One night as we were heading back to our hotel in Kigali, Ebralie had our driver take a detour. We were near her old neighborhood, and she had the driver take us down the street where she once lived with her family. When we got to a certain house on the road, she asked the driver to pull over along a ditch that divided the house from the road.
Ebralie told us that this house had been her home with her family when the genocide broke out. She recounted the night that militiamen came to their door, and lined the family up in the ditch that was next to our car. She, her husband, and her children were laid in the ditch with guns to their heads. The militiamen grilled them with questions, accusing them of hiding someone and searching for a reason to pull the trigger. Ebralie said she had no idea how long they laid there, as she asked how does one count minutes when waiting to die?
Suddenly, a gunshot rang out from down the street, and a militia member on the corner was killed with a single shot to the head. The others that had been threatening the family ran to the dead man, and began to exchange gunfire with someone down the street. After laying there paralyzed in fear, the family slowly and silently got up and went back into the house. Ebralie said they huddled together all night and prayed, and the militiamen never came back. They left the home the next day never to return. After wandering through Rwanda, then living in Nairobi, Kenya for six years, the family finally made it to America. Her journey had come full circle back to that moment. In her one prior visit to Rwanda, she had not been able to make this visit. She was glad that she had this time, as she said each step helped in the healing process. I think the progress she found in the healing of Rwanda as a nation helped with the personal healing she found.
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