Reuters

By Arthur Asiimwe

March 28, 2004

She didn't understand why students were released from class early that day, but when she got home, she found her house had been burned down and that her father had been killed by Hutu militiamen on the first day of the country's 1994 genocide.

During the 100 days that followed, extremists from the ruling Hutu majority slaughtered some 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates in the tiny central African country, triggering a decade of instability across the heart of the continent.

Among those killed was Janine's mother, who was murdered when Hutu militiamen hunted down hundreds of terrified Tutsis hiding among the reeds in a mosquito-infested swamp.

As the eldest in her family, young Janine, now 17, was left homeless and in charge of her two brothers and two sisters in a desperately poor and dangerous country riven by ethnic hatred.

"Each day presents us with difficulties," Janine says, forcing back tears. "It is too big a burden for me."

Her task may be difficult, but she's not alone. There are an estimated 100,000 children in Rwanda living without parents or adult guardians, or 30,000 child-headed households, according to the U.N. children's agency UNICEF.

Many were orphaned during the genocide, while others have lost parents to HIV/AIDS, rates of which have increased since 1994, when the Hutu militias used mass rape as a weapon that could silently go on killing after the war.

Other children saw their parents in prison accused of crimes related to the genocide and with Rwanda's slow pace of justice their parents -- guilty or not -- remain behind bars.

A recently adopted government policy for orphans and other vulnerable children recommended that a system of community-based care and protection be established.

But with HIV/AIDS affecting up to 10 percent of Rwanda's 8.5 million people, there are fears that the number of children burdened with adult responsibilities will only continue to grow.

"These children's sense of belonging to the community is weak because they are threatened and have no care and this could have an impact on efforts to build a cohesive Rwandan society," says Jose Bergua, a child protection worker with UNICEF.

Janine and her siblings managed to elude the 1994 militia attacks and, along with other survivors, found their way to territory controlled by the Tutsi-led rebel army that eventually ousted the Hutu government and ended the genocide.

The former rebels led by current President Paul Kagame remain in power and the Tutsi-dominated government has brought a measure of stability to Rwanda, which nevertheless remains crippled by poverty.

The biggest challenge for orphans such Janine is meeting the daily demands for food, water and medicine. Education is considered a luxury for most.

"There are so many sacrifices that we have to make. I dropped out of school to enable my bigger sister to continue with her studies," says Jean Claude Maniragaba, 16, who lives next door to Janine in the hills just beyond the capital.

He shares a small thatched house made from mud and wattle with another teenager, Alphonsina Tuyishimire, 17.

Both lost their parents who died in refugee camps in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, where hundreds of thousands of Rwandans fled in the aftermath of the genocide.

Inside their hut, the walls are painted with cow dung while a living room and makeshift kitchen are separated from the bedroom by papyrus reeds. The beds are woven mats.

Many children in Bugesera survive by providing cheap manual labour, such as fetching water, carrying goods, working in gardens or other odd jobs.

The absence of proper guardians, however, leaves them vulnerable to exploitation or abuse by adults.

Some children resort to begging while a number of young girls have been drawn to prostitution to raise money for their fellow dependents.

Most children don't understand property rights and are easily shoved off their land in one of Africa's most densely populated countries where 90 percent of the population relies on tiny vegetable plots to eke out a living through subsistence agriculture.

Like Janine, Jean Claude and Alphonsina collect water from the swamps an hour and half's walk from home.

Janine provides for her siblings by selling eggs and chicks from a hen donated by a UNICEF-backed programme called the Bamporeze association, which also gave Janine a goat that she hopes to sell in order to buy two younger ones.

Bamporeze also provides children with some counselling support and offers vocational training such as carpentry, welding and soap making lessons, but the small association operates in only one of Rwanda's 12 provinces.

"We try to make them feel part of the world and not so isolated," says Bamporeze's Jane Muhongayire, "But even then, most of their needs cannot be met."