Mireille’s flight: The girl who escaped the Rwandan genocide and became a medical doctor
After fleeing her home country, she didn’t think she would live to see adulthood. But life had other plans.
In the midst of the 1994 Rwandan genocide Mireille Twayigira, a young Rwandese girl, would never have believed that one day she would become a doctor. She and her grandfather fled the war and made their way to Dzaleka refugee camp in Malawi where she relied on WFP food assistance for survival. This is her story.
Mireille was two and a half when she escaped from her home town of Butare in Rwanda during the genocide. At the time all that mattered was survival.
After they lost their father in the genocide, the family fled Rwanda, making their way through Burundi and settling in a refugee camp in Congo. While in the refugee camp Mirelle lost her sister and mother to illness. She and her grandfather then travelled from Congo through Angola and Zambia, finally arriving in Malawi six years later.
“We arrived in Malawi in September 2000 from Zambia after my grandfather heard about Dzaleka refugee camp. He managed to find money for our transport. It was a life of hassles in the rest of Congo and Angola, wandering in the forests mostly with bullets behind our backs. Many days and nights we walked and had nothing to eat. We survived by begging, or sometimes ate some roots from the forest or whatever we could get our hands on. For a child my age it was tough and I was very malnourished. You can imagine with a big tummy and thin brown hair and swollen cheeks and feet.”
Throughout the time that Mireille and her grandfather were searching for peace, in places where they were in camps she is thankful for the food assistance provided by the World Food Programme (WFP).
“WFP provided me with one of the most important thing a kid needs — food. To focus in class a child needs to have a full stomach. A child needs to be healthy, and not malnourished, in order to prosper at school.”
“WFP food was very important. Before we reached the first camp I was malnourished and the food we were given brought me back to life. In Malawi, I would go to school and come back to find something to put in my stomach. It was not always enough but at least it was something. Without it I don’t know where I would be right now. Would I be alive? Would we have found other sources of food? I don’t know.”
As a young refugee child, growing up in the camp was challenging, Mireille remembers. “Not having all you need as a child is tough. It was a life of having to do with what you have. But of course it was better than having to wander in forests running for my dear life. I had friends to play with, I could go to school, and I had food and shelter, so it was ok.”
She never believed there would be a time in her life when she could provide for herself. It was all a dream until she graduated among the top six students in Malawi and won a scholarship to study medicine in China.
“My dream of becoming a doctor started when I was very little, but it was just a child’s dream. I started thinking more about it in secondary school when I was trying to choose a career which would allow me to meet different groups of people. I know with hard work everything is possible.”
Mireille now calls Malawi home. She attained a Malawian citizenship and now works as a medical doctor at the largest referral hospital in the country.
Are there things that she misses from her native Rwanda? “You can’t compare the food in the camp to that in my country,” she says. “We had all we needed: meat, potatoes, plantain, milk.” However, now she is able to earn money and live life the way she wants, thanks to her budding career as a medical doctor.
As a former resident of Dzaleka refugee camp, Mireille has not forgotten her roots. Every so often she returns there. “In the camp at the moment, there are families who cannot afford anything, so WFP food is the only source of food they have.”
She meets with other refugee children, and visits them in their schools. She want to encourage them to dream big. “I want to be that object of hope for them,” she says.
“Mine is a story of hope, from ashes to beauty.”
By the end of 2016, WFP Malawi had provided food to 33,700 asylum seekers and refugees.
