ABSTRACT
I interviewed Thérèse, 2 a hospital worker, at her home in Gahini one morning in March 2008. She had been working on her plot of land before I came to visit her and as we chatted in the comfortable living room children were running around in the front yard. I found speaking with Thérèse a difficult experience because she had lost her husband and her two sons during the genocide and it was still hard for her to talk about it. She told me of her harrowing experience of seeking refuge with others in a health centre in April 1994. The Interahamwe ‘were coming to take whoever they wanted and kill them. Some were killed and others escaped. It means that I was lucky because I was not taken among those who were killed’. There was no place to hide and she now thinks that it is thanks to God that she is alive today. Interestingly, she did not always believe this. She ‘used to say that God didn’t exist. I said that if God existed he would not allow what happened to happen’. She became saved in 2000 however and she told me of the change she experienced in her life. Since the genocide she had ‘lived in trouble and grief … I couldn’t sleep. I always had a headache … I took so many medicines from various doctors, but those diseases couldn’t be cured’. She subsequently ‘managed to understand the Word of God, I received salvation and it was the end of my problems’. She now has an active role in the Church and preaches ‘wherever I meet people … It helped me and I want to help others with it … It is in believing in God that I got happiness and peace’. In recounting her experiences during the genocide it was striking that Thérèse, in common with other Anglican survivors, related them as part of her revivalist conversion testimony.
