Scarred

A member of the Hutu militia dragged Reverien Mfizi's unconscious body to the side of a dirt road. A wounded man's pained screams jolted Mfizi awake. Surrounded by dead bodies, bloodied from a severe blow to the head and soaked from a recent rainfall, the then 14-year-old Mfizi realized he shouldn't still be alive.

He didn't have time to process that day's events. Aware most of his family was likely dead, he had to push on. He was a Tutsi amidst the Rwandan Genocide.

He only survived because the Hutu militia, which killed the four others he was fleeing with, assumed him dead.

He later discovered he was the only survivor of his seven-member household.

Distracted by the older Tutsis who were capable of fighting back, the militia members must have "forgot to finish me off," Mfizi said, while reflecting on the horrors now 18 years in the past.

Mfizi, now a 33-year-old political science Ph.D. student at UB, is left with a scar that stretches from his temple to behind his ear on the left side of his head. His matted black hair conceals the physical evidence of what he has endured. With a stoic demeanor and conscious effort to remain strong for his family, most people - including the students and colleagues he encounters as a teaching assistant - know little of his painful past.

Mfizi came to America in 2000 after being awarded a scholarship designated for refugees. The father of three has built a new life. But he will never be able to separate himself from the Rwandan Genocide; it's the reason he studies political science.

He looks to higher education to help him make sense of his war-torn tale of survival. He knows he will probably never find the answers to satisfy his questions. No matter how many years pass or how many miles he is from his homeland, a part of Mfizi will always be back in Rwanda.

"You've escaped something or not really anything at all," he said. "I've always boasted myself [to be] this strong person who wanted to escape this past, but I can't get rid of it. It always comes around and goes back again, but I have really pushed so hard. At the end of the day, you've seen that past and you're revolving around it. You live it."

Rwanda, located in East Africa, was a hotbed of ethnic tension for decades. The Hutus and Tutsis - though they speak the same language, live in the same area and follow similar traditions - are considered ethnically different. Some say Tutsis are taller and thinner or have longer noses. "Really most people in Rwanda look the same," Mfizi remarked.

Tensions first started to majorly erupt in 1959, when Hutus held riots and killed over 20,000 Tutsis. Tutsis were regarded as the higher class by the then in-power Belgians, which enraged many Hutus.

In 1962, Rwanda became independent. The Hutus took power and the Tutsi minority became Rwanda's scapegoat for every crisis in the following decades.

April 6, 1994 seemed like a normal day for Mfizi. It was a Wednesday. He went to school, where he was typically taunted and called names like "traitor" and "cockroach" by Hutu children.

He went through the same motions he did every day. He came straight home after primary school - as a Tutsi in his home city of Kigali, you were in your home by 5 p.m., Mfizi said. As soon as the sun started going down, Tutsis stayed indoors. They kept to themselves.

Stay quiet. Shut up. Don't get involved in politics. Don't stay out late.

If Tutsis didn't follow those guidelines, they were killed, Mfizi explained.

But the rules he became familiar with didn't apply once the president of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana, was killed that day in April.

Violence, death and murder surrounded Mfizi. So when the president's plane was shot down above the Kigali airport - only a few miles from Mfizi's home - the teenager didn't know anything unusual happened. He slept through the night.

Gunfire was commonplace. Mfizi was almost immune to the sound a grenade made when it exploded. It stirred him enough to acknowledge it and be thankful the grenade didn't land in his family's home.

The city around him was chaotic. At first, April 6 didn't seem any different to him.

His mother, however, was concerned with the constant gunfire and explosions that night. Mfizi said she let him sleep as she stayed up and worried about what was going on in their city. She was unaware of how serious things were until early the next morning.

"We turned on the radio and heard exact news [of the president's death]," Mfizi said. "Typical blame we were all familiar with: 'Tutsis killed the president. Tutsis have to be killed.'"

Hutus often said Tutsis killed Habyarimana, but it is also argued Hutu extremists coordinated the attack to set the stage for their already planned Tutsi genocide. The culprit is still contested. But regardless of that uncertainty, between April and June 1994, an estimated 800,000 Rwandans were killed.

By 10 a.m., Mfizi witnessed his world starting to break apart. Hutu militias were pouring into cities, setting up roadblocks and killing Tutsis.

"It was like, you know what - I may have skipped this death for a long time, but this is my time," Mfizi said. "So we fled. We ran away from the house because [the militias] were killing people house to house."

He and his household of seven took cover in the school where his mother taught, a 40-minute walk from his home. All of the city's terrified citizens, even some Hutus, gathered at the school. But when it became clear Tutsis were the target, some Hutu families started heading back to their homes.

While Hutu families started to leave, news of slaughtered Tutsis spread through the school.

Mfizi and others - the names of those murdered still fresh in their minds - sat in fear.

"We were waiting to be killed," he said.

After bunkering down for at least two days, the militia came.

"It started out with a few people in military uniforms," Mfizi explained. "They started lying to us - 'We're here to protect you' - but it was a lie. It was just to make sure we all gather together, everyone come together in that sense of security and then just start the whole thing.

"Around 3 o'clock, that's when we saw vehicles with militia and people with machetes and guns and spears and grenades. That's when everything really started. They started killing."

Mfizi can still feel the dread and hear his mother's voice drifting through the terrorized crowd. As the militia began attacking with grenades and hacking at people with machetes, Mfizi's mother was lost in the panic. She called out for him. She struggled to keep her family together. Mfizi had no choice but to run away from the slaughter.

"It's the image of my mother that never goes away," he said.

That day at the school was the last time he saw any members of his immediate family.

He has no concrete understanding of how his mother was killed. Neighbors told him she survived the attack at the school and stayed at a Hutu family's house for a few days. But Mfizi doesn't have any closure regarding what happened to her.

"This is the reality of Rwanda. It's ugly," he said. "We know the place where she spent her last days, but we can't get the story of where she died and when. We can't even find her bones."

He remembers his mother as a strong-willed fighter, someone who held her family together after Mfizi's father died in 1991. Mfizi's father was a smoker for years, and when Rwanda's civil war started in 1990, he was unable to get the medication needed to maintain his damaged lungs.

The police harassed the sick man in the days leading up to his death. There were constant interrogations and imprisonment of Tutsis. Police taunted Mfizi's father and questioned the whereabouts of his sons and cousins.

Once he passed away from lung complications, Mfizi's mother gathered together the family, full of children mostly from her husband's previous marriage, and moved from the suburb of Nutara to the city of Kigali, where her brother lived.

"When my father died, I was too little to comprehend the whole process. My mother is the one I can recall much more quickly," Mfizi said. "Losing your mother is not something very simple - especially when my mother was very influential in our family."

After losing all of his immediate family, he survived by pretending to be a member of a Hutu family. It was their mercy that saved his life. Before finding them, he was on the run. He survived by settling in with different groups of refugees, searching for scraps of food and staying on the move to avoid the same fate as his family. He eventually was sent to a Red Cross orphanage that helped him locate his extended family members who had survived.

He turned 15 on May 18 that year, just over a month after the genocide erupted.

"Nobody ever celebrated birthdays [during the genocide]," Mfizi said. "I didn't even know if I'd survive."

Mfizi lived on the streets for five months prior to the orphanage. The family that was hiding him decided to flee Rwanda, and taking Mfizi along was too risky.

The orphanage allowed him to relate to other survivors who had also lost their immediate families.

"Some people when you tell them this - in America - that you're the only one left, they say: 'Oh that's so sad,'" Mfizi said. "But in Rwanda, everyone has lost people to the extent you cannot even think of; you cannot imagine about the suffering of people."

His story isn't rare in Rwanda.

He still struggles with accepting the loss of his mother. He has no grave to mourn; that void is one of his heaviest burdens.

But the tragedy drives his academic work. His mother and father were both teachers, and that's something that stays with him while he instructs recitations or works with students. He remembers the mentor his mother served as to many children during her time as a countryside schoolteacher. Mfizi questions if his desire to become a college professor is a way to stay connected with his late parents.

The content of what he studies echoes his past. Mfizi focuses on civil wars and totalitarian regimes.

He questions why this happened to him and to Rwanda in general, but he hopes to get answers little by little through academics. He wants to understand how politics shape peoples' minds.

He hopes to heal himself.

"Now I'm a grown up, but I can't get over the experience," Mfizi said. "I have tried to be methodic about it, and one way of understanding things is being methodic and going through the experience of learning. That's how I see my whole experience with studying civil war."

He works hard for the family he has put together in America. He and his wife Christine have been married since 2006. He is now a proud father of three children - two daughters, one who is 1 year old, and the other who was born this September and a son who is 6 years old.

Mfizi came to America in 2000 because he won a scholarship from La Roche College in Pittsburgh. The college has a special program set up for refugees. His wife also came to America from Rwanda under the same undergraduate scholarship.

The professors he works with at UB describe him as an amazing student and an incredible family man. They're amazed he is able to balance all he does.

"He has an adorable little boy who's really into dinosaurs," said Michelle Benson, an associate professor of political science. "To be able to have gone through what he's gone through and do what he's doing now, especially with the added responsibility of a family, it's really a testament to his strength of character and intellect."

Eric Hanson, a fifth-year graduate student in political science, shares an office with Mfizi. As a newlywed, Hanson is just learning how to balance marriage with his studies - he struggles to even imagine the addition of three young kids.

"Being a graduate student and having a family has got to be difficult," Hanson said. "It has to be. There is no way it could be easier than the life of a bachelor."

Benson and Dr. Claude Welch, a SUNY distinguished service professor, work with Mfizi because he is a teaching assistant in their political science classes. They are continually impressed by his dedication and ideas.

Welch thinks Mfizi's experiences add a lot to the classroom.

"He can bring the reality of life as a person who is trying to maintain his cultural heritage in a very different land," Welch said.

Mfizi has been back to Rwanda twice since leaving. He has witnessed the once small capital city start to transform into a business-oriented city, with new buildings being constructed. He hopes he can take his whole family to Rwanda this summer, but only if he is able to find affordable plane tickets.

Most people know little about Mfizi's history. Mfizi, who was described as a patient and excellent listener, doesn't talk about his past often. The things Benson and Hanson know are secondhand bits of information.

But there is more to Mfizi than the brave front he puts on for his family and coworkers. He is a man who will forever be hurting.

"I always like to say that I recovered from that experience, but I never recovered from it," Mfizi said. "You can really see that in what I do. I can boast all the time about being a strong person, but look what I gravitate toward."

For now, Mfizi spends hours researching, writing, teaching and learning about tragedies similar to his own past, forever searching for answers he may never find.

Email: news@ubspectrum.com