Clare with her daughter, Elisabeth

My message to my children is: Don’t look at whether one is Hutu or one is Tutsi.

Before the genocide, I had a family, I had parents, I had relatives, I had brothers and sisters; we lived a happy life until the genocide came and destroyed it. Everybody was killed, apart from me.

On April 6, the president was killed, and Tutsis around our village were targeted by Hutu militias that were very organized, like they had prepared this for many years. My family fled to the nearby church. A priest told me I should hide in the head priest’s house. When I entered the house, he called his friend and said this was an opportunity for them to “enjoy a Tutsi girl.” And so they raped me, both of them raped me three times each in the house of the chief priest. He called in other militias, and they almost killed me. Outside the parish, my upper teeth were removed with clubs. They had dug holes in the forest. There, they hit me with clubs and machetes and threw me among the dead bodies. They thought I was dead. I don’t know how I survived, but in the night, I managed to walk slowly through the dead bodies and then quietly through the bushes. But I was discovered along the way by many militiamen, and they all raped me.

Each time I was “saved” by someone, he would rape me and then lead me to another bush where I would be raped again. I was raped by many men. The final man who raped me kept me captive in his house for several days. He would go out to kill during the day and come back at night to do whatever he wanted to do to me. Fortunately, one day when he went out to kill, he never came back.