Olive Mukankusi lives in a two-room house with mud walls and a dirt floor in a village called Igati, in eastern Rwanda's Rwamagana province. To get there, you have to drive about 30 minutes down a dirt road.
It's there, in her home, on warm and sunny afternoon, that she tells a story that she's only told three times in 20 years: first to a local judge, then to an American genocide researcher — and now.
The story begins in April 1994, at the start of the genocide of Tutsis carried out by Hutu militias called Interhamwe. As she walked down a road of recently torched houses, Mukankusi, a Hutu, met two Tutsi girls, age 15 and 17. The girls had been her neighbors before she married and moved away.
"They seemed to be confused, not knowing where to go," Mukakusi remembers. "They had a few things folded in their hands."
The girls told her to go back home.
And she told them: "Come with me."
Mukankusi, now 42, knew the act of hiding Tutsis was punishable by death. But in that moment, it didn't matter.
"I knew these girls. I saw how much pain they were in," she says. "I was ready to die with them, whatever would happen to me or my family."
Mukankusi also brought another neighbor, a 55-year-old woman. She hid them behind her house, in a pit for making banana beer. Then her husband came home.
"Of course I was a little bit worried that he might give them in, like most other men were doing," Mukankusi says. "But he saw that I had loved these people. If he betrayed these people, he would have betrayed me as well."