Rwandan genocide survivor has come to Yerevan to share the pain

Rwandan genocide survivor has come to Yerevan to share the pain –

Esther Mujawayo, 58, has come to Yerevan to not only share the pain for the Armenian Genocide with the Armenian people, but to also join the Armenian people in proving that, like the Armenians, the tribes having experienced the Rwandan genocide have also survived and can’t be killed.

“I have come here as a sister of pain. I am here as a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. I have been living with this pain for 21 years now. I was lucky to stay alive. They killed my husband, father, sister and my husband’s relatives. They were killed, but I stayed alive to bear that pain and live with that memory,” Mujawayo mentioned during the forum entitled “Against the Crime of Genocide”.

Mujawayo paused from time to time during her speech as she remembered the horrors of the past, wiped the tears and kept repeating: “We survived, we must live for the sake of those who were killed.”

“By remembering your pain, I am also your sister who was saved and survived,” Mujayavo mentioned, adding that she compares the Armenians to a tree that hasn’t dried, and the small branch of which has given life to an enormous tree.

Esther Mujawayo is a sociologist and psychotherapist in a psychological center for refugees in Duesseldorf, Germany. She specializes in post-genocide psychic trauma.

She was born in 1958 in Rwanda. She survived the genocide of 1994 during which almost all her family was destroyed, except for her three daughters, her two sisters, and a sister-in-law.

 Esther Mujawayo is co-author, with Souad Belhaddad, of the book “SurVivantes”. In the book, Esther recalls her life: from her birth on a Rwandan hill to her current life in Germany. She tries to recount the appalling wound of the genocide in order to overcome the terrible guilty feeling about: “Why did I survive?”

 In July 1994, she co-founded the association of widows of the Rwandan genocide, “Avega-Agahozo”, which tries to help women survivors, in particular those who were raped and suffer today from HIV-AIDS.