chris karuhije

Six. That was the number of people killed every minute of every hour of the day, for one hundred days. The dead lay there mutilated, raped, disfigured, and dismembered. They were strewn across the African countryside, piled up in empty churches, and thrown in the lakes and rivers.

Alphonse and Thacienne had their dream life. They were in love, they had five children, and they pastored a great church in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali. But in 1994 it all came to a cataclysmic end as almost one million people were slaughtered in an eruption of violence that lasted three months. As Alphonse is trapped in his church fighting to stay alive, Thacienne embarks on a courageous journey to get her children to safety, holding hope that she will be reunited with her husband.

Written by one of the survivors,We Were Royal Refugees is the gripping and heart-wrenching true story of the horror, loss, forgiveness, and triumph of a family in one of the worst tragedies in modern history, the Rwandan genocide.