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In june 1996, the buildings of Rwesero Minor Seminary, having
been closed after the Genocide and the War of 1994, reopened with about 96 students from the dioceses of Byumba, Kigali and
Kibungo. This for all of us was the beginning of an uncertain journey: for almost all of us, or at least most of us, it was
the first time in a boarding school, or away from home. More to that few of us had known each other before. More to that was
the different backgrounds we were coming from: some were coming from the city, others from the countryside, some of us had
suffered a lot fromthe war and the genocide, and for others, the suffering was still a part of the their lives, even though
nobody dared to talk about it. Some of us were shy, others were not. With such an ecclectic group of teenagers, one could
only wonder how long it would take to start making friends.
Praise God for Football! One of the deacons (I think it was Emmanuel, now
the curate of Kabarondo Parish, the last time I heard from him) that were part of the authority that presided the school gave
us a football and a basketball! At the end of the game, everyone knew everyone, and many jokes about this or that had started
to circulate in dorms. Irenée, Prevert and Vincent had impressed most of us already, and within our minds, we started
fighting for second places!
The next days the climate around us was as friendly as it could be, and as
the time to start classes came (we had been there for only three days), it felt for a lot of us like we had been there for
longer than we had. Each one of us knew more than the half of the entire school, we knew were everything was, and in the end,
most of us had responsibilities already, like in the Sacristy (Séverin) and Jean d'Amour (Music). I'm tempted to write their
nicknames down, for only they can show how much confortable we were getting with each other; but then again, knowing how much
most of us grew to resent, and even hate those nicknames, I judge it better for all of us to not mention any.
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