In the rural unassuming village of Nyarubuye, 18-year-old Festinah Mukampore lost 17 members of her family, this is her story. For as long as Mukampore could remember there had always been murmurs about the 'differences' between the Hutus and the Tutsis even though they had inter-married, befriended each other and socialised together for years. Because of this interaction Mukampore and her peers never thought anything would come of these 'imaginary' hostilities. The events of April 6, 1994 changed their thinking and took away their innocence forever.
"The first rumours started coming in that the president had been killed in an air crash, an accident they said. Only later would we receive the accurate information that his plane had been deliberately shot out of the sky," she says and adds that by that time they were in a battle for their own personal survival and had no time to dwell on the passing of anyone else, even their own president.
