Nadine*, who is working as a teacher, fled to the Central African Republic to escape the conflict in Rwanda.

“My mother is Tutsi and my father is Hutu, but I feel as a Rwandan who was forced to leave her country due to war. I was 20-years-old when the conflict affected my city. My parents didn’t allow me to go out, but I could hear the cries of the victims and my brothers talked about corpses lying on the side of the streets. The terror had started two months before and already hundreds of people had been displaced to our area. We couldn’t afford to give them money or food and they survived by picking up fruit and vegetable from our gardens. The country was paralyzed and there was no commercial activity at all.

We were afraid that our family would be particularly targeted. But my father was always helping others, as he was working at the health sector. Thus, when a gendarme came to harass us, it was the people of the neighborhood that chased him away. Our neighbors, though, couldn’t protect us from the generalized fighting.

It was evening when we fled. There were gunshots and grenades just behind our house. At one moment, we saw a part of the house being destroyed and this is when we started to run. In the commotion, I lost completely track of my relatives. There were so many people on the road! Even children abandoned on their own! If somebody fell down, there was no time to pick him up, as everyone was running. My town was next to the Democratic Republic of Congo, so it took me only an hour to cross the border. It was there that I found out that my two brothers had been killed.

I stayed at a refugee camp, until war chased us away from the DRC. I ended up near PK5 in Bangui, I married a man I met on the road and I managed to start all over with the help of a lady who gave me work as a teacher. Even today, when I try to analyze the conflict, I cannot understand why this tragedy took place.”

(*Name changed for protection reasons.)