So in 1994, the president even told us, the people from Rwanda who went to Burundi and we read the newspaper from America, the Americans gave us the message that if you go to Rwanda, you gonna get killed. At that time, we were almost gonna go, so we didn’t go.
So we like live in Burundi, but that man told us, he knew what we wanted to do, so he told us that we gonna stay, if you’re Hutu or Tutsi you better stay where you are, but if you go in that country [Rwanda], you gonna get killed. So we stayed. So in 1994, Burundi shot the president in the airplane, the bad president and some people took some pictures of him when he died. Ate too much, turned into a beef.

Serge: He was in a plane. They shoot the airplane. The president from Burundi was in that airplane. The Hutu is the president, the time that president went in the plane, the Tutsi shot the plane. They burnt up in the plane. You can see the bone.

Raeshma: Because of that plane crash, how did it affect your life?

Serge: We think if the Hutu know the president was killed, maybe they start to fight and that’s why they started to kill.

Raeshma: So after the crash, who was killing who?

Serge: Hutu was killing Tutsi. The French didn’t come and fight.

Chris: They gave guns and knives to the president.

Sumitra: The French gave guns and knives to the Hutu?

Serge: Yeah, to kill them. To those people who could kill the president.

Raeshma: I know in Rwanda, a lot of Tutsis were killed and that made a lot of Tutsis leave the country or try to leave at some point.

Serge: The Tutsi leaving and after that, the one guy who was like a slave, he said it can’t be like that in the other countries, let’s start to fight too, to fight back. And they went back inRwanda to kill Hutus.

Chris: Two of my little sisters got killed. They got killed in the war. In Rwanda. They used to live in Rwanda.

Raeshma: Why were they killed?

Chris: Because my family was rich. But one sister, her child got safe. One of them came to visit us in Christmas. They live in Indiana. So they’re all rich. But one sister, they killed her whole family. They got like five kids but they killed all of them.

Raeshma: Who did?

Chris: The Hutus. They came and some of the…They take their money, they take everything and then after that, they burn house.

Marijana: What happened to poor people?

Chris: They burned the house. They killed them. Some of them go inside the holes.

Serge: They think that if my aunt, and they kill her, they’re gonna be rich more. That’s why they kill my aunt.

Raeshma: So what happened in Burundi?

Serge: What made me leave was that in Burundi, they start the war first and in Rwanda, that was there to fight. It’s been a long time.

Sumitra: How long has it been?

Serge: My parents they try to protect us to not see the people killed.

Raeshma: So when did your family leave? What happened?

Serge: We was coming from the war, we came from Burundi and we went to Rwanda. There was war, that’s why. It be like a long time to start the war, and they start fighting in Rwanda and that’s how my aunts got killed. They just kept us away, try not to see the war.

Raeshma: How did you not see it? Did you stay in the house?

Serge: Yeah, we stay in for a long time. You can’t go to school no more. It was only our chance to live or die. And they keep us and we don’t go outside.

Raeshma: For how long?

Serge: A long time.

Mohamed: You sure you’re not on the outside. Don’t try to fight?

Serge: No, we didn’t see no fight.

Mohamed: Outside the bomb is coming up.

Serge: There ain’t no bombs.

Mohamed: No one going in the house. Everybody running.

Serge: Mohamed, where you gonna run to?

But they don’t show the bombs a lot. They know how to use the weapons to cut you.

Raeshma: The machete. So your parents kept you down in the ground.

Serge: Yeah, the basement. I was like 11.

Sumitra: And you’re now?

Serge: 16

Chris: I was like 8.

Serge: Because the war, it began like in 1989.

Sumitra: So this was the beginning of the war, when you went down in the basement?

Serge: No, in the beginning of the war I was in Burundi.

Sumitra: So at the beginning you were 5.

Serge: And all those years I was in Burundi. And in 1992, the war, there was a car that stopped. And we were in Rwanda. In 1989 we were in Rwanda. In 1992, we came fromBurundi and went to Rwanda.

Marijana: What happened to end the war?

Serge: They killed our aunts in 1992.

Marijana: When did it end? Which part won?

Chris: I was gonna say that… What was the question?

Sumitra: When did the war end? What happened?

Chris: The war was finished in 1994. And they just wanted to kill the president, but Hutus keep on killing people until we got off our country.

Raeshma: Which was when?

Chris: We got out of there December 18, 1999

Raeshma: And you came here from Rwanda directly?

Chris: After the president got killed in 1994, we left Rwanda. We left Rwanda; we came to America in 1999. We got to Rwanda in 1995. We walked for one month.

Sumitra: From Burundi to Rwanda?

Chris: Yeah.

Sumitra: Why did you go to Rwanda from Burundi if there was a war?

Chris: No, there was war in other cities, it kept in the cities. In the town, there was peace.

Raeshma: So you get on the plane there and you land in New York in December. And when you said you were in the basement for four years?

Marijana: How did you survive? Four years?

Chris: We got food in our house.

Marijana: Without air?

Chris: Air? We didn’t even see the war. We saw it on TV.

Raeshma: So the war wasn’t happening in your town?

Chris: We used to hear guns in our town, but we used to hide.

Raeshma: So how long did you hide.

Sumitra: So you would only go into the basement if you heard some gun shots because of some fighting?

Serge: Yeah, it was just a hiding place.

Sumitra: But otherwise, were you able to go out and get food? What was your life like?

Serge: It wasn’t good like that. But sometimes some days we were hungry. Some days the war was serious and the war was for real and we couldn’t go out. For a whole day. Sometimes the war was like that and then five hours later… But life wasn’t good; it wasn’t nice for us.

Raeshma: How? Can you describe it?

Serge: We were like hungry. It was very scary for us. We were scared to go outside. They keep us in the basement.

Raeshma: School?

Serge: No. School was over.

Raeshma: What did you do all day?

Serge: We just slept. We was like praying in the basement. We think that maybe God couldhelp us.

Raeshma: You believed that God could help you so you prayed a lot.

Question: How did you pray?

Serge: We was Christians. We prayed to Jesus.

Jesus [their younger brother]: I know how you pray. You go like this: Hallelujah!

Serge: In the basement, we wasn’t playing in the basement, we were praying. But sometimes you could go and get something to the store or to your house.

Sumitra: The stores around where you lived, they were opened?

Serge: Nah but in the big place, they had certain things. They had food and everything.

Sumitra: Did you get whatever food you wanted?

Serge: No, we didn’t eat our favorite foods or anything.

Agnes: What kind of food did you eat? Who’s cooking for you?

Serge: We couldn’t cook in the basement, because the smoke would kill us.

Raeshma: What was upstairs?

Serge: It was a house. Other people lived there.

Raeshma: And you guys are Christian?

Serge: Yeah.

Raeshma: Are most people Christians in Rwanda?

Serge: Yeah. Most of them are Christians. Some, they pray to snakes.

Chris: Yeah, some people pray to Buddha:

Serge: Yeah, but not in my country.

Raeshma: You’re Christian, but you don’t go to a Catholic church?

Serge: No. My grandparents, they are Catholic. My family, they don’t believe Catholic.

Jesus: Sometimes they pray to cockroach. Bees.

Raeshma: Jesus, do you remember any of this?

Jesus: I was in my mommy’s tummy.

Raeshma: How old are you?

Mohamed: Ten. He was dead.

Chris: He was in the body, he looked like a squirrel. He was swimming in the body with Angel.

Raeshma: So do you remember Africa?

Jesus: I was in Burundi. I was still little.

Raeshma: So you don’t remember?

Jesus: Yeah, I remember the airplane. The airplane we take in my country was nice, but theother airplane was not nice.

Sumitra: How old were you?

Jesus: Ten years old and half.

Sumitra: No, on the plane.

Jesus. Five. No eight. Eight.

Raeshma: So you must remember when you first came here. What did you think?

Jesus: I wasn’t excited, because some of my family was still in my country and they weretaking care of me good. It made me sad. But I was happy to see my father.

Sumitra: Your father was here already?

Serge: Yeah, ten years.

Agnes: How about Serge and Chris? They were here already?

Jesus: We came together with my mother.