Q:My first question is: How has the genocide affected you?
A: When it happened, actually I was in Rwanda. On April 6th, when the President was coming back from a meeting in Tanzania, his plane was shot down. That unleashed the killings that ended up becoming a genocide. But in the beginning, the killings were mostly of the people in power. Everyone was opposed to that President and his system. They were after those people. So that is what I am saying about the killings. As the days went by, it became more of ethnic nature. When it started it was the ammunition of all the opponents because the thinking was: “Ok the president was shot down,it is by the position and to prevent the position from coming to power, we have to eliminate them”, that is how it started, and I was there at the time. Fortunately, the American Embassy evacuated American citizens. My kids were born in the US and that is where I went to school. We were on the list of those to be evacuated, so that is how we left the country. We left very early. I had 2 brothers and a sister. One of the brother and my dad were killed in the genocide. When we left, my brother and dad stayed behind. The other brother was still alive but he was not in the country at that time.
Q: Where was he? Can you still travel to Rwanda?
A: He was probably in the Middle East, he is a businessman and was on a trip to the middle east. He stayed out of the country until things started to clear, then he came back. I can still go to Rwanda today.We have my wife’s family and my brother living there so we go when we can. There is nothing that prevents me from going back to the country.
A: In the beginning really the way things were before Europeans came into Rwanda, Rwanda was a Kingdom. It was a country that had a King. The elite at the time were ruining the masses. Like in every Kingdom, they had the King and the King's family are the elite and then you have the masses. Then in 1959 the masses revolted against the King and his elite. The King and the elite then fled the country to neighboring countries like Tanzania, Uganda, and Congo and others went all the way to Europe. In ‘62 the country became independent. Rwanda was ruled by Belgians. Belgium is a small country in Europe close to France. So it was all about Belgium until 1962. There was Independence in 1962. But the people who fled the country in ‘59 -”62 were either living in the camps in different countries or found a place to go to school and escape the refugee camps. Those who grew up in the camps stayed there for a long time and some of them joined the military in Uganda. So now Kagame who is now the head of the country who is also the head of the rebellion, grew up in the camps in Uganda and he joined the military in Uganda. So when he was in military training in Uganda, he was able to invade the country and lead in rebellion and win it.
Q: What was your experience like growing up in Rwanda in terms of education?
A: Let me start with a story I told my kids when they were young because they grew up in the US and they don’t know the hardship in Rwanda. I told them I walked to school no matter what the weather was like. They asked me why I didn’t take the bus. I told them there was no bus. They were very astonished by this. I grew up in a very poor country. In terms of infrastructure, health care, transportation, clean water, housing, it was very poor. That is the environment I grew up in but I was able to go to school. I went to boarding school from seventh grade on up so I didn’t have to walk to school I stayed at school for 3 months and then go back home for vacation and then go back to school.
Q: So at that time did you miss your family and how did you stay in contact with them?
A: Yes I missed my family but I wasn’t very far from home. My older brother would come to visit, but I would also write letters. It took a while to get to them but it was sufficient.
Q: How did your family live, was there a food that you ate often, where did you get your food etcetera..?
A: We raised cattle. I grew up on a farm. We mainly ate meat, dairy, and vegetables. We grew a lot of our own food. We would grow enough for ourselves and the surplus we would sell to buy things that we did not grow like salt and oil. We had to milk the cattle every day, for us and for the market. We also made our own butter. We made enough to last a month.
Q: Did you witness or hear about any violence involving political disagreements as a child?
A: Not really but in ‘59 I was 4. That was when there was a revolution. Where I lived there was not much violence. The most I ever saw was people fleeing the country.
Q: What town or city did you live in and how far was it from Kigali.
A: I lived a little bit over 70 miles from the city in Butare.
Q: That is the extent of my questions, do you have any thing you would like to add that you think might be helpful.
A: What I can say is that when you look at the violence in a country, say Rwanda, you have to know that rich people get together in respective of the ethnic groups. They have their own interests. It is different from belonging to an ethnicity you can see that even today. They use that to influence the behavior of the masses. They try to get the masses to support causes that they don’t know about. It is hard to make a decision between ethnicity and wealth. Because when they have something to share they don’t fight. When they have disagreements they try to seduce the masses by saying this group or that group is against you but the people themselves don’t see that until someone comes and says stuff like he doesn’t like you or they are against you and stuff like that.