Out of Rwanda’s horror, abiding bonds of love emerge

This love story -- and to its central characters it is indeed a love story -- began when experts and victims from around the world gathered in Rwanda to discuss genocide.

Donald and Lorna Miller had traveled from California to the capital city of Kigali to share the story of her father -- an Armenian genocide survivor -- at a gathering of more than 200 scholars and survivors in the historic Hotel des Mille Collines, where 1,200 people survived the 1994 Rwandan massacres because of the heroic intervention of a manager who bribed the militia by passing out liquor.

Donald Miller is a professor of religion at USC; Lorna Miller directs a community outreach ministry at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. The Altadena couple had been invited to the 2001 conference because they had written extensively about the Armenian genocide, including a book based on Lorna Miller’s interviews with 100 survivors. She had interviewed her father, now deceased, who was 16 when he lost both parents and six siblings in 1915.

Members of a group of young Rwandans called the Assn. of Orphan Heads of Households approached the Millers after her presentation. The parents of the young Rwandans were among the 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus slaughtered by Hutu extremists.

“I kept thinking, ‘It’s my father all over again,’ ” Lorna recalled.

She is convinced that their encounter was a divine appointment, a way for her to repay the care her father received from missionaries when he was orphaned -- and his eventual arrival in Pasadena to pastor an Armenian church in 1956.

The Rwandan genocide started 13 years ago this month. Through the Millers, the orphans have made connections with prominent clergy, scholars, business executives and philanthropists in America. The 1,800-member group, which goes by the French acronym AOCM, also began to collaborate on projects to preserve the historical record of the genocide. And along the way, parental bonds began to grow.

Naphtal Ahishakiye, who lost both parents and all of his siblings in the mass killings, wrote in an e-mail that after the group’s members “observed their love day by day,” the Millers essentially became parents.

Naphtal, past president of AOCM, noted that except for his wife’s doctor and himself, the Millers were the only ones who saw his newborn daughter in the hospital to share in his happiness after she was born.

Many e-mails the Millers receive from Rwanda begin with “Dear Father and Mother” and relate goings-on big and small. In Rwanda, the Millers struggle with their rusty French and the Rwandans’ limited English. But it’s all English on the Internet.

In a recent “Dear Parents” e-mail explaining a long silence, Jean Muyaneza said he had been sick: “I’m now in the new house, but under construction, and I think that it was the source of the illness, because we enter in it without glasses [panes] in the windows, so the wind was too much.”

“It’s wonderful to hear from you,” Donald Miller replied. “We have been worried! I will be in Rwanda from March 22 to April 3. I am hoping to spend some time with you.”

Miller’s recent trip was his tenth to Rwanda. His wife has traveled there eight times. One expression of their ties is a course USC is offering this semester: “What Can I Do? Personal Responses to World Traumas/Crises.” It is taught by Rabbi Susan Laemmle, dean of religious life, and the Rev. Cecil “Chip” Murray, retired pastor of First AME Church in L.A. Both have visited Rwanda with the Millers.

Another effort was a photo exhibit, “Rwanda: Portraits of Survival and Hope,” at the California African American Museum in Exposition Park that ran from September through March. The museum and AOCM split the proceeds.

Bob and Beverly Bingham, family friends of the Millers and owners of NorQuest Seafoods in Alaska, donated $100,000 after visiting Rwanda with the couple. The money funds various projects, such as providing tuition and books for orphans attending college and putting a roof on a building housing Solace Ministries, a Christian outreach to genocide survivors.

Donald Miller called the outreach program vital, because many Rwandans, the vast majority of whom are Christians, found their faith tested in the genocide. Miller wrote in a report to the John Templeton Foundation, which is funding his research into spirituality, that “when God-loving people affirm their humanity, survivors interpret these acts of kindness as emanating from God himself.”

He added that survivors need hope, which is “the special province of religion, that subtle, sometimes miraculous engagement with the divine.”

The drive to exterminate the ethnic minority Tutsis began April 7, 1994, the day after the plane carrying Rwanda’s President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, was shot down as it approached the Kigali airport. Ethnic tensions that went back decades erupted. By July, a rebel group had defeated the Hutu regime, ending the 100 days of terror.

The Millers visited sites of atrocities, including churches and schools, and heard story after story of horror.

One woman at a weekly Solace meeting said all the men in her village knew her body because, as Lorna Miller quoted her, “I was raped by everybody in the village.”

Naphtal, now 32, told how he survived by first hiding in a river, clinging to roots. Later he hid in the forest, drinking rainwater and coming out at night to eat bananas from people’s gardens.

After the Millers returned to Los Angeles from their first visit, they kept asking themselves how they should respond. They came up with the idea of an oral history project. The Millers would provide equipment and training, and orphans would do the interviews. AOCM went for it.

Seed money for the project came from a $25,000 gift from the Binghams on the occasion of the wedding of the Millers’ son Shont a year earlier. After funding projects to build latrines and stoves for the poor in Guatemala, the Millers still had $12,000.

Donald Miller, executive director of USC’s Center for Religion and Civic Culture, suggested that orphan leaders write a proposal for the oral history project. They came up with a $7,500 budget to conduct 100 interviews.

In 2002, the Millers returned to Rwanda with tape recorders and spent 10 days training the interviewers. The AOCM members practiced by interviewing each other and at first spoke so softly that the recorders weren’t picking up what they said. When the Millers left Kigali, the couple doubted the project would work.

But to their “incredible surprise,” the AOCM team completed 100 interviews, Donald Miller said. They needed more funds. The Millers raised the budget to $11,000. The team then had the interviews typed on a computer and translated from Kinyarwanda into English.

“We thought the world should hear their stories,” Lorna Miller said.

Donald Miller wrote philanthropists Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, whom he knew from another project, and asked if they would be interested in funding a book that would combine photos with excerpts of the interviews. The Ahmansons donated $50,000.

Teaming up with Paris-based photographer Jerry Berndt, the Millers published “Orphans of the Rwanda Genocide.” The book gives full credit to AOCM as partners.

One copy reached a person in Sweden who contacted Miller and suggested that he nominate AOCM for the World’s Children’s Prize for the Rights of the Child, sponsored by Children’s World magazine. Although Miller thought the likelihood of winning the prize was remote, he spent a day working on the nomination.

More than 3.2 million readers of the magazine, based in Sweden and published in seven languages, voted for AOCM.

Last April, the queen of Sweden presented the prize, which comes with $40,000, to AOCM leaders in Stockholm. The “AOCM kids,” as the Millers call them, are using the money to build housing for group members. A two-room house costs $3,000.

The Millers traveled to Stockholm for the ceremony and celebrated with five AOCM representatives, including Naphtal, who looked elegant in a dark suit.

His daughter, whose birth the Millers had shared in, is named Arpi, which in Armenian means early rays of sunshine. It is also the name of the Millers’ daughter.

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connie.kang@latimes.com