This is Jacqueline. She was born and raised in Rwanda until she was nine. One day she went to stay with her grandmother in another village. While she was gone, her mother and father were slaughtered in the start of the genocide, as were her four brothers, and her two sisters. Her grandmother fled with her trying to reach safety. Twice they were stopped and thought that they would die. Finally her grandmother managed to reach an orphanage run by Italian priests where she left Jacqueline, and promised to come back and pick her up. Three days later the grandmother was dead as well. The Rwandan Genocide was the systematic murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, as well as their moderate Hutu sympathizers, in Rwanda, 1994. Some estimates put the death toll between 800,000 and 1,000,000, all in 100 days. Jacqueline is now a college graduate and working on Human Rights, traveling around the United States and the world, challenging people to remember, to fight indifference, and to coexist. And I was lucky to have a chance to photograph her today, and hear her story.
2 comments:
dont know how i would have coped in those circumstances. it's uplifting to hear of people who made it and made something of it and their lives.
It is really uplifting to be in the presence of this wonderful young woman.
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