Before diving deep into the teenage years, I would like to layout a bit of my family history as I have it in my mind and touch the surface of my formative years up to age 10 in this 10-minute read. This is how I know my family’s story, might be not always accurate but this is how I remember it, as told by my paternal grandmother and other elderly family members. The rest is from childhood memories, at least the instances I did not completely bury deep down or suppress, and that I can still access with my conscious mind.

It all started with a father (may his soul rest in eternal peace) from a good family, he was born and raised like a small prince until the age of 6, when his family had to flee the country because his tribe was targeted for murders and prepared to be exterminated/extinguished in the 1960ies. From one day to the other, my fathers’ family started walking miles towards the nearest adjacent country. They failed to settle in the first neighboring country they reached, so they changed directions and walked some more. It took them months; maybe years, I can’t recall the duration of this “adventure” as told by my grandma. Eventually, they found a calmer spot in a very rural region in the second country and settled there. My father grew up there, leaving for secondary boarding school and university later. 

My mother’s family was established in the same country my father’s family moved to as my maternal grandfather was in the military and in those times soldiers were exchanged between countries colonized by the same European country. Therefore my mother was born and grew up there as well, her family didn’t go back to our home country, even after the countries independence, of as she belonged to the same tribe as my father and the same death threats applied to them as well.

The childhood of my mother was not the best either although she didn’t have to flee the country, she was born a refugee and soon lost her mother by age 10. My grandfather never remarried and had to raise 7 children on his own, the youngest of them was 5 years old by the time my grandmother passed away. My mothers family was very modest, or even quite poor but most of my uncles and aunties had/have their higher education completed and my mother met my father during her last years of her teachers degree. 

My parents met at the beginning of the eighties and their story quickly evolved to marriage as my mother got pregnant with me at age 22. After the marriage, they moved yet to another very remote area of the country, quickly welcoming my little brother. They were both teachers and we lived in a nice residential area dedicated to teachers and the school staff. I would say that despite the false start my father encountered more than 25 years earlier, he had managed to build his own family in a safe and secure area. I guess for my mum meeting my dad and getting pregnant to get married so quickly wasn’t exactly her plans but life went on and decisions were made and a new family life awaited the both of them.

I don’t recall much of the period from 0 to 3 years old but I think it was a happy period for all of us. Young couple, new babies, home workers, family members living with us etc. We were living like any other typical middle-class African household . Both my parents were working, me and my brother were mostly taken care of by nannies and home-workers.  I remember being always happy to be around my brother, he is only 2 years younger than me, therefore I cannot recall any memories without him in my life. I am almost certain that those were mostly happy years.

I loved time spent with my brother, he was a bit spoiled by my mother and last born of the family for 5 years, therefore held a sense of innocence that I felt I no longer possessed, even when I was only 5 years old and already starting primary school. He was just happy and enjoying life while I was already observing and overthinking most of the things around me. I loved those times nonetheless as I was my fathers pride, I look quite like the man and he would take me for a few years wherever he could go with him and was always expressing the pride he had of having me as a daughter. There was a balance between me being a daddy’s girl and my brother being spoilt by my mother, it all worked out pretty well until I felt a shift when my sister arrived when I was 7. 

This shouldn’t have made a big difference in our lives as we had help home and all was in check, but the little over-thinker I was felt directly like a third wheel and also threatened to lose my place as the favored one towards my father. It is pretty interesting how I still feel the emotion towards that in my body when we were told that our mother had had a baby girl and we were going to visit them at the hospital. I don’t remember seeing her pregnant with my sister, so this surprised my brother and I when we learned about our new sibling almost the same day as we met her. I have always been a nurturing person since my brother was born, I guess, it didn’t take me long to shift into that space quickly with my sister as well. I have never discussed with my brother how he felt when a new baby replaced him, maybe I will one day but for now I assume that all was well for him. 

A year went by and no major event that I can recall happened until my sister was 2, that was the year 1993. My grand father on my dad side passed way during that year. When he passed away, my parents went to burry him. They left us back home as my grandparents lived completely at the other end of the country. It was also school days, so they couldn’t take us out of school for a whole week. What still is a wonder to me is why did my mother not take my sister with her, especially when she was still breastfeeding her?

Two days after they had left us with the workers, I was nine and those people made me do so many chores and amongst them some dangerous tasks including fire. It didn’t take long until one of the biggest traumatizing moments of my life happened. I was instructed to go check on the milk that was boiling on the small stove fueled by charcoal, and of course I saw it overflowing and had to take it off the fire. This was on the ground level and I heard my 2 year old sister drag shoes behind me and as I turned she advanced on the other side and fell into the boiling casserole of milk.  She was so small and was covered in boiling milk but her instinct helped her protect her stomach, her face was intact but both her arms were burnt as well as one of her legs to a 3^rd degree. I still see the people rushing to our house to tear up her clothes, I remember what she was wearing, it was so tight that taking it off took layers of her skin off as well.  I also remember realizing that she might have just died on the spot if she hadn’t protected her small belly. She was taken to the hospital and she stayed there for 2 months. I didn’t see her for 2 months and all that time I was just thinking that I almost killed her. This is probably the first event that altered my brain and made me think that I can’t count on adults to protect me or the ones I care about. I know that my sister’s memory of this event is more faint than mine and that she would never blame me for it, but I did feel guilty of her accident for at least 20 years after that and it is still to this day difficult to go through it without tearing up.

When 1994 came about and after my country has gone through one of the biggest genocides in the known history of humanity, during the summer of my 10 years, we left the place we were living in preparation of our move back to our home country. We spent 2 months in the capital city at my auntie’s place. They had a small home and I remember how crowded it felt. I was still very grateful they could let us stay with them for a few weeks. On August 4^th 1994 we drove back home in a minivan or was it a pick up truck, I can’t remember and this lasted hours. It was quite uncomfortable, nevertheless a dream come true. 

First for my father, then for me as I could see in his eyes that he was so thrilled to be back home after more than 25 years in exile. This was the summer of all possibilities, a fresh start for my family in our very own country. The excitement was beyond belief and we had such high hopes for this new life offered to us. While driving and approaching more populated cities, I, for the first time, realized the horror that had just happened there. I knew something really bad had happened there but never imagined it would be to this extent. There were corpses everywhere and the air smelled like death wherever you would go. We drove until the capital and there we tried to settle, just like any other place right after a massacre and war, it was ghost towns everywhere. 

I remember asking myself, what the hell had just happened here and why would we want to live in such a place with such a heavy history and then I remembered that it was not ideal but this was our home. Whether we like its past or not, we had to accept it in order to contribute to rebuilding it. By the way, this was really my thoughts and I was 10 years old. But the sense of gratitude was installed in me at a very young age, gratitude for food, shelter, health, family etc. so at this exact moment I realized that we were lucky to be alive, that if we would have been there, i would not be here to tell this story. At that point, my heart was filled with hopes and my head with dreams, and no matter how things looked, I was a hopeful 10 year old. I know that it wasn’t the most ideal of situations,  but we were home and together. See you in a bit and let’s walk through it together.