April 7, 1994 began 100 days of murderous genocide in the small country of Rwanda.  The group known as Hutu Power began a low-tech, systematic massacre of 800,000 Tutsi.  In the course of those 100 days, the dead accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the entire time of the Holocaust.

In the aftermath, 95,000 children were orphaned. Even now, 12 years later, Rwanda is home to one of the world’s largest proportions of child-headed households, with an estimated 101,000 children living in 42,000 households.  These children are on-their-own either because their parents were killed in the genocide, have died from AIDS, or have been imprisoned for genocide-related crimes. Rwanda has about 6,000 street children, mostly in Kigali. More than 400,000 children are out of school, and 1 in 5 children die before their fifth birthday.