In Rwanda, Orphaned Brothers Reunite : Africa: Loss of family in ethnic chaos darkens their gleeful meeting.

Finally, Sylvestre and Alexis could smile, whoop and jump with joy on the tear-soaked hardpan of Rwanda.

Once again, they had each other.

And that will have to do. At ages 13 and 10, these brothers are what remains of a family.

For 18 months, they had not even this. Two of Rwanda’s 100,000 lost, damaged children, they drifted separately through Central Africa’s ghoulish chaos. Their nightmare can only be imagined. Or perhaps not. Maybe it is beyond the comprehension of a sane imagination to be young and endure such madness.

But last week, the boys were reunited, thanks to the biggest, most expensive family tracing program since World War II.

The moment was pandemonium, heart-rending, bittersweet.

With wide eyes and toothy grin, Sylvestre watched the Red Cross van bounce into a parking lot here in the capital. The door slid open just a crack. His little brother Alexis exploded out, shoeless and crusted with the smoky grime of refugee camps.

The boys clutched one another--two pint-size, stringy kids locked in each other’s arms, squealing in delight and kicking up the dust.

Let’s go back a few hours: Inside the Red Cross waiting room, five families have assembled. All are to be reunited this day with children from whom they were separated last year during Rwanda’s unlucky trifecta of civil war, ethnic genocide and refugee stampede.

So far, 25,000 parents have approached the Red Cross and the U.N. children’s agency, UNICEF, looking for their missing sons and daughters. At the same time, relief officials have registered 80,000 “unaccompanied” youngsters from Rwanda’s descent into dementia. How many others might be unregistered is pure guesswork.

In the waiting room, each family quietly told its story.

One mother wearing saddle shoes lost track of her 6-year-old daughter in the dark night of April 15, 1994, when shooting started and everyone for miles panicked and fled into the countryside. Another mother in a bright red blouse could not reach her 13-year-old daughter when fighting broke out in her neighborhood on April 11, 1994. And so on.

But who is this undersized boy sitting at the edge of the group, his legs dangling over the seat of his chair?

In a soft, steady voice, he tells this story:

I am Sylvestre Sendakeye. I am 13. I was with my parents at our home in the town of Kaduha. My brother is Alexis Nibarambe. He is 10. On this day, he was away visiting our aunt.

It was spring, 1994. A maniacal orgy of ethnic killing was sweeping Rwanda from the capital of Kigali toward villages like Kaduha. Fanatics from the majority ethnic group, the Hutus, were slaughtering minority Tutsis. Fever spread. Kill or be killed, the fanatics screamed. So the Hutus killed, with guns, knives, clubs and boots. Perhaps 500,000 Tutsis and their Hutu sympathizers died.

Alain Sigg, spokesman for the U.N.-sponsored international tribunal investigating these crimes, said the frenzy engulfed entire communities “in an ecstasy of killing.”

Meanwhile, a Tutsi rebel army advanced from the north on its way to take the country and rout the Hutus, sending them fleeing into refugee camps where perhaps 30,000 perished from disease in mere days.

When it started, I ran to the Catholic church with my parents to be safe. But there they killed my mother and my father. Shot them. And they killed my three brothers. I was hit with a club and left. I learned later that, at my aunt’s house, she ran to another church. She was killed. My brother disappeared.

The two brothers are ethnic Tutsis. Neither knew what happened to the other.

Sylvestre was rescued by a nun and taken to a French orphanage in the neighboring country of Burundi. Three months later, with the invading Tutsi army in control of Rwanda, he was repatriated. In Kigali, he was accepted into the household of a cousin.

Alexis was rescued from the slaughter by a sympathetic Hutu neighbor, and taken along as Hutus fled into refugee camps across the border in Bukavu, Zaire. There, he was mistreated. So he moved in with another family and earned his keep by cooking for them.

Relief agencies recognized immediately that they had an unimaginable crisis on their hands with displaced, orphaned children. And for more than a year, they have roamed through camps containing nearly 2 million refugees, assembling dossiers on the lost young.

With a budget of $5.2 million, the International Committee of the Red Cross became a clearinghouse for separated families.

So I went to the Red Cross. But they told me I was too small to ask for my brother. So my cousin came. We learned my brother was alive. I was very happy. In my memory, we liked each other. People always asked us if we were brothers. Now it is on my mind how he might have changed. Will he be bigger, fatter?

The inquiry from Kigali reached aid workers in Zaire.

Alexis was told that a relative wanted him to return. Did he wish to go? He said yes.

Last week, 38 children, Alexis included, were loaded into vans for the trip home. An escort said the children were quiet as they left the camps in Zaire. They were apprehensive approaching Tutsi soldiers at the Rwandan border. Then, on the winding road home through banana groves and tea plantations, they began to “loosen up.”

Soon they were singing and horsing around. At smaller towns along the way, the caravan halted. From his window, Alexis could see happy reunions occurring. Then there were only a few children left for the last stop.

The van came down a back street to the Red Cross compound in Kigali, rounded the last corner and jounced through potholes across the parking lot.

For a split second nothing at all happened. It seemed that even breathing stopped. Then the children spilled out, Alexis first, arms outstretched, squealing.

The mother with the saddle shoes grabbed her daughter, now 7. They looked at each other with the shocked expressions of people who had just experienced a true miracle. The woman with the red shirt disappeared with her 14-year-old into a circle of well-wishers.

When Alexis and Sylvestre finished romping and screeching and laughing, a bystander asked how the youngster felt at his homecoming.

“I feel very happy,” Alexis said.

And what’s the first thing he wants to do?

“I just want to see the rest of the family.”

But who would tell him?

Everyone else was dead.