to understand her and comfort her. It was really hard for me to accept,” Claudine says.
It was the first time Claude and Claudine discovered they were fathered by the men who carried out the genocide. The enemies they had learned about at school were, in fact, half their blood.
Their fathers were rapists and killers, but they would never know exactly who they were, or if they were still alive.
“It’s really difficult living without a father. But my mum was there for me, she took care of me in every possible way,” Claude says.
After years of pain and seclusion, Eugenie began speaking with other survivors.
It is estimated that more than 250,000 Rwandan women were raped during the genocide.
“After meeting other survivors … I started to share my testimony. That is when I started feeling free,” she says.
A time for reckoning
Twenty-five years after the genocide, Rwanda is undergoing an enormous economic and social transformation.
The Rwandan Government wants the nation to be a high-income economy in the next 30 years. It is also championing women as the country rebuilds.
More than 60 per cent of MPs in Rwanda’s Lower House are women and new opportunities are opening up for women in business, education and leadership.
But the average Rwandan only earns $3 a day and rural women are yet to see the benefits enjoyed by women in the cities.
The Rwandan Government has its critics.
International groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have expressed grave concerns about unlawful arrests, disappearances, limited free speech, detention and repression.
The Government maintains that unity is vital for developing the country and ensuring there is no return to the divisions of the past.
About 60 per cent of the country’s population was born since 1994. Now is a time of reckoning.
The country is at a crossroads between remembering and moving forward. And while survivors look for peace in their own lives, many perpetrators are preparing to return to their communities after serving long prison sentences.
“Our country encourages us to forgive people who did wrong to us. We have to forgive those who killed our families and raped us,” Eugenie says.
A quarter of a century after the killing, the survivors are still rebuilding their lives.
Dreams for the future
Despite growing up in a middle-class, educated family with plenty of land and cattle, Eugenie has spent many years after the genocide living in poverty.
Today she stays in a simple house belonging to a friend, where Foreign Correspondent spent time with the family.
But the neighbourhood on the outskirts of Kigali is changing.
Builders are constructing flash apartments on the block next door, and there’s talk that the house where Eugenie lives will be demolished to make way for a new road.
Eugenie makes a small amount of money cooking in big pots over an open fire in her yard. The food is loaded into taxis and used in catering for dignitaries at community functions.
The catering work is all she has at the moment. But she is hopeful and dreams of her children’s success. They dream too.
“I wish in 10 years to be an old man with kids,” Claude laughs.
Claudine says she will be working as an engineer and dreams of having enough money to care for her mum.
“The truth is, our country came from a place where women and ladies lived in fear, they had no confidence,” she says.
“The women who have lived through these difficulties, including my mother, these women are very strong. I have learned a lot from them.”
“My mother won’t lack anything as long as I am alive. I will take care of her. I treat her like a hero, she is the role model of our family.”
Eugenie smiles proudly when she speaks of her children. They are all the family she has left and she is grateful.
“I feel that my children will get married and they will have kids too, so I will have grandchildren and even great grandchildren,” she says.
“I feel strong enough. I lived without hope when there was no-one to comfort me. But today I have hope and I am sure I will live longer.”
Watch ‘Mother Courage’ tonight at 8:00pm on ABC TV and iview.
