Summary of the speech

I was born in Rwanda in 1958, in the years of independence. Those were the years that the Hutus started fighting Tutsis. The fear we lived through in 1994, when the government planned the final solution against the Tutsis, was a real fear, nothing imaginary, and was linked to the certainty of what would happen later.

The only hope for salvation was to continue to believe in our own intelligence and our own souls. As long as these were there, so was the chance to survive. After the genocide we all lived in an existential vacuum. Wives had become victims, children were now orphans, and mothers were once more women with no children. At that point, what was terrifying was existing without memories of the past, in the absence of values, and it was there that the trauma settled. I turned my tragedy into a guiding experience, into something that would let others who had lived the same terrible experiences reconstruct what had happened, to elaborate it, and discover that they were part of a community. And so Avega was founded, an association of widows of the 1994 genocide.