Christopher Black - Photojournalist

Since 1994, 6 800 children have passed through the doors of the Kacyiru Orphanage in Kigali, Rwanda. Supported by the Rwandan and Belgian Red Cross Societies, over 6 500 of the children have been reunited with their families or placed with foster parents. The children who remain were either too young to remember their names when they were separated from their families during the genocide, the mass exodus that followed it, the return to Rwanda in 1997 or simply have no families to return to.

By the fall of 1997, the International Committee of the Red Cross had reunited 12 000 children through it's tracing program. Since 1994, over one hundred thousand children have been registered by NGOs as unaccompanied, roughly half of those have since been reunited with their families.

Ngendahimana Kiginyi, 13 years old, fled Rwanda in 1994. He stayed with a paternal Aunt in a refugee camp in Zaire. On the return to Rwanda she abandoned him. He traveled by himself through Rwanda until he wound up at an Orphanage outside of Kigali. ICRC tracing efforts over a period of a month led him to the village where his mother lived. Upon reaching the village Kiginyi was told that his father had died since he had left and that his mother was living nearby. The reunion took place shortly thereafter.

Kagabo, 12 years old, fled Rwanda in 1994. Upon his return ICRC tracing efforts took on his case. Kagabo remember the name of the village where he had once lived and he also knew the name of the hill where he had once lived. Although first efforts at finding his parents were unsuccessful, the hard work of the ICRC tracing officers paid off and Kagabo was reunited with his parents.

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all photographs copyright christopher black 1996-1999