Anne-Marie with her daughter, Celestine

We started sensing trouble when soldiers came and began rounding people up. But they didn’t say anything until around noon when they told all the men to go to one side and all the women to go to the other side. When the men went to the other side, they started shooting them.

A local leader called a meeting, saying, “People should go back to where they came from...girls and women can go back to their places of origin.” I went to a house to ask for water. They sent me away. As I was reaching the end of the road, I met the owner of the home. He looked at me with a lot of bitterness and cut me in the face with his machete. I ran, but was feeling weak. I reached a place I thought would protect me for the day because I didn’t want to walk in the daytime. You could hear people being killed with machetes, being hit with clubs, or being speared.

I went to a Catholic Church. There was a group of militias there, but one of them who knew me advised me not to hide there because I had a wound that would easily identify me as Tutsi. He told me to hide in the houses near a place called Rango. He sent two young men to kill me there. They hit me with machetes and clubs, saying I shouldn’t die in the house because my blood would cause bad omens. They took me to the forest and raped me there.