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Sunday, September 24, 2000
By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer with pictures by Martha Rial, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Staff Photographer
Domina Uwamaliga's life has been a macabre Cinderella story. Today, she is a vivacious 16-year-old with fashionably close-cropped hair, wearing a bright coral T-shirt and jeans, whose pretty face can go from wistful to indignant to merry in the quick changes typical of a teen-age girl.
But that energy and hope are astonishing in light of what she has experienced.
Over a five-year span, Domina lost her home and family, slaved at strenuous daily chores while never having enough to eat, and resigned herself to certain death. All this while she walked more than 1,000 miles, equivalent to the distance from Pittsburgh to Oklahoma City.
Domina, a Tutsi, was 10 years old when the genocide began.
She had been visiting an aunt during a school vacation and fled with those relatives when the killing started in their village. They went to a nearby town and holed up in the home of a Hutu family, she said, but they knew it would be only a matter of time before their hosts gave them up to the genocidaires -- the wave of killers spreading through Rwanda.
Domina found out that her immediate family had also made its way to this village, staying in a school with others who had run for their lives. She found her grandmother, mother and nine siblings. Her father, she learned, probably had been killed during the earliest days of the genocide along with thousands of others in their hometown church in Nyamata.
Domina told her family how much she wanted to stay with them.
"Go!," her grandmother insisted. "Go away because maybe you'll survive." Domina reluctantly obeyed.
She was on her way back to her aunt's family when the genocidaires began their murderous assault on the village. From a distance, she heard grenades explode at the school where she had last seen her mother, grandmother and brothers and sisters. The small girl scampered through the ranks of attacking soldiers, only to find that they had already laid waste to her previous refuge. With her cousins and other terrified Tutsis, Domina fled into the swamp.
She remembers the arrival of dusks and dawns, but she doesn't know how long she was there. People who ventured out of the swamp in search of better shelter or food were inevitably caught and killed by genocidaires wielding machetes or large knives called pangas.
In the swamp, the top layers of her skin blistered and chafed off in the inhospitable conditions, exposing the raw pink flesh underneath. Remembering that, she giggled. It made her look like a "muzungu," she said -- the Swahili word for a white person.
She also laughed when she was asked about being hungry.
"Don't talk about hunger," she said through a translator. "It was more than being hungry. We were depending on water, only water."
The unrelenting hunger and growing resignation eventually forced her and many others to leave the swamp, Domina recalled.
"After all, we are going to die," they thought. "We better get out and they can kill us."
The militia were ready to oblige them. When they came out on a river's shore, she was among a large group of people who were ordered to lie down on their stomachs in a line, heads toward the water. The genocidaires went about their macabre work with machetes and pangas, methodically moving down the line.
Click to a map tracing Domina's long road to return home.
The little girl could hear the knives coming closer. Terrified, she jumped up and moved further down the row, huddling in the middle of the group once more. Again and again, she leapfrogged over the others.
Domina, finally, was the last one alive. She stood up.
A man hit her in the back with the flat surface of the panga. She began to cry and then to beg for her life.
A voice called out, "Stop! Don't kill her."
Another genocidaire decided on the spot to spare her so Domina could be a servant to him, his wife and infant.
For the next month, he continued his deadly work while Domina began a daily regimen of fetching water and firewood, cooking and cleaning, and being beaten, often without explanation. The man's wife would revile her as a snake for her "cunning" ability to survive.
Meanwhile, an army of Rwandan expatriates had fought its way to the capital of Kigali and ousted the genocidal government. Domina's "protector" thus became one of the hunted. He took her and his family into the Democratic Republic of the Congo, west of Rwanda, where they became refugees. Domina began pretending to be a Hutu to escape the threat that any Tutsi would face in the refugee region.
The family built her a tiny hut, like a doghouse, on the verge of Lake Kivu. Every night, she was terribly afraid that she would wake up to find herself in the lake itself, or not wake up at all because she would be swallowed by crocodiles. She didn't know that Lake Kivu wasn't a habitat for the sharp-toothed reptiles.
Domina became emaciated and felt constant stomach pain.
Finally, after several months with the family, she met a refugee woman who promised her a better life.
So one day, while the family that had enslaved her was out of the house, she piled up all their belongings to show she hadn't stolen anything, and ran away.
For the next five years, Domina stayed with the woman and her niece. Because both girls performed strenuous chores, Domina felt her new caregiver was treating her fairly and well. She said that the woman loved her.
Like many other Rwandan refugees, they moved from place to place, eventually traveling the width of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, once known as Zaire. According to the U.S. Committee for Refugees, starting in 1997, about 15,000 Rwandans crossed the Congo River in their flight from war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and ended up in Brazzaville, the capital of the neighboring nation to the west, called the Republic of the Congo.
Domina was among them.
In Congo-Brazzaville, Domina suddenly faced a new crisis. She found out that the woman who had been caring for her was planning to make a lot of money by selling her to one of the ex-soldiers in the camp.
"You are like my mother and I love you," 15-year-old Domina told her foster mother. "But me, I am too young. I can't do it."
She sneaked off again, this time to a nearby center run by relief agencies for "unaccompanied children" -- the term that is preferred over orphans, since it's often impossible to know whether the children's parents are still alive. There, she discovered that a program had been set up to reunite children with family members still living in Rwanda.
But Domina did not believe that she had any relatives left, anywhere.
"It's me who is surviving, me in my whole family who is living," she told the workers.
And there was another threat to face if she asked the relief workers to trace her family in Rwanda. The Hutu refugees, some of whom had committed crimes in the genocide, might find out that a Tutsi girl had been living in their midst, pretending to be one of them.
But Domina also was sick. Believing she was going to die, she gave out a few details of her past when she was pressed by relief workers.
"She didn't want to reveal herself. She went to the center as a last resort," said Elias Rugenza, an International Rescue Committee staffer in Kigali who traces the whereabouts of families in Rwanda so they can be reunited with refugees from Congo-Brazzaville.
He met Domina's surviving uncles and aunts in Kigali, who were flabbergasted to learn the child had escaped what they thought was the annihilation of their brother's family.
Rugenza relayed the news to his Rescue Committee counterpart in Brazzaville, who in turn told Domina. It was a miracle.
A year ago, Domina was escorted to Kigali by Rescue Committee workers and reunited with her relatives. She found out that one of her sisters had also survived.
Now, she lives with her uncle's family in a spacious house. A peacock and peahens strut in the courtyard. After a five-year absence, she is back in primary school, a head taller than the other children in class. To help her catch up, her uncle has hired a tutor who coaches her after school each day in such subjects as French and English.
She thinks about becoming a journalist or a nun.
Faith kept her alive, Domina said. She talked to God every day during her hardships and tried to convince herself that surely, at some point in her life, she would come across one relative, even a distant one.
And she believed her fate was in God's hands. When her time came, she would die.
But now, it's clear to Domina that she must live.
Back to Journey Home main page
Domina flicks her fingers to get her teacher's attention. Her flight from Rwanda after the genocide kept her out of school for several years, so she is one of the older children in her primary school class. Click to Photo Journal 
Online Graphic 
Domina Uwamaliga, 16, is safe now and back with her family after an astounding escape from near death and a circuitous journey of more than 1,000 miles. Her desire to tell her story makes her think about becoming a journalist; the faith that kept her going makes her think about becoming a nun. Click to Photo Journal.