Stories - Helping survivors of genocide rebuild their lives

Claudine

Claudine is now twenty-seven years old, but she was only fourteen when the Rwandan genocide began. It took her ten years to be able to talk about what happened to her family. Like many survivors of the genocide, she could find no words to express her sorrow, depression and anxiety. Finally, three years ago, she stood before a meeting of three hundred and fifty genocide survivors and told them about how she had been forced to watch as her brothers and father were slashed with machetes until they died. She said she had been taken prisoner by the extremist Hutu militiamen who had rampaged through her village, and was forced to “marry” one of the commanding officers. Two months later the man tried to kill her with a machete. He left her for dead, but she escaped from the militia’s camp and found shelter in the home of a sympathetic and brave stranger.

The outer scars have healed with time, but the inner trauma only surfaced when she had the courage to put her experiences into words. Suddenly, she said, the huge burden was lifted from her shoulders. She realised she was not alone and that it helped to talk. She also knew she wanted to help other survivors.

Now Claudine is part of a training programme run by Network for Africa’s volunteer psychologists and psychiatrists. She is one of dozens of women who wish to be able to offer other genocide survivors the psychological support they need.

Rwanda is a poor country with limited resources, and there are too few professionally qualified psychotherapists to begin to address the enormous legacy of the genocide. Network for Africa brings professionals to Rwanda to provide courses in the techniques of psychotherapy. It would be inappropriate for volunteers from Europe or North America to do one-on-one counselling in Rwanda. However, by training local women in psychotherapy, it is possible to reach rural people who could never afford to travel to the capital, Kigali.