Twenty-five years ago, Tasian Nkundiye murdered his neighbour with a machete.
The 43-year-old Hutu and a few other men from his Rwandan village chopped the Tutsi man to pieces one horrific slaying during a 100-day genocide that killed an estimated 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and the Hutus who tried to protect them. Nkundiye was convicted of the killing and other crimes and spent eight years in prison.
Today he lives nearby the widow of the man he killed. And somehow they are friends their children and grandchildren play and share lunch together, their cows graze in the same field.
"I am very grateful to her," Nkundiye, now 68, said of the widow, 58-year-old Laurencia Mukalemera. "Ever since I apologized to her after prison life, confessing to my crimes and asking her for forgiveness, she has accepted me. I even leave my children with her when I am away."
"It was useless to tell militiamen the children didn't have any idea about the president's death," said Mukabyagaju, who was 17 at the time. "But as you know, during the genocide, all sense had gone."
Mukabyagaju said she asks herself why she survived. "I believe it was God's mercy that I didn't die," she said. "I have decided to let anger go and forgive all people, including those who killed my family."
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