Nikki Gamer: Hi everyone, this is Nikki Gamer for Catholic Relief Services. And welcome back to Behind the Story, a podcast series that invites you to celebrate the people behind 75 years of our history—the people we serve, our partners, our staff … and especially the supporters who make our work possible. In our last episode we met Dave and Nathalie Piraino, former CRS employees, who began telling the very difficult story of events leading up to the Rwandan genocide of April 1994 … when nearly a million people were killed in just 100 days. Nathalie is Rwandan, and they met and married when Dave took an assignment to Rwanda in the late 1970s.

Last month, Nathalie took us back to her childhood as part of a fun-loving, devoutly Catholic Tutsi family that began to feel the effects of civil war and discrimination years before the genocide.

Nikki Gamer: We left the story just as Nathalie and her Tutsi classmates were kicked out of school because of mounting violence. Through the kindness of strangers, they began making their escape on foot through the mountains, hiding in tall grass as homes were being burned around them. Let’s listen to what happened next …

Nathalie Piraino: We heard somebody whistling. Uh-oh, they found us. It was a Hutu priest. God bless you—they killed him in the genocide. Anyway, he said, “Other kids are at the parish.” “Where is the parish?” So he said, “It’s like 10 minutes from here.” He said, “But I cannot take you with me.” “Please, please.” We begged. He said, “No, if I take you, they kill you.” He showed us how to go down the hill. Then, he said, “Go down, turn left.” Oh my God. We felt like we died and went to heaven. We walked a little bit. There were these guys, the killers—sweating and with machetes, and it’s like, oooh, your heart is beating and you’re whispering Our Fathers, Hail Marys, as many as you could handle. Oh God, if we die here our parents will never know where we died or who killed us. We run up there, and poor priest, he was waiting for us at the gate.

Nikki Gamer: Wow, what a story. Dave, can you give us some context about how CRS was working in Rwanda in those days, before the genocide? And how we might have seen what was coming?

Dave Piraino: Yeah, CRS Rwanda worked through partners, particularly the Catholic Church with different parishes, but also with other local partners. And, in fact, one of our bigger programs was all the high schools were boarding schools, and CRS supplied those schools with food so that the students could have a good meal during the day. At that time in Africa, we were just starting what became our largest program across Africa, maternal child health programming.

So it was a way to encourage and educate people more to the link between health, eating and growth.

Nikki Gamer: Nathalie, you were fed by CRS as a child, right?

Nathalie Piraino: They fed me when I was a kid. So when we lived in the refugee camp, we left everything behind. So my parents and my older sister Tereza will go to get food, milk with that USAID hand check on the powdered milk, rice and yellow cornmeal. We were fed by CRS in elementary school. Lunchtime, you lined up, they give you two scoops of rice and milk, and you gobble it down.

Dave Piraino: In addition to the food and the weighing and the education, we would do some small projects related to food, like chicken raising or vegetable gardening, and relate those to health and the well-being of the child. We also had some agricultural projects in Rwanda.

Dave Piraino: But just to get back to one of your questions about the tensions between Hutu and Tutsi, there was a quota system for a lot of things in Rwanda. The government said they were basically 10% of the people in Rwanda—although that was questionable … many people thought there were more. But only 10% of the people could go to school and get jobs, and all of that. So one day, not too long after I got there, I was called into the office of the police, and they wanted to question me about our hiring practices. And they said, “Well you have a problem. And here’s the problem: You have 18 people, and you have two Tutsis. You’re only allowed to have 10% and you don’t have 20 staff so you must fire one of your Tutsis in the next week and come back in that period of time.”

Dave Piraino:  And I thought that is terrible. So I talked to the embassy to see if they could help us. I talked to the apostolic nuncio. I talked to some other nonprofits there, and they all said that’s the way it is here. So we ended up looking at the two Tutsis. One was an older gentleman who had actually been set to retire in another 8 months or 10 months, so we ended up firing him. And the other one luckily was younger, who had just started working with CRS, but that was a real wake-up call for me.

Nikki Gamer: Yeah, how did that impact your morale? I mean, because here you are married to a woman who’s a Tutsi and your children are Tutsi, I can imagine. So how did that impact you?

Dave Piraino: I felt helpless. I was in a system that promoted this and it appeared there was no way to get around it, and you have to bite your tongue, and figure that you’ve got to keep going and do it the best you can.

Nikki Gamer: What year was this?

Dave Piraino: This was 1978.

Nikki Gamer: Okay, so quite a few years before the actual genocide …

Dave Piraino: Yes, it was …

Nikki Gamer: The question then becomes, how did CRS not see this coming If we are in the country, if we are experiencing things like that. What went wrong in our own system?

Nathalie Piraino: I think every institution, with the exception of those who planned it, were taken off guard. If they knew they would have tried to flee, even if you cannot have the entire family run away, at least a few. I know within my family, at least my youngest siblings would have fled if they knew that they were going to be wiped out.

Dave Piraino: Well, for Catholic Relief Services, we were very focused on social economic development. That’s what we did. And we were an agency that didn’t get into politics. And for us, by not looking beyond our projects, we didn’t really look at the relationship between people.

I think as an agency, we looked at our work. We looked at what has to happen and what we could do differently. What were the relationships within the country that could affect the people? What was the government? Not that we wanted to feel we had to get involved with government issues, but we realized we have to know how those relationships, whether they’re good or bad, would impact on the people that we were working with—and then we might have to change how we would approach our projects.

Nikki Gamer: And from my understanding, the focus on peacebuilding came out of that.

Dave Piraino: Yes, that’s correct. And out of that, where we ended up is going back to Catholic social teaching. And we wanted to look through what we called the “justice lens” and look at the principles of Catholic social teaching, which basically were the idea of the dignity of every human person, the rights and responsibility of people. We wanted the people closest to problems, the people that knew the problem best to not only help solve it, but to identify what it was.

And of course, solidarity—together as a team and with various people in agencies. So the next 2 years after these initiatives were taken, every country program, including headquarters here in Baltimore, had to go through a process that we call the justice reflection. They had to look at their programming, they had to look at the relationships within the office, within their staff, within management and within the country, through this justice lens that basically focused on these principles of Catholic social teaching.

Nikki Gamer: So it’s 1994. You are living in Baltimore, and Nathalie, tell us what was going on at that time in Rwanda. What you were hearing from your family in the days leading up to the genocide?

Nathalie Piraino: I remember the last time I talked to my mom was the 26th …

Nikki Gamer: What month was this? …

Nathalie Piraino: Of February, a month and a half before they killed them. I used to call, not too often, but she wouldn’t say much on the phone because this is, again, the fear people carried over the years that the government may be listening in so she wouldn’t say much. But, friends in Kigali, or siblings in Kigali, they were more open, they would say, “Things are not good.”

I say, Mom, please this phone call, it’s going to cost me money. Can you please answer my questions? Because my mama was supposed to come here to live with us. You know, I had my citizenship since ’83. So to sponsor a parent wouldn’t be difficult. So I told her, I said, ”Mom, tell me, do you feel comfortable for me to come at Easter? Because we keep moving it.” She said, “Sounds good, but why don’t you keep saving money and come at Christmas instead of this Easter?” But, because she was suspecting something. And I thought,  it’s Mom, being Mom … just said, “Okay, I will work hard, but please at Christmas you’ve got to come.”

Nikki Gamer: Do you remember the last thing you said?

Nathalie Piraino: Well, I told her, “I’m going to tell the kids. We are excited, we are going to be together at Christmas.” She said, “Well, you will call again, right?” I said, “Yea