But what Rwandans endured is so extraordinarily horrifying—in terms of how many people experienced or witnessed brutal acts, and the sheer scale and speed of the killing—that the more time I spent in the country and talking to Nishimwe and others, the more I wondered how such a place could possibly go on after what happened in those horrible 100 days from April to July. How did each person survive? How does a whole country thrust into a hideous nightmare of people hacked to death and raped and tortured survive? What is it like to live in a society in which nearly everyone over the age of 20 has memories of such inhumane deeds?

Consider that 15 percent of Rwandan children were forced to hide under dead bodies to survive.

Consider that 90 percent of those children believed they would die.

Consider that Nishimwe still won’t wear a skirt because she doesn’t want to show the scars a man etched onto her legs with a sword as he raped her—or the marks the HIV he gave her has left on her body.

Consider that her three brothers—Philbert, 9; Pascal, 7; and Bon-Fils, 18 months—were hacked up and thrown in the septic tank of their burned-down house while Nishimwe was with her mother nearby on May 9, 1994. Her father had already been killed in the first weeks of the genocide, on April 15.

And then consider the response Nishimwe gave when I asked her how she survived: “There are others who really had it worse,” she said.

This phrase, “others had it worse”—I heard it time and again from other Rwandan survivors. It is hard to understand how someone who has experienced multiple traumatic events in a short period can think their experiences are not as bad as what others have gone through.

“We’re going to be breathless in realizing that they have the capacity to come out of atrocity with this very modest sense that others had it worse,” said Frank Ochberg, a psychiatrist at Michigan State University and a pioneer in the field of trauma therapy. “The Rwandan example is one of endurance.”

But just because Rwandans have endured doesn’t meant they’re living lives free of pain.

***

In Kigali, there is a walkway that herds you through the country’s genocide memorial. But after half an hour of dutifully progressing with my audio guide from room to room, I fled the building. I had come to something called the “Children’s Room,” which features large portraits of toddlers above descriptions of their favorite foods, what they loved in the world, and how they were murdered. Ariane, 4, was a “neat little girl” who loved cake. She was fatally “stabbed in her eyes and head.” Her parents said she enjoyed singing and dancing.