no, this is not how you do it,” these uniformed men would say, laughing at the trainees. Sometimes he
saw larger exercises from a distance—a crowd of men running in ragged formation across a field,
carrying pieces of wood roughly shaped like rifles. Sometimes he heard them singing songs or having
songs sung to them. The one he heard most often went like this: “God is just. God is never unjust. And
we will finish them soon. Keep working, keep working. We will finish them, we will finish them soon.
They are about to vanish! They are about to vanish! Don’t get tired! You are about to be done!”
He couldn’t tell for sure which, if any, of his fellow refugees were Tutsis. He knew most must be Hutus,
and it was safest to assume that all were. Occasionally, Interahamwe would hang around with groups of
refugees, around a campfire or a tree. Often these seemed like recruiting sessions. Keeping to the
peripheries, never saying a word, he’d hear militiamen tell the refugees that the RPF, that army of Tutsi
cockroaches from Uganda, was moving close, slaughtering Hutus. They said that the RPF had spies
among them, right here, in these very refugee camps. They should be on the lookout for spies. Deo
doubted all this. The last time he’d heard anything about the RPF, they were far away in the north.
Indeed, the last he’d heard, a peace agreement had been made between the RPF and the Rwandan
government. He figured the militiamen were trying to scare the Burundian Hutu refugees, many of
whom were already bitter and militant, judging from their talk. The talk about the RPF certainly scared
him, because “RPF” was clearly the equivalent of “Tutsi.” Some of the refugees would sit around
angrily denouncing the “cockroaches,” and one or another of the Rwandan militiamen would say,
“Someday things will be fine. Someday they’ll be over, and things will be fine.” And in every group like
that, he noticed that some refugees, usually older people, sat silently with their heads bowed or made
small movements—a slight shift of posture, a pursing of the lips—which he took as signs they
disapproved. He would not allow himself any such liberties.
From time to time he asked himself, “Why did I come to Rwanda?” But his thoughts rarely strayed that
far into the past, and almost never into the future. When the United Nations trucks arrived with food, the
refugees would get in lines, and sometimes they would fight, and sometimes Rwandan militiamen would
intervene. Sometimes the militiamen would inspect people in line. Usually it was the muscular young
men they’d approach and pull out of line, saying, “You don’t need to be here. You need to go to work.”
One time early on, he saw a group of militiamen surround a man in line. They led him some distance
away, into a nearby woods, and not long afterward there was a scream, then silence. And sometimes Deo
saw them pull a young woman out of the line and walk with her toward the woods. Deo would turn
away and pretend not to notice. Later, he would see the same young woman coming out from among the
trees, head bowed, face averted, and then three or four men would come sauntering out of the woods
behind her, smiling and laughing.
He never ate during the days, for fear that while standing in line he might get caught up in one of the
arguments over food and be noticed, then scrutinized. It wasn’t impossible that he might come face-toface
with a Hutu who knew him from Burundi. He ate only at the evening distributions. Once in a while,
when there were a lot of militiamen nearby, he avoided even those, and went hungry. Stomach cramps
and diarrhea had long since become companions, and his feet itched with what he knew was fungus. The
wound on his back became a hot abscess. If he had been his own patient, he would have drained it and
administered antibiotics, but his immune system would have to deal with it unaided. Occasionally he
would find a place to sleep by himself, a thicket of brush, a stand of ferns in the woods, but usually he
slept on the ground among others, because it was dangerous to be seen alone. For the moment, it was
safer to be in a crowd, and if it seemed appropriate to talk at all, safe only to talk about the weather:
“Yes, it’s cold,” and “Wet again.” He would wonder sometimes whether a fellow refugee was a Tutsi or
Hutu, but it didn’t feel safe even to think about that, and life seemed even more miserable when he did.
“Just forget about it,” he’d tell himself.
He moved four times among the impromptu, open-air camps. Twice it was other refugees who initiated
the moves, saying the place where they were camped had grown too crowded. Another time it was
militiamen who suggested that some of them relocate. To Deo, another place was always better. After a
month or so in a camp, he’d worry that his face was becoming too familiar. He’d imagine he had caught
a glimpse of someone he knew in a crowd, or he would dream that someone had recognized him.
Several times he sensed that some of the other refugees were eyeing him. It helped that he was often sick
and therefore someone whom others tended to avoid. One time a militiaman called to him, “Hey. Come
here and clean up this shit on the ground.” It was literal shit.
“Oh, okay,” Deo called back. “I’m coming. Just let me get a tool.” But he couldn’t risk being exposed,
alone, in front of Interahamwe. He turned and disappeared into the crowd.
So when a group of refugees decided to move, he’d insinuate himself among them. He didn’t dare ask
anyone, “Where are we exactly?” or “Where are we going?” But listening in on the talk at night, he
gathered that he was still near the Burundian border and not very far from Butare, the Rwandan
university town. Sometimes he thought of finding his way to Butare. He imagined he’d be safe there.
Maybe he would find refuge at the medical school, or just someplace to stay out of the rain, someplace
where there might be someone he could trust enough to talk to. But how to get there without exposing
himself to soldiers or police or militiamen, and without being seen by farmers who would alert the
authorities? There was no way he could get to Butare on his own.
At the third camp, an aid worker appeared, a young man, who began dispensing medicine to the sick,
who were arrayed in a long line. Deo watched him. The aid worker had to teach every person how to
take a pill. Deo could tell he wasn’t a militiaman. The languages of Burundi and Rwanda, though
differently named, are identical for all practical purposes, but the two main accents are distinctive. This
man spoke Kinyarwanda/Kirundi with a funny accent, an accent Deo had never heard before, so he
figured the man was neither Burundian nor Rwandan. Médecins Sans Frontières, “Doctors Without
Borders,” was painted on his pickup truck. Deo had heard of the organization in medical school.
Deo wanted aspirin, but he didn’t dare stand in the line. He approached the young man from the side.
The aid worker was saying to the next person in line, “Okay, first put the pill in your mouth, then drink
this water.”
Deo whispered in French, “I know how to do this.”
The man turned to him, and asked in French, “How do you know?”
“I’m a medical student,” Deo said. He felt panic rising. He could feel the people in line staring at him,
probably because of the French. He could speak openly in French, because people who had never taken
a pill wouldn’t understand the language, but for that same reason he was now marked as different. “It is
not safe for me. I’m afraid,” he said hurriedly to the young man. “Can you help me get out?”
“Stay here with me,” said the young man.
When he had finished his work at that camp, the young man drove Deo away in his pickup. Deo asked if
he could take him to Bujumbura or to Butare. The young man said he wished he could. In fact, he
sometimes drove to Bujumbura to pick up medicines. Burundi was a mess, but the killing had died
down, he said. The problem was Rwanda. Every road had checkpoints, where every passenger had to
produce an ID. It would be too dangerous to run that gauntlet with Deo on board, too dangerous for him,
too dangerous for Deo. Instead of taking Deo toward Burundi, he drove north and dropped Deo off at
another makeshift outdoor refugee camp, not far from a paved road. He told Deo to stay there, and he
would try to figure something out.
Some time later—days or weeks, perhaps—Deo was sleeping with other refugees in yet another open
field, in utter darkness, under a drizzling sky. Suddenly, the night erupted, like a thunderstorm, a man-
made thunderstorm. Flames rose on the horizon. The lights of trucks went racing past. He could hear
people shouting, not in the camp, but in the settlements nearby, and choruses of voices just outside the
camp, voices lifted in song: “It’s the beginning of the work…. Before the end of the night, the
cockroaches are not going to wake up again.” Through a loudspeaker somewhere, he heard that chanting
song: “God is just. God is never unjust. And we will finish them soon. Keep working, keep working. We
will finish them, we will finish them soon. They are about to vanish! They are about to vanish! Don’t get
tired! You are about to be done!” All the voices lifted in song sounded jubilant, as if they were singing
the Hallelujah Chorus in the church in Sangaza at Christmastime.
For five months, Deo had been living with a stomachache, which he attributed to worms and dread. It
had long been obvious that something very violent was coming in Rwanda and that it was going to be
aimed at Tutsis. That had been clear since the day he’d crossed the border, and from the training of
militiamen he’d witnessed and from the songs he’d heard. Over the next days he heard people say that
the plane of Rwanda’s president had been shot down in Kigali the other night, the night of the fireworks.
They said that Burundi’s appointed president had also been on board. Deo guessed that the event for
which the militiamen had been training was now under way.
The refugee camp started to scatter. He hid among the remnant, for how long he couldn’t have said at the
time; in fact, it was for several more weeks. For a while, there were still some extremists around, angry
Burundian Hutus. Now and then they’d gang up on someone, saying, “You look like a cockroach.” A
few people were taken away and no doubt killed. But soon the most militant had left the group. Many of
the young ones, Deo later presumed, had volunteered or been forced to join the Interahamwe. Now the
people left in his camp were mostly the women and children and elderly. From the accents, Deo knew
that most were Burundians. Some, he guessed, were Congolese who had fled their homeland for Burundi
and now were on the run again. He was now among a safer class of people, not people he could trust, but
peaceful people. Many, he imagined, were Hutus who didn’t want to participate in what was going on
here. Maybe there were some Burundian Tutsis hiding among them, as he was.
Around fires at night in the diminished camp, small groups would sit and speak softly to each other, as if
they were friends. Maybe they were friends. Deo sometimes sat among them. No one seemed afraid of
him—probably because he was so quiet and skinny and sick. He heard them tell stories that marked
them as peaceful, stories told in low voices that would be dangerous to tell in a militiaman’s earshot. He
heard one about a Rwandan militiaman tossing a baby into a campfire with one hand while munching on
an ear of corn with the other, and many tales about the tricks militiamen would employ. One woman told
how her husband had been murdered by militiamen simply because his last name was the same as that of
a leader of the RPF—and, as it happened, her husband was a Hutu. Someone in the group had a
transistor radio. Over it one day, Deo heard a Rwandan official declaring that displaced people should go
to a town called Murambi. They would be safe there, he said.
A day or two later, a fleet of Toyota trucks drove by, men standing in the beds blowing whistles,
shouting through bullhorns, saying that displaced people should go to the school in Murambi. If they
were hungry, if they wanted to get out of the rain, they should go to Murambi. It seemed as though many
of the people around Deo believed this. He did not. He suspected the message was meant for Tutsis, that
a trap was being prepared; but when his group started walking north, he went along, because the group
was his only hiding place. When more men in trucks came by offering the refugees rides to Murambi,
Deo made himself scarce. His group walked on together for several days. They numbered about two
hundred. Probably, he later thought, most were Burundian Hutus who didn’t know the score, who didn’t
know why people were being urged to go to Murambi. Soon his group had left the vicinity of the road
and were hiking through countryside, and the militiamen no longer visited them.
The region was all hills and narrow valleys. It was still light when he got a glimpse of what he figured
must be “Murambi,” a large school set on a hilltop plateau and made up of many narrow single-story
buildings, each about the size of his old elementary school. From the distance he saw crowds milling
around the buildings.
The next thing Deo knew, the next thing he would remember being aware of, his little crowd of refugees
had disappeared, and he was on a hillside, and all around him people were running, propelled, it seemed,
by screams from the town to the east. He heard voices around him saying, “If we can make it to the
school we’ll be safe.” He stayed among the hustling, panicky crowds, until he found himself in a little
wood, at a crossroads of sorts. Here streams of people were coming from several directions, women and
children and men with frightened eyes and contorted faces, all running down this hillside to the valley,
and up the next hillside toward the school. From their accents, he knew that most of the crowd streaming
by was Rwandan, and since they were fleeing, most must be Tutsis.
Deo felt weak, for the moment too weak and sick to walk any farther, and also too frightened. He sat
down by the crossroads. Then he got up and walked a few feet down the trail, and sat again. Someone
stopped and said to him, “Come on, you can make it.” Deo shook his head without even looking up.
