6 Nov 2019

Making New Zealand Home: Marie Niwenkunda

From Afternoons, 1:44 pm on 6 November 2019

Each week at this time we bring you stories from New Zealanders who were forced to leave their homelands and have resettled here.

Today we are speaking to Marie Niwenkunda from Rwanda.

“My sister Martine and I share the same birthday. This was our last birthday party in Rwanda before we became refugees. A world we knew nothing of at the time.”

“Me (second from left) and my cousins at my grandmother’s house at our annual family get together. It was taken in May, 1992”

“With my siblings and cousins in our new life as refugees in Kenya 1995. At one point about 60 of us (8 or so families) lived together in one house when we first arrived in Kenya. As kids, we were having the time of our lives being together every day…can never imagine what it would have been like for the adults though ☹”

“On our way to NZ, our new home, in March of 1996. We had stopped for transit in Hong Kong”

“We had been wanting to recapture the May 1992 photo for a long time and finally managed to in Johannesburg where the four of us met again for the first time in 25 years”

“Hanging out in Johannesburg in 2017 after years (some as long as 23 years) of being separated by war and genocide. For a family that had annual family holidays together, it makes me sad. We were forcibly separated, now live on different continents, speak different languages and have become strangers without choice”

“With my parents and siblings, 2018”