I've never seen kindness like this amid such horror

WE are not exactly in millionaire territory. When Chris Tarrant walks with me through the door of the mud hut which is Sekamana's home, he is transported into a world of the most desperate poverty.

It is so dark inside that even in daylight we have to use a torch to find our way. The beam, travelling around the walls and floor, illuminates all that Sekamana owns. It doesn't take long.

There are a couple of plastic plates, a rusting cooking pot, a pile of rags to sleep on, a sack of seeds, a bar of soap, a hand mirror, a toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste. The torch sweeps around in the blackness looking for more, but there isn't any. No furniture, no table...nothing.

Sekamana's entire worldly goods amount to less than pounds 5. Chris, the man who holds out the promise of untold riches on his quiz show Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, can hardly believe what he is seeing. He is a merry and boisterous person, rarely short of a word, but this has shocked him into silence. All the more so because Sekamana does not have just himself to support in this desperate place. His three younger brothers and sisters live here too. Sekamana is their guardian, their mother and father rolled into one. It is a daunting responsibility, all the more so because of his age.

Sekamana is a boy of 15, and he has been doing this since he was seven, since the day he came home and shouted "hello" and found his mother and father lying dead on the floor, hacked to pieces. There are thousands like Sekamana in this forgotten country, 65,000 to be precise, heads of households while they are still children, the sad inheritors of one of the most appalling tragedies of modern times.

Eight years ago, Rwanda erupted into an orgy of slaughter whose ferocity stunned the world. It was basically tribal in nature, with members of the Tutsi, Twa and moderate Hutu ethnic groups being massacred by Hutu extremists.

The bloodbath lasted for just 100 days, and in that short time a million people were murdered. At its height, five Rwandans died every single minute. Nothing like it has been seen before or since. It was the most efficient mass killing since the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War Two.

But it wasn't just the scale of the massacre that was so appalling, it was its nature. The untold thousands who died didn't suffer an anonymous death from an aeroplane somewhere up above the clouds. Most were butchered alive by mobs wielding machetes, an end of unspeakable terror, the blades coming down severing limbs, sawing off heads, as blood lust shone in their killers' eyes.

The victims were pursued through the fields like animals; when they tripped and fell, they would be set upon as if by a pack of hyenas. From April to July it continued, and every morning you could tell what sort of night it had been by the numbers of corpses floating down the river towards Lake Victoria.

Sometimes the river would foam pink with blood as scores, hundreds, of dismembered bodies, hardly recognisable as human, swept along like half-submerged logs.

In 1994, when it happened, I saw many children trickle into the refugee camps which had been hurriedly set up across the Tanzanian border. They were so traumatised by what they had seen and by the loss of their parents that the power of speech had entirely left them; they did not dare put their thoughts into words in case it drove them mad. They sat for hours on end in their orphans' compound, staring at nothing.

Eight years on, they have not really mended. The grief of bereavement is still with them, less intense maybe, but there all the same, like a dull pain that won't go away. You can see it in their eyes as they talk about how much they miss their mums and dads.

We have become accustomed to Africa and its famines, its babies like sticks, but this particular agony can't be alleviated by food; it is forever. For Chris Tarrant, witnessing this at first hand has come as an immense shock.

He is here because his wife Ingrid, also a TV presenter, is a supporter of the charity War Child, one of the few organisations committed to helping these lost children.

In Rwanda, one of the poorest nations on earth, there is no welfare state simply because the government cannot afford it. Chris spent his time in an emotional limbo, torn between feelings of despair and utter admiration for these children who have suffered so much and yet still find it in themselves to care for their younger siblings.

On a hilltop an hour's drive from the capital Kigali, we come across an 18-year-old girl called Uwimana. Like so many, Uwimana, then aged 10, watched her parents being chopped to death before her eyes, then took it upon herself to look after not only her own two sisters but other orphans too. She has continued to do this ever since.

For anyone, anywhere this would show an unimaginable generosity of spirit, but in Uwimana's case it is doubly so, because when she was a baby she was stricken with polio. Chris, Ingrid and I walk up the incline to her home, Uwimana leading the way, face set, teetering on her crutches. Our destination is a house - well, you would call it a house, but in fact it is just a shell of a house, walls, and a roof with so many holes that to look up on a sunny day is like looking at the stars.

Uwimana smiles. "Welcome," she says and in that word is the unfathomable kindness of Africa. Again we stumble in the darkness. If anything this is worse than before because there is nothing in this hut but empty space. On the walls are chalk drawings from the younger ones, images from a world they have never seen and never will: helicopters, skyscrapers, Cadillacs (in another house, the holes in the wall are plugged with soggy pages of magazines scavenged from rubbish dumps; the faces of Westlife grin out from one).

Uwimana and her dependants are battening down for the night. Far away, the hills flash with sheet lightning. This is the rainy season in Rwanda and with the roof in the state it is, the little family will spend the next 12 hours sleepless and huddled together as the floor turns into a quagmire.

"How do they do it?" Chris asks as we aquaplane through washed- out roads. "To live through so much and still give everything to someone else. I don't think I've ever seen such kindness."

Chris and Ingrid have two children and imagining them in a situation like this gives them the horrors. I love Chris and Ingrid. Chris, the "do you wanna phone a friend?" TV star, knows he can make a contribution here.

He does it by making people happy, fooling about with Hamish O'Hare, the puppet War Child use as an ice- breaker, leaping on people's bikes and riding them crazily down dirt streets, and with every mad wobble of his tyres there is a gust of laughter, a fleeting promise that things really can be okay again, given time.

War Child play a huge part in this. They are trying to restore pride to a whole generation whose parents have been wiped out and who otherwise would be rudderless. They get children to unite in projects, be it keeping bees or growing strawberries, so that they can begin to believe that they matter. Hairdressing is another growth industry. In a market town in eastern Rwanda, an 18-year-old boy called Hategekimana wields comb and clippers like an expert. He has been trained by War Child and when you sit down and ask for a short back and sides you expect him to lapse into barber-speak, but Hategekimana is beyond small talk. When he was 10 he saw his parents killed - even now it feels like yesterday.

At the back of his little shop, when he speaks about it, tears fall among the tufts of shorn hair. But how could he forget? The reminders are everywhere. The scenes of some of the most appalling atrocities are preserved as a warning to future generations.

They are not like museums, they have the look, and worst of all the smell, of something that happened yesterday. Chris, Ingrid and I drive to a church at Ntarama where 5,000 people were massacred in a manner that almost defies description. They were promised sanctuary, but their enemies were waiting for them, hiding in the scrub outside. Around 150 stormed the building, first throwing hand-grenades, then making free with their machetes.

Their victims were unarmed and died in absolute terror. Now you see their skeletons and their clothes strewn around the church - you pick your way through breastbones, tibia, ribs and skulls.

Unless you watch your step, you crunch another person's life. Chris and Ingrid walk over the pews in order not to step over the remains of the dead. But it is impossible, no matter how hard you try, to avoid all the bones. Chris looks pale, he is poleaxed by the enormity of it all.

A friend of mine called Annette, an aid worker, walked with me through the possessions, the fossils, of thousands of lives. She stopped at a child's sandal, so small you could put it in the palm of your hand. "I often wonder," she said, "what sort of life she would have had."

The desperate need now is to help the children who are left to struggle against overwhelming odds to survive and bring up their families.

"There are 400,000 kids without parents here," Johnnie McGlade, War Child's emergency relief co-ordinator tells me. "They are great kids, the most resilient I have ever known, but they are vulnerable. Some were only six or seven when their parents were killed.

"Life is very hard for them. Their average income is pounds 60 a year. Many of the girls have been raped because they have no one to protect them."

One of the most appreciated elements of War Child's work is supplying families headed by children with wind-up radios. They cost pounds 35 each, but their worth cannot be measured in money. Not only are they the most valuable thing these children have ever owned, they give them untold comfort. "It must be marvellous for them," Chris says, "just to hear voices." In the small hours, when the nightmares come, the radios bring a kind of peace. "It's noise," Johnnie McGlade says. "But it's nice noise."

A final memory: This is something you can't forget, can't even begin to forget. We're on the plane back to Nairobi where there are hot baths, lagers, swimming pools, muggings, all the things the Western world offers. It should be a release, but Chris is lost in thought. "They're the most wonderful children I have ever met," he says.

If he says it once he says it a dozen times. The stewardess tells us we are about to land, but after what we've seen I doubt if we ever really will come back to earth.

Copyright 2002 MGN LTD
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