What Happens Here Matters
Yvette's Story
A Genocide victim finds a safe haven at Manhattanville College.
To look at Yvette Rugasaguhunga, you would never guess what she's been through. Strong and poised, she looks as you'd expect any twenty-year-old college student to look. Then she talks about the Easter when the genocide began.
A member of the Tutsi tribe, Yvette had just returned to her home in Kigali from a two-week visit with her aunt. What she remembers about returning was the laughter. Most of her ten brothers and sisters were scattered throughout the countryside, visiting relatives for Easter vacation. Yvette had lost her mother when she was six, but her father and her brother Rambert were there, along with her two older sisters. They were laughing when the lights went out.
Blackouts were not unusual in Kigali, but when gunfire erupted, Yvette says, "We could feel the surrounding danger." In the morning, they learned that the President of Rwanda had been assassinated. Hutu militias arrived vowing revenge and everyone was ordered to remain inside their homes. Rambert ran but the rest of the family hid in a carpentry workshop owned by a Hutu neighbor named, of all things, Innocent.
Conceiving Life
She was with her father at Innocent's house when the screaming started.
"That was the way the militias communicated with each other," she says. "They screamed to let other members know that prey is in the area." The "prey," they learned, was Rambert. As her father rushed out, "his last words to me were 'I will be right back.'"
Confronting the militia, he was ordered to retrieve his son and turn him in. When he refused, they forced him into his home and, in front of his mother, they shot him.
"I didn't see it. I was at Innocent's house," Yvette remembers. "But I heard the shot and I knew my father was dead."
Yvette ran to the banana field behind Innocent's house. It was there that she watched as the militia captured Rambert. Watched as they beat him with clubs lined with nails. Watched as her brother died. That was the defining moment of her life.
"I wanted to get rid of life. How can you live in the middle of mad dogs? But I saw how much my brother wanted to live and I knew there must be something, some reason he wanted to live. I realized that the only way to avenge his death was to conceive my life."
After finding two of her sisters and an aunt, Yvette, still only 14, was forced to flee again. She slept in streets with no clothes and no food for months.
"We had no future. But still we talked about school. My parents had taught us that the two things that can never be taken from you are your education and love."
Only six of her ten siblings have survived.
Yvette does not know whether it was luck or providence that brought her to America. "I wasn't going to do it," she remembers. "But my friends pushed me. Leaving my siblings was a very tough decision. In January 2004, I left my little world in Rwanda and came to the United States. A land of strangers."
She spent six months in Minnesota where she encountered an historian who denied the Rwanda Genocide had ever taken place. She knew then, that she had to speak. "It was the only way I could deliver the truth about myself and my people. Yes, people were cruel. But other people helped us. Innocent risked his life and his family's lives to help us."
Keep Dreaming
Yvette began telling her story at high schools, grammar schools, community groups, Holocaust and genocide centers across the country. In November 2005, she told her story at Manhattanville. She was the keynote speaker at Courage to Care, the annual benefit for the Westchester Holocaust Center. Manhattanville President Richard A. Berman heard her speak and Yvetter was awarded a scholarship to join the class of 2007.
Yvette, now a Junior, is majoring in Finance with minors in International Management and French. She will become a lawyer and looks to practice business law.
She continues to tell her story.
"Keep dreaming," she says. "That's the only way."