Hey guys, this is Pastor Vlad and I have the opportunity to have
Frida Umuhoza all the way from Australia. She is a genocide survivor. She has a book called
"Chosen to die: Destined to live" An incredible testimony of forgiveness and God's healing power
that flows through forgiveness. So Frida share us your story. Thank you pastor Vlad and my name is
Frida as you've heard and I live in Australia but I was born and grew up in the country of Rwanda.
I grew up in the village called Nyanza and my country went through a genocide 1994 that wiped
out more than a million Tutsis within just 100 days and through that, I lost my five siblings.
I lost my parents, my grandparents, my extended family. As a child growing up in that country,
I already knew that I was a wrong tribe from the age of six. I learned that from school not from
my parents but we learned that in school where the principal will come every three months, they will
be counting how many Hutus and how many Tutsis are in the class and that's how I discovered that
I was a Tutsi and actually one day I went back home and I told my mom, why did you choose to
be Tutsis, a wrong tribe to be because obviously every three months when there was the counting,
we were made fun of and we were made to be feeling like less than human being. So as a child when you
grow up in an environment like that you feel unsafe and you feel unwanted at the same time,
you have nothing to do about it because it's just that discrimination that goes on from one
generation to another. To cut a very long story short the genocide was perpetrated and prepared
from a very long time and mostly in 1990, when the Tutsis who had been living in exile had tried to
come back and stop the discrimination that was going on and therefore the plans of the genocide
started. We started hearing that we were on the list of the people that were supposed to die.
We started hearing that in different parts of the country, there was killings but there was
no report of anything like that. So when I turned 13, my youngest sister was killed in the hospital.
She was a baby and even that we weren't allowed to to report any of that. So by the time 1994,
when the Hutu president was assassinated, it was then made official that the killing would start.
We left our homes. Our homes were destroyed and demolished. People being killed everywhere in the
country. There was nowhere to hide. You couldn't even hide in a church. There was nowhere to
hide. My family that lived in that small town, I thought to myself maybe everything will go wrong
but not for my family because my parents and my grandparents had been kind to the neighbors and I
thought maybe they would hide us. But the thing is we were actually not killed by people from so far,
we were killed by neighbors, the next door neighbors, people that knew us very well,
people had turned against us, the Hutus had turned against us and the government was supporting
it. The machetes had been supplied and the government was behind everything. A month later,
also running around and hiding, that's when my family was attacked. My family was attacked on
the 7th of May, 1994. In that very morning, we were led outside of our house, my grandpa's house,
we were led to a ditch to be killed in that ditch. Now in my village, to be shot you had to pay
because remember, we are referred to as snakes and cockroaches. So we really didn't have any money.
So we didn't have money to pay for a better death which is to be shot. So they asked us to pick from
machetes, clubs and spears and all that. I picked a young man that had a club and I thought that
was a better death for me. Sixteen of us were led and put in the ditch, in the same ditch. My father
was hiding on the roof of the house and he could see it. So he wasn't with us but my grandparents,
my siblings, my mom and my aunties, we were all led and put in that same ditch. I was hit
with a club that a young man that I've picked, I had chosen and asked him to kill with a club.
Because I thought that was a better death. I was only 14 at the time and so thinking like that was
a teenager girl thinking like that. He hit me at the back of my head while my whole entire family
was killed. My mom's head was chopped off and we were then buried all together in a ditch. I was
in that ditch for a very long time. I don't know how long but I was in there for a very long time,
probably more than 10 hours because we were killed early morning about three or four am
and and I was out in the afternoon. A young man rescued me, dug me out of that grave. Later on,
I was hidden by another man who was a Hutu and hid me until the genocide was over.
When the genocide was over, I was a tormented and traumatized girl. As a teenager, I cried
every single day. I suffered depression. I suffered headaches. I suffered stomach
ulcers. I couldn't eat, I was only crying every single day. At 18, a friend of mine took me to a
church with her and I gave my life to Christ. On the 15th of January 1998, that's when I gave my
life to Christ and everything turned around for me. From then, I was in love with Jesus but I
wasn't able to forgive right away. I couldn't walk that journey for months and months, I cried and I
asked God to give me the grace to be able to do that. Later on, I asked for prayers from friends
as well and then I was able to walk that journey of forgiveness to even to an extent of being
able to go meet the people, the very people that destroyed my whole family, my whole entire family,
was able to extend grace to those who killed my family and profess and actually speak in
words that had forgiven them and since then, I walked that journey of healing because of the
start of the forgiving and receiving forgiveness from my Lord Jesus Christ. And from then to now,
I'm able to tell my story. I'm able to speak about the grace of God without hatred, without
grudges and without any bitterness in my heart and that is only by the grace of God. Thank you.
Thank you Frida and for those of you who are interested in learning more about her story,
you can get a book on her website or on Amazon. Frida - Chosen to die: Destined to live. Thank you
so much for sharing your story of forgiveness and encouraging us, all of us to look to Jesus, who
forgave us of our sins and extend that forgiveness to other people. Thank you, I appreciate that.