Marguerite Barankitse

Marguerite Barankitse was born in 1956 in Ruyigi in eastern Burundi, and trained as a teacher. She was a Tutsi in a country where Hutu and Tutsi had been killing each other in cycles for decades, and by the early 1990s she had already adopted seven children from both communities, which some of her neighbours found unforgivable.

In October 1993, after the assassination of the Hutu president, Tutsi militia came to the Catholic diocese in Ruyigi where she worked and where Hutu families had taken refuge. She was tied up and made to watch as seventy-two people were killed. She had hidden a group of children, and by pleading and paying she kept them alive. There were twenty-five of them, and she had nowhere to take them but an abandoned school building.

That was the beginning of Maison Shalom. It became not an orphanage but something closer to a town: houses in which older children looked after younger ones, farms, workshops, a school, a hospital, a cinema and a swimming pool, on the principle that children who had seen the worst deserved not charity but ordinary joy. Tens of thousands of children passed through it over twenty years, Hutu, Tutsi and Twa together.

In 2015 she spoke out against the president's decision to cling to power, a warrant was issued for her arrest and she fled to Rwanda, where she began again with Burundian refugees. She received the first Aurora Prize in 2016.