During the Rwandan genocide in 1994, Josephine Dusabimana smuggled ethnic Tutsis out of the country as neighbors attacked neighbors and almost a million people died.
LAKE KIVU, Rwanda — To be clear, there is nothing funny about genocide. Which is why it is particularly disconcerting to hear Josephine Dusabimana laugh out loud, repeatedly, as she recounts the events that took place in her Rwandan village on the shore of Lake Kivu in 1994.As Dusabimana recounts the events, she smiles often at little details. You can see her big, crooked grin. At times, when she remembers a close call, or a moment of humor in a time of incredible tragedy, she laughs.
In April of 1994, Dusabimana was living in a Rwandan village, in a two-room house with her husband and children."Life wasn't great," she remembers. Her family farmed beans and sorghum. They were poor. And while it was incredibly risky to interfere – many Hutus were labeled as Tutsi sympathizers and killed – Dusabimana believes her poverty shielded her from suspicion."Because we were poor, no one suspected that we could hide someone," she says.
Dusabimana lived on Lake Kivu, a massive body of water that defines part of the border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Some of the lake's islands represented the safety of a neighboring country. But they were easily an eight-hour canoe trip away. And she had no boat. She told her husband she found a solution: she could steal the canoe and give it to the man with his children. They would have a shot at freedom and her husband wouldn't worry for the family's safety."Great, now you found a boat and you found someone to kill you," she recalls her husband telling her, before letting out a big belly laugh.
"I would be happy to see those killers today," she says."They killed people thinking that afterwards life will be normal. And now how are they?"
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