Dr. Phodidas Ndamyumugbe was 24 years old and living in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali in April of 1994 when the genocide against the Tutsis began.

During that time, the president of the country had just been killed and the Hutus wanted to get rid of the Tutsis.

He said the Hutu government sent militia from one house to another killing with hammers, clubs and machetes.

Nadmyumugbe recalls the first time he was hunted down. He was in his house when the militia showed up and told him he was not allowed to leave. As a Christian, he began to pray and he was asked to his identification card as proof of his ethnicity.

“They didn’t kill me. They took me to my room, they took me back to the living room,” Nadmyumugbe said.

“After taking everything that belonged to me, he finally shouted ‘we’re not going to kill you, we will go and call the police. They will be the ones to come and kill you.’ That was a miracle from God because, obviously, there was no reason why they wouldn’t kill me.”

As he was fleeing the country, Ndamyumugbe recalls coming across roadblocks where the Tutsi people were being killed.

“They would have to check to see if you were Tutsi and then they would kill you,” Ndamyumugbe said.

“They would slaughter and there were prisoners released to load the tracks of dead bodies and at every roadblock, I had to say a prayer, just a simple prayer, because I realized there was no way out.”

He said at one of the roadblocks the guard took his ID but didn’t look at it. Instead, he asked if he was fighting and Ndamyumugbe said ‘no’ and the guard let him through.

From there he fled until he hit the next roadblock where his ID was checked and he was put in line to be killed. As he was about to be killed, he told the guard he was “a man of God” and eventually the guard bargained with others to allow him to escape.

A former professor at the Adventist University of Central Africa, Ndamyumugbe now lives in the United States as a professor at the Weimar Institute in California.

Ndamyumugbe was in Moose Jaw Thursday, Friday and Saturday at the Seventh-Day Adventist Church speaking about his book Preaching From the Grave.