Word: nereciana
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...sameness of his days, however, ended when he met Nereciana. They were from adjacent districts in Kibungo prefecture, Rwanda. She had a round, happy face, full cheeks, short, curly hair and good, straight teeth. She wore silver bangles, which jingled as she and Joseph walked together around the road that marked the perimeter of the camp, talking about home, about the avocado and eucalyptus trees, the rolling, verdant hills and the cooler air of Kibungo. Nereciana had sharp, slightly downcast, eager, probing eyes. When she spoke, Joseph detected a confidence in her tone; she knew what she was saying when...
...Musuhura refugee camp was literally a purgatory, a place of suffering and expiation, where 40,000 Rwandan Hutu like Joseph Havamungo, 29, and Nereciana Mushankwano, 20, wandered amid the huts strung together of relief-agency donated blue plastic sheeting, trash-can fires and hastily dug pit latrines and sought to scavenge the one thing that could sustain life in this place: hope. They were between countries. Host Tanzania didn't want them, and if they returned to Rwanda, they feared Tutsi would seek revenge for the genocide perpetrated by Hutu extremists just two years before. The landscape around the camp...
...Joseph and Nereciana, their relationship was a reprieve, a warm place in the heart of this darkness. And even when Tanzanian troops surrounded the camp, launched tear gas into the compound and ordered the refugees onto the roads back to Rwanda, Joseph and Nereciana, holding hands as two links in a 40-mile chain of humanity, could go with hope, believing--despite rumors that Tutsi were waiting at the other end of the Rusumo bridge over the Kageva River to castrate returning Hutu males--that God would watch over them and return them to safety. There were some positive signs...
Returning refugees such as Joseph and Nereciana found the fields lying fallow, the last few harvests still rotting on the stem. This wave of humanity could have precipitated a disaster had not the new Tutsi government headed by Paul Kagame secured international aid and, even more miraculously, somehow managed to bridge the bloody tribal divide. There were Tutsi reprisals against Hutu, but for the most part the reintegration of Hutu refugees into Rwandan society went smoothly...
Joseph and Nereciana reinhabited a familial plot in Rwankogoto and began the process of building their dirt-floor, four-room hut from bamboo, reeds and mud. The house, perched on a hillside overlooking a fertile valley, catches morning sun and stores the warmth all day within its thick stucco walls. They built a thatched-roof outhouse, a rabbit hutch and a chicken coop. They cleared four acres of farmland and sowed their first crop: manioc, beans, peanuts, pineapples and sweet potatoes. Her sisters lent Nereciana pots and empty jerricans that she filled with bananas, yeast and hops to ferment banana...