Genocide: How a four-year-old girl cheated death

Leila Umubyeyi was 4 years old in 1994 when the Genocide began. At that time, she was living with her grandmother and two cousins in Bugesera, currently known as Nyamata District. One morning they woke up to the news that their village was the next target of the Genocide perpetrators. So they took off.But they were not so lucky. As they were escaping, they bumped into a militia roadblock. And to their astonishment, one of the murderers at the roadblock was their own herdsman. As they got closer to the murderers, her grandmother, who had been holding her hand, told her to run for her life. She obliged. But the herdsman was not about to let her live to celebrate her fifth birthday. The machete-wielding monster went for her head. However, determined to live, the scared young girl ran as fast as her short strides could allow and, fortunately, her pursuer got tired before he could take her life. He gave up. “Go and get killed by others. I am done with this,” the cold-blooded herdsman said as he gave up. The little girl slid into tall blades of grass that hid her from her persecutors. Blackness welled within her as she heard the man say those words. A few minutes later, she lost consciousness.She woke up hours later, with traumatic amnesia, disoriented and scared because it was dark. But she mustered some courage and followed a certain path, unaware where it would lead her to. Never was the young girl prepared for the horror that awaited her. As she walked on, she found her grandmother’s African Print Fabric, commonly known as Kitenge, in tatters.As she strolled on, she found a larger piece of her grandmother’s Kitenge and bent down to pick it. But she got the shock of her life when she saw pieces of her grandmother’s body, who had been butchered by the genocidaires, wrapped in the Kitenge. Bewildered, she stood there, wishing her grandmother was with her at that moment to guide her. At her age, unable to think with clarity or act intelligently, Umubyeyi failed to fathom what she was seeing. As she was standing there, in a trance, she saw a woman approaching. Carrying a baby, she had deep cuts all over her body, and she looked almost anaemic because she had lost copious amounts of blood. Like Umubyeyi, this woman was also running for her life. But even in her condition, this woman knew very well that the little girl’s life was in her hands. So, she took her hand and led the way to an unknown destination.Their journey was made more unpleasant by wild dogs. Nowadays, several dogs had gotten used to feeding on dead bodies and could also easily devour human beings alive. Fortunately, they reached a medical centre that had been half-destroyed and they took refuge there, together with hundreds of other war victims who were nursing their Genocide nightmares.However, on arrival at the medical centre, the woman got the worst news: her baby had died on the way. She had been able to save the life of a kid she had found wandering in the wilderness but had failed to save her own blood. Sad. That very night, Umubyeyi lost touch with her savior when the killers discovered their hideout and dispersed them. That was the last time she saw the woman who had saved her life. Once again, Umubyeyi was on her own, running for her life in darkness, stumbling on boulders. But fate was on her side again, as she found herself in a cathedral, with people she had met at her previous rescue centre.However, the mob which had been hot on their heels bombed the cathedral and one side of the building caved in. At this place, hundreds of Tutsis were massacred, but Umubyeyi survived. But she almost died when she met a band of Interahamwe women, who tortured her to near death and abandoned her by the roadside. Blood-spattered and almost lifeless, Umubyeyi was not aware when RPF soldiers took over the area where she was and good Samaritans carried her to hospital. That’s how she survived. Umubyeyi now lives in Kigali, and works at Mount Kenya University as a receptionist. She was re-united with her parents who were in Burundi during the grotesque 1994 genocide.