The 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi left behind ruin and despair. A million people lost their lives in three months, and some who survived lost their identity and family links. The aftermath presented harsh realities.

As the killings engulfed Rwanda, many families were separated, with some toddlers found suckling on their dead mothers’ breasts and rescued by RPA soldiers.

These children, locally known as "sans identite", French for ‘those without identity’, are now grown. However, they are living without roots or branches, men and women without a past.

Claudine Uwamahoro doesn’t know exactly how old she is, but she chose 28 as the age to work with.

The earliest memory she has is of lying alongside many people in the bush, who in her young mind she thought were sleeping. Along came three soldiers who said, “They are all dead”. On hearing a child crying, they came over to where she was.

Uwamahoro remembers being taken into a settlement that was probably a camp with many people.

Other memories before that event are blurry, they come like dreams, lodged somewhere in her consciousness, fragments of her past life that she can’t piece together.

Uwamahoro estimates that she was about one and a half or two years old when the soldiers separated her from her dead mother’s body, as she was told.

From the camp she was taken to an orphanage in Gahini, in Rwanda’s Eastern Province, not far from where she was found. She says it seems like her life began there, and anything before that was a dream. She remembers feeling extremely thirsty at night, and crying a lot, and being given milk to drink.

At this point she had no name. The lady in whose care she was put under named her Uwamahoro Claudine (the peaceful one), when she had already started school.

She says that at the orphanage, some children were claimed by relatives or parents. But no one came for her.

In 1999, the remaining children were integrated into local families. She was taken in by a family that lived in Nasho in the Eastern province, along with a boy, Kayezu Jerome, who had also lived at the orphanage.

Life in the new home was difficult. The family that took them in had been promised steady money for upkeep, but after a while the support from the government dried up and they took out their frustrations on the children.

“We were thoroughly mistreated. I remember during one of the many beatings, our mother said she will beat me any way she wants because no one will come asking for me,” Uwamahoro said.

She longing for love, but all she got were reminders that she was all alone.

In 2004, the foster family sent her away. Kayezu, her foster brother, had been sent away the year before.

Not knowing where to go or what to do, the 12-year-old Uwamahoro was taken in by a neighbour where she spent the night. The following day, the neighbour told her she would take her to Kigali and find her a family to stay with.

However, the neighbour’s plan was to sell her to a family in Kigali as an unpaid domestic worker.

“When we reached Kigali, the neighbour asked to be paid Rwf6,000 ($6.4), but the family said they only had Rfw4,000 ($4.3) and would give her the balance later. They also complained that I looked too young to work,” she says.

Uwamahoro worked there for two years. One day she left even though she had nowhere to go. A man approached her and asked where she was going. She explained her predicament, and he took her to his home. The man, Biseruka Theoneste, treated her as his child, and enrolled her in school. She lived with the family until she finished Senior Six.

ALL ALONE

“Being an orphan is a terrible life, but knowing that you have no one connected to you in the whole world is an indescribably painful reality,” she says. “What makes it even worse is the lack of closure, thinking that my family could be out there kills me, but that thought also feeds me with hope.”

In one of the fragmented memories of her life before, she remembers being baptised, and the name of her godmother was Rose. Her mind also pulls up a foggy image of a water body not far from their home, and her mother, dark with long natural hair, dressed in kitenge coming home carrying a hoe, and lifting her up. She has no memory of her father or siblings.

Uwamahoro has followed multiple leads in vain. One day, after an announcement was made in church that she was looking for her family, and she mentioned her godmother Rose, a woman named Rose approached her. However, it was a false lead.

One time a man told Uwamahoro that she resembled his wife. When she met his wife and narrated her story, they decided to take her into their home in Kagugu, where she lives now.

She later joined an association called CCMES, made up of 78 people who lost contact with their families: 59 are children who lost their parents, and 19 are parents who lost their children.

Ukundamariya Justine, a fellow member of CCMES, also has a tale of loss. In 1994, she was hacked on the neck by the Interahamwe with a machete and buried in a shallow pit.

Luckily her husband came back from his hiding place and heard her calling out from the fresh grave. He took her to a neighbour’s house, where he had already taken their three children, then went back into hiding: She never saw him again.

The neighbours became jittery and asked Ukundamariya to leave. She then sent her six-year-old son, Ndikumukiza Deo, home to see if there was anyone there.

“That was the last time I saw my son. A girl from our neighbourhood told me Inkotanyi soldiers were at our home, but I don’t know where he went,” Ukundamariya says. “I went to all locations where they kept lost children but I didn’t find him. I still have a photo, and I hope that I will see him before I die."

Hope became reality for Leonard Sebarinda, who lost his daughter Beata Nyirambabazi. Nyirambabazi was with her mother, her twin sister, and brother, when her father went into hiding with their other three children.

Her mother sought refuge at the Nyamata Catholic Church, but attackers threw grenades and spears inside killing up to 10,000. Beata, just two years old, was found alive, lying next to her dead mother, sister and brother.

Her father later found her in an orphanage. He left her there as he made plans to take her to be with the rest of their surviving children, but she was taken to Italy and adopted.

They were reunited 23 years later, in 2017, after one of her brothers traced her. She was married with children, and was known as Jeanette Chiapello.

Uwamahoro's education continued, thanks to support from the National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide. She recently graduated from Kitabi College of Conservation and Environmental Management, and is hopeful that she will get a job soon.

“I have followed three false leads, but I still have this undying hope that I will one day at least find one of my family members. If it doesn’t happen, I will leave this earth still searching,” she said.