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Gatebuke barely dodged death
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He was ordered to dig his own grave and wrote a letter to relatives that began, “I regret to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed.”Survival looked bleak for 14-year-old Claude Gatebuke during the Rwandan genocidal massacre of 1994. But Gatebuke’s life was spared just hours before he was scheduled to be murdered and he eventually sought refuge in Congo on his way to the United States.“People were getting killed with brutality as machetes and clubs were the weapons of choice,” said Gatebuke while addressing McMinnville’s Noon Rotary Club on Thursday. “People were massacred in stadiums and markets.