Ufiteyezu Manzi David got emotional as he told his cousin how as a boy he escaped from the men who killed his family in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

The men chased him and his grandmother into a cattle shed, causing the frightened animals to run. The assailants, who also hoped to steal the livestock, ordered Manzi to round up the cows.

“I ran in the same direction the cows had gone, but I never returned,” he said. “Before I left, I saw them hack my grandmother with a machete.”

The horrific anecdote is part of Stories for Hope, a project that is helping to revive Rwanda’s storytelling tradition – one of the casualties of the genocide that killed 800,000 men, women and children in the central African nation.

Read more at Global Michigan