Send Page to a Friend 'I've seen too much blood in my life'   By Irene Sege Boston Globe   Scores of her relatives were slain in Rwanda. Now, she pleads for the thousands dying in Sudan. A rabbi has already explored Isaiah's entreaty to ''unlock the fetters of wickedness" when a young African-born woman takes the podium. Sifa Nsengimana's audience of 50, mainly middle-age Jews is ending a bring-your-own-sandwich series on Scripture with a panel on putting the prophets into action. Her charge is to tell her family's story, the tale of more than 85 relatives who died in the Rwandan genocide of 1994, to inspire those in attendance to press for an end to the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Nsengimana briefly invokes the 100 days when 800,000 Rwandans were killed, many by machete, and she mentions the aunt who still suffers from being slashed and left for dead a dozen years ago. Mostly, however, Nsengimana appeals to a shared humanity in selling her cause. ''What I am looking for," she tells the gathering at the Combined Jewish Philanthropies' downtown headquarters, ''is my own peace of mind, to know that I, as an individual, did everything I could to stop it." Even sharing only a hint of her history, Nsengimana, 31, is an eloquent, impassioned messenger. Since February, she's been coordinator of the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur. She's enlisting participation in the April 30 rally for Darfur in Washington and the associated campaign to bombard President Bush with postcards, as well as managing the logistics of getting Bay Staters to and from the D.C. demonstration. For a perpetual outsider whose peripatetic life has been defined by Africa's troubles, the work resonates deeply. She moved here from Oregon last July to attend Boston College Law School, intending to focus on human rights, then deferred matriculation a year to settle her family. What Nsengimana didn't postpone was working on Darfur, where more than 200,000 have died from violence, malnutrition, and disease, and 2 million have fled their homes since 2003, when government-backed Arab militias called Janjaweed started destroying black African villages they associated with rebel groups. She'd been involved in the issue in Portland, since an Amnesty International representative spoke about Darfur a year ago at a fund-raiser for a foundation that aids Rwandan widows and orphans. She'd helped Rwandan refugees in Montreal and Portland, but until that fund-raiser, she'd avoided thinking of Darfur. ''It was too much for me," she says. ''I've seen too much blood in my life." By the time Nsengimana addresses the lunchtime study group, she's attended one meeting on logistics for the march and another on a Holocaust commemoration that would include mention of Darfur. She's returned calls from her cubicle at the Jewish Community Relations Council. By day's end she'll have picked up her children, 8-year-old Odette and 6-year-old Daniel, from their Christian school in Marlborough, taken them home to Framingham for a snack, and driven them to swimming lessons. Stylishly dressed for work in a blue sweater and black slacks and black heels, she opts for warm-up pants and T-shirt at home. Her English -- her seventh language -- is nearly flawless. In appearance and setting, Nsengimana is a suburban mother, juggling the demands of home and job, too busy to wash the dishes in the kitchen sink, far from her African childhood marred by hunger and violence. ''I think about my children who have food. I find myself saying I need a vacation. What a luxury," she says. ''There were days I was saying I need a pen. I need food. I've done well. We're not rich, but we're not poor. I look at all that, and I feel overwhelmed. The task is so huge. What can one possibly do? This work on Sudan has helped me a lot because it has allowed me to move on, to do something useful, something that might have results." Early hardships Nsengimana's parents left Rwanda in 1962, the year the country gained independence from Belgium, and crossed into neighboring Congo to escape anti-Tutsi violence shortly after the second of their 11 children was born. Nsengimana was born in 1975, the year nationalization cost her father his job managing a Belgian-owned plantation. Her mother then supported the growing family by selling fruit or cooked food or taking odd jobs. ''It was a hard life. I did pass out very often from hunger," Nsengimana recalls. ''I'd go to school and not be able to finish the day." The family's economic circumstances improved considerably as the older children started working, but other hardships remained. ''We were living always in fear," her brother Roger Munyaburanga says by phone from Johannesburg. Nsengimana's mother, concerned for her safety, sent her at 13 to the capital, Kinshasa, to live with an older sister she'd never met. ''I was coming of age, and between the soldiers on the ground and the teachers who wanted sexual favors and whatnot, I wasn't going to be able to finish my classes and remain whole," Nsengimana says. In 1991, after her sister moved to Burundi to escape anti-foreigner tensions, Nsengimana's hopes to finish high school in Kinshasa ended with the start of an uprising. She hid in an aunt's attic every night as soldiers roamed the streets seeking young women to rape. ''And the hunger," Nsengimana adds. ''There was no food to be found. We ate amazing things. I refuse to even remember." Four months later she moved to Burundi, only to flee for Canada in late 1993 after civil war erupted. ''The bullets," she says, ''were just going through our window." On April 6, 1994, safe in Montreal, her family was holding a memorial vigil for an uncle who'd died in Africa when they learned Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana had died when his plane had been shot down. ''We are finished," mourners murmured. Soon the calls started. ''You could hear people on their cellphones getting the news of relatives who had just died," Nsengimana says. ''We were lucky to have our immediate family outside Rwanda so we felt obligated to be strong and to be there for other families. I had a friend who was eight months pregnant when she learned her parents and all her siblings had been wiped out," she says. ''Then we started to get phone calls of our own." Her grandparents were dead. So were uncles, aunts, cousins. ''We were the ones telling our mother that her family was being killed. She was in Goma [in Congo] and didn't have any access. I remember my mother just saying, 'Thank you for the information.' That's all she said." Nsengimana was 19. Six years earlier, a favorite brother was murdered while patrolling Lake Kivu. In 1998, another brother was killed in Congo by radical Hutu bands from Rwanda. In Montreal and in Portland -- where Nsengimana moved in 1996 after marrying Rwandan-born Joseph Nsengimana, whom she'd met when he vacationed in Canada -- she worked with Rwandan refugees, translating for immigrants and organizing remembrance events. When the Nsengimanas left, says Felicite Mukawera, a medical assistant in Portland, ''everybody was, 'What are we going to do without them?' " Meanwhile, Nsengimana wrestles with an irrational guilt. ''Honestly, there were times I was so overwhelmed I wished I had died there," Nsengimana says. ''It's so unfair. I've always been spared, so to speak. When my little friends from elementary school were getting pregnant and having babies at 14, I was safe and sound in my sister's home. When people were getting raped in Kinshasa, I didn't get raped. When more people died in Burundi or were stuck or didn't finish high school, I was able to get out. I just felt this overwhelming sense of responsibility." Grief and empathy The little girl who coped by thinking of those who were hungrier is now the distant witness hesitant to grieve her own losses when others lost so much more. Her husband says, ''It's a different kind of suffering, but it's a suffering nevertheless." She demurs. ''Now and then, when I feel strong enough, I pull back the memories and try to sort it out and mourn. Little by little I tackle it," she says. ''When I think about the widows who survived the genocide, who saw their own children being thrown against the wall, then I see that's pain. Even for my mother, who lost her entire family, she still wasn't there. I'm surrounded by people who saw it. Anyone else will somehow move on." Nsengimana's 25-hour-a-week job stretches to 50 hours or more, helped by a husband who sometimes works from home so she can tell a church or community group about the death and despair in Darfur. Tomorrow, Rwanda and Darfur merge at a concert at the Zero Arrow Theatre in Cambridge, when Rwandan musician Samputu, who is staying at the Nsengimanas' house, performs to bring attention to the situation in Sudan. On April 29, in the hours before she sees off the buses taking demonstrators to the Washington rally on Darfur, Nsengimana and her husband will host a dinner for the Rwandan widows organizing an event commemorating the 12th anniversary of that genocide. The next morning, Nsengimana will fly to D.C. Come September, Nsengimana will enter BC Law School, hoping to use what she learns to combat poverty in Africa. ''The basic problem in Africa is bad leadership, bad governance. No work is going to be done without being attached in some way to politics. So I was starting to think of law school at that point when Darfur happened," she says. Ask Nsengimana whether she believes human beings are intrinsically good or evil, and she answers without hesitation. ''Good. Absolutely," she says. ''I think there are people who have managed to silence their consciences."