Rwandan Genocide Survivor, Kizito Kalima tells his story at the MSC
By Valerie Sanabria | Published by March 21, 2019
On the evening of March 5 the Holocaust Resource Center hosted an event to hear Kizito Kalima’s own story of survival and forgiveness. The event took place at the Miron Student Center where faculty and students learned about Kalima’s journey through genocide.
“Forgiveness is for your own benefit,” said Kalima, who was born and raised in Rwanda and he was a teenager listening to the French radio in 1994, when he heard that Rwanda’s dictator, Juvenal Habyarimana, had been assassinated.
As a Tutsi teenager and blaming the president for having a curfew he thought that would be over, he remembers how his mother told him, “when a president dies, we [Tutsi] pay the price.”
“In my mind I thought, ‘no more curfews’,” said Kalima. “Sitting in the back of my porch I heard noises [guns and bombs], and there I realized my mom was right.”
Kalima survived by hiding. He was verbally abused and was taken to the top of a mountain and saw dead bodies. He was attacked with a machete and remembers how the “killers,” as he referred to his attackers sang, “Tutsi your days are over.”
Kalima hid in a swamp for a few months as he contemplated harming himself and committing suicide.
He was saved but without a family and at that moment he wished he was dead, “I thought about suicide,” said Kalima, “and when suicide didn’t work, I fled from my country.”
His journey as a genocide survivor was difficult and at night he could not sleep. He lived in different countries of Africa but his life began to change when a basketball coach offered him to join his team and he was told there was an opportunity for him to go to America, where his height, “meant something.”
Kalima struggled with speaking about the genocide for a long time because of shame and fear of people not believing his story. However, he claims to have felt better when he began opening up with other survivors.
As Kalima got in contact with more survivors, he met two girls who today are his daughters, because after hearing their story he could not leave them and decided to adopt them. He also talked about how survivors take care of each other, “those are survivor skills,” Kalima said.
Kalima believes that God had blessed him so much that he has to do something for society and he had an organization to bring awareness and help survivors. He mentioned that forgiveness is the best thing that had happen to him, and that you do not need to be a billionaire to help others.
The event ended with some questions from the audience and with people thanking him for being brave to share his story. “When you are a victim of a genocide, you do not heal in 10 years,” he said, “you uses a band-aid to walk on your own.”
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