ABSTRACT
Violette Mutegwamaso is one of the few women survivors of the Rwandan genocide whose story is on the internet. It is told by an organization called “Women for Women International.” Violette had to flee her home with her two children, through showering bullets and falling bodies. She fled to a church, only to find the church under attack. She smeared the blood of dead bodies on herself and her children, and told them to lie still among corpses. Violette and her children (aged four and five) lay there for a week pretending to be dead until the church was liberated. Her husband, who had been working a couple of hours away, was murdered in the genocide. Violette lived through the genocide, which is where most International Relations (IR) theorists who pay attention to civilian suffering in war stop paying attention. As hard as Violette’s week on the floor of that church was, however, it was only the beginning of her struggle for survival. In the genocide, she lost not only her husband but her family’s source of income, and any momentum in the Rwandan economy that would have allowed her to get a job with a living wage. After the genocide, Violette took in an orphan whose parents had died. She and her then-three children looked for work, but she was only able to find someone who would allow her to farm their land to get (barely) enough food for them to eat. Violette could not afford schooling, medicine, or clothing for her children, and they were malnourished and unhealthy.
