ALBANY — War has followed Devota Nyiraneza for half of her life.

She carries that burden without resentment and her lank, angular frame is larger in a room than her humble character.

For two days, she hid in the space between the ceiling and the roof of her parents’ house in Rwanda when genocide spread from the nearby capital city, to her small village in the 1990s.

When the noise beneath her had stopped, she came out of her hiding place to find that she was the only one of her 50-member family left living. She was 14 years old.

Now nearly 30, she tells her saga quietly, with the familiarity that comes with having told it dozens of times to officials.

From her empty home she sought refuge with a neighbor, who was herself a refugee — she had fled from Burundi to Rwanda. Nyiraneza spent two months hidden in her neighbor’s house, before she traveled with her neighbor’s family back to Burundi, and from there, to the Democratic Republic of the Congo — all on foot.

They made it to a refugee camp in Bukavu, a Banyamulenge area of the eastern Congo, that borders Rwanda. The Banyamulenge are a tribe of Tutsis who are the target of genocide. (See related story.)

There, in the eastern Congo, Nyiraneza’s Burundian neighbor demanded that she marry her brother. She threatened to run Nyiraneza out of the camp if she refused, so she complied.

The war soon crossed the border into the Congo and Nyiraneza gave birth to a daughter.

With just her three-month-old baby on her back, Nyiraneza left her husband at the camp and spent the next year-and-a-half walking to the neighboring Republic of the Congo.

In a flood of refugees, Nyiraneza traveled through remote valleys, always hidden, sometimes walking through chest-high water for days at a time.

The refugees could not stop; the war was always at their backs.

With nothing to eat, people would search for wild sweet potatoes, eating the leaves and the roots of the bitter plant, despite its dizzying effects.

Nyiraneza watched children die on their mothers’ backs. They would be left behind on the side of the road; there was nothing else to do. People too exhausted to keep going, but not yet dead, would fall by the wayside and ants would crawl in through their noses.
"You could tell that people were rotting alive," she said, in smooth, rhythmic, French.

One of the most terrifying parts of her journey was not knowing or trusting fellow travelers. There were two groups of soldiers that would walk with the refugees — one group was also running and the other was chasing them.
"Soldiers that had been with you would try to kill you in the middle of the night," she said.
Along the way, two soldiers began a rivalry over Nyiraneza; each demanded that she marry him. "One said, ‘Marry me,’" she recalled. "One said, "Marry me or I’ll kill you.’" She married the first for protection against the second.

When the refugees made it to a camp in the Republic of the Congo, they were each given a handful of couscous and a doll-sized jar of tomato sauce, a two-day ration for each adult.

They lived in that village of green army tents for a month, until the war was at their backs again. The government gave refugees 30 days to leave the country.

Nyiraneza and her husband settled in a small village near Cameroon, where she lived for three years and bore two children.

Then the war was on her heels again.

It came suddenly this time, and she scattered with her children in a different direction than her husband. Nyiraneza paid more than $1,000 in bribes to cross the border into Cameroon.

For the first time in the whole journey, Nyiraneza rode in a car.

She arrived in the capital, Yaoundé, with her three children and $20. She spent the next four months begging for food. Little by little, she learned enough French to explain her situation to a passer-by, who took her to a United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office, where Nyiraneza applied for refugee assistance.

As soon as she could, Nyiraneza applied for resettlement, but it would be a year before she would get her first interview; after that, the refugee office sent her to see a psychologist. People often make up stories so that they can be resettled in another country, but hers was so far-fetched that the interviewer sent her to seek psychological help. The doctor saw her story was credible and spoke on her behalf.

After four years of living in Yaoundé, Nyiraneza was told that she would be leaving for the United States on June 20, but she didn’t believe it. Refugees are routinely given several dates before actually leaving.
There is a rumor "that once you got motion-sickness medicine, you were actually going to leave," she said. Nyiraneza got her medicine and arrived in Albany on June 21.

Now she is living in New York’s capital city, wearing a fuzzy orange fleece in the heat of the summer, and for the first time in her adult life, the war is not at her heels.
"In life," she said, "there are always going to be some kinds of problems."

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Translation was provided by Steffa Krisniski of the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants.