Shun and Maki interviewed a woman from Rwanda. Her name is Towari Marie Louise. She believes that education and poverty are closely linked and that education is a way out of poverty for children. She now lives in Fukushima, Japan. Here is the transcript of the interview.

Shun: Thank you for making time for us today. I’m Shun, and this is Maki. First of all, we’d like to ask about your personal history.
Marie: It’s nice to meet you, Shun and Maki. I was born in the small country of Rwanda in central Africa. I worked as a dressmaking teacher there. I first came to Fukushima in 1993 as part of a JICA-sponsored program and studied Japanese and dressmaking.
Maki: From what I learned in world history class, that was around the time that the Rwandan genocide occurred.
Marie: That’s right. It was two months after I returned to Rwanda that a war broke out between two ethnic groups. It was a terrible time. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed. When I fled with my husband and our two children to a refugee camp, we saw many dead people lying along the roads.
Shun: That’s awful.
Marie: During that time, I saw many horrible things that made me hate war even more. The saddest thing I saw was a mother lying with her baby at her breast. When I looked more closely, I realized that the mother was dead but the baby was still trying to drink its mother’s milk.