(1/6) “I was only ten years old at the time so I don’t...

(1/6)  “I was only ten years old at the time so I don’t remember much.  Nobody explains things to you when you’re a child.  I was never told that I was different.  Or that some people wanted to kill us.  My mother basically raised me by herself, but it wasn’t an unhappy childhood.  I do remember feeling afraid sometimes.  I remember occasionally being kept home from school.  And I remember not being allowed to play freely in the streets.  But these things were never fully explained to me.  When the genocide began, I was visiting my grandmother.  It was a school holiday.  I’d made good grades that semester, so my mother had bought me a pair of yellow flip-flops as a reward.  I was obsessed with them.  I remember waking up that morning and realizing something strange was going on.  I could hear gunshots outside and people screaming.  My grandmother told me to stay inside the house.  She’d recently had a stroke and was confined to a wheelchair, so it was just me and her alone in the room.  Eventually I got bored and decided to sneak outside to see what was happening.  All the streets were empty except for young boys with machetes.  That’s when my uncle came over, and I overheard him telling one of the maids that it was extremely dangerous outside.  He said that all of us might be killed.”
(Kigali, Rwanda)