Why did the women come, she asked her mother. Why didn't they eat at their own home? They can't go home, her mother explained - something about them being all the same tribe. ''You wouldn't understand,'' her father said. Soon enough, she would.

The women came by, but the family barely left the house. The vegetable garden in the backyard was almost empty, but one day a kindly neighbour offered goat meat and sombe, a staple for many people in Rwanda.

The cooking began in the morning, the smell drifting through the simple three-bedroom house in the capital, Kigali. Marie Clarie, then just 9 years of age, had two older brothers, an older sister and younger brother. She watched one of the visiting women braid her hair in the sitting room.

She complained to her mother. ''I'm feeling hungry, I want to eat.'' Her mother sighed. Go fetch your brothers. They had been playing outside.

The boys had gone. But the street was full of people. Men with machetes, guns, heavy planks of wood.

Marie Claire Mukayiranga pauses at this point in her story to take a breath, and when she begins again her voice is a whisper. She is remembering the horror 20 years ago, when her country turned on itself in the worst way imaginable. The act of genocide.

Over 100 horror-filled days in 1994, the United Nations estimates that 800,000 Tutsi died in a campaign by Hutu extremists to cling to power. Entire families were butchered and women were systematically raped.

What marked the violence as extraordinary was the sheer ordinariness of the attacks. Thousands died from machete wounds, hacked to death.

Rwanda's population of 7 million people convulsed, with the UN estimating about 200,000 people participated in the genocide. Millions of refugees spilled into the region - sparking a humanitarian catastrophe that has continued almost all the years since.

Marie Claire lives in Melbourne now, having moved from Africa only a few months ago with her partner, an Australian. She is yet to find work, but is eager to make a new home. ''A good future,'' she says. But at night, she can't help but remember the past. Marie Claire has never told this story in public before.

''I didn't talk with my friends, I didn't like to talk. I just kept it in my heart.''

She remembers seeing the soldiers' backs. Three men with guns and five more, brutal militia known as the Interahamwe. She could hear her father, an architect, and the two women visitors squatting in a line in front of the house and remonstrating with the men. Her mother too.

''My ID is lost,'' her father insisted, but the soldiers scoffed.

''You're lying, you threw it away because you're Tutsi.''

She could see her father's face. She could see his wide eyes, darting from side to side, as if to tell her to run. But she didn't understand.

Marie Claire didn't know that for months beforehand hate-filled radio broadcasts in Rwanda had urged Hutus to ''crush the cockroaches'', the derisive name they gave Tutsis.

How could she have understood that decades before, Belgian colonists had adopted bizarre pseudo-genetics to divide the country's people, despite their common language.

The Belgians believed the minority Tutsis to be a taller and thinner specimen of native, with fine thin noses, smaller feet and a European-like sensibility. The colonists regarded the shorter, broad-nosed and flat-footed Hutus as less worthy. Each group had their tribe branded on their identification cards. Hutus believed Tutsis were given special treatment and resentment festered.

Marie Claire could not be expected to know that by this day Hutus had already drawn up a list of those Tutsis to be killed, crude weapons stockpiled and a terrible plan hatched. Explicit warnings by peacekeepers in the country to UN headquarters of ''anti-Tutsi extermination'' months beforehand had been ignored.

Marie Claire also couldn't have known that on April 6, 1994, about four days before the soldiers came to her house, a rocket had ripped apart the presidential plane as it came to land in Kigali, killing the country's Hutu leader, Juvenal Habyarimana.

Hutu extremists blamed Tutsi rebels and opened the gates of hell.

''It was the first time I saw a gun,'' Marie Claire says. ''I just didn't know what was going on. I just didn't know.''

She saw the blood spurt out. The soldiers had asked her father if he was ready to die, then shot him in the chest. They gunned down the two visiting women, one clutching her two-year-old daughter.

Marie Claire ran and a man struck at her with a machete. Already she had a scar on her right cheek from two years earlier when a deranged neighbour cut her, but this time the machete missed. Bullets hit a tree as she sprinted down the road.

She again pauses in her story. ''I didn't have anywhere to go.''

Marie Claire made it to the home of a girlfriend from school - a Hutu - in tears and hearing the echo of gunshots across the city. Her refuge there lasted just a couple of hours. Her friend's father knew of the trouble at the house and told Marie Claire to leave.

As night closed in, she crept home. She saw the bloody bodies, and a woman shuffling nearby, singing Latin like at church. It was her mother, beaten and dazed. ''Mama, it's Marie Claire,'' she said. ''Help me,'' was all her mother could answer.

''My mother, she didn't tell me what they did to her,'' Marie Claire says.

But she knows that after the soldiers shot her father they took her mother into the house and pulled violently at her eyelids and beat her around the ears. Doubtless, they did more.

They trashed the house and urinated on the food they had prepared for lunch. One soldier told Marie Claire's mother she would be next to die. But he was too tired today from killing. The mother, he hissed, was to be number 45.

The neighbour who had given the family goat meat and sombe found Marie Claire and her mother shivering with terror in their home. He said he would help, but said they must leave immediately. (Marie Claire's older sister had hidden with her younger brother as the soldiers arrived and they had managed to escape.)

But Marie Claire's mother didn't want to leave her dead husband just lying in the road. ''The dogs will eat him.'' The vegetable patch at the back of the house became a shallow grave.

They slipped outside into the dark and crept down the road with scarves over their heads to hide their Tutsi features. They hid in a small ditch, but a woman who had heard noises went to investigate and recognised Marie Claire's mother who had worked in the local hospital. She would shelter them- reluctantly.

She led them out back to a tiny, airless room with a door that could be locked. Inside the family crouched and listened to the crackle of gunfire as the days stretched into weeks.

But there was a moment of joy in the midst of all the madness. The two older brothers had hidden at a teacher's house and were given help to find their mother.

But back in the small room, food was running out. The woman concealing the family could only offer a bare handful of food each day, and told them they would soon need to leave.

There was one other option - a terrible risk - that involved Marie Claire getting to the hospital where her mother had worked and asking for help. ''That Marie Claire,'' the woman said. ''She doesn't look so Tutsi face. She can go out.''

Marie Claire's mother protested that her young daughter would never find the way, but finally relented. They bought a pair of shoes to cover nine year-old Marie Claire's tiny feet so that the men with machetes would not recognise them as belonging to a Tutsi.

They inserted a folded note inside the sole of one shoe. If the men stop you, lie, her mother told her, keep your nostrils open, don't look at the bodies. Are you sure you know the way?

''I went out and it was so scary, really scary,'' Marie Claire says.

She left early in the morning, about 7am. There were barriers across the streets. The Interahamwe often fuelled their bloody rampage with drink late into the night, spurred on by the hate radio. They milled around at the roadblocks. It took her about an hour to reach the hospital.

A woman there recognised Marie Claire, shocked to see her alive. After handing over the letter, she was given some food to take back to her family and told to go back home a different way.

A little cash was tucked back into her shoe. In the weeks ahead, with her feet covered, she would make this dangerous trek another four or five times.

But the family's saviour, the woman with the tiny locked room, was becoming their jailer. The girl must do more, the woman insisted.

So the girl with the not-so-Tutsi face was again sent outside. The road out front led to the Kigali cemetery, and she was to sell cassava flour to those passing by. Soon Marie Claire would be sent out everyday, to sell flour and sweet potato. And all the while, at a barrier just down the road, the Interahamwe checked people's identity cards.

''Every time they killed the people, I closed my eyes,'' Marie Claire says.

Trucks rattled by piled with bodies on the way to the cemetery. Some corpses bled, others were rotting.

By now it was sometime in May, perhaps June, and one night the woman who had hidden the family suddenly declared they must leave. The next morning the woman was gone - the family still locked in the room.

Marie Claire found the woman's daughter and convinced her to give her the key. The family emerged in shock. ''It looked like the whole of Rwanda was passing one way.''

The crowd massed before a bridge, a queue of sorts where people tried to cross. Below in the surging water, swollen, colourless bodies floated by. Could they be Western, people wondered, until someone said bodies turned white in water.

''You kids, you think you're going to survive this?'' a stranger asked Marie Claire and her brothers and sisters.

The huge crowd might have been the beginnings of the drive by the Interahamwe to flee the advance by Tutsi rebels. The Rwandan Patriotic Front had been on the offensive, attempting to stop the killing, while the rest of the world quibbled about how to respond. Years later, Bill Clinton, US president at the time of the genocide, conceded 300,000 lives might have been saved had the world acted sooner.

Hiding among a herd of cows, Marie Claire and her two brothers crossed the bridge. An elderly man stopped them from following the crowd, and after hiding overnight, they made their way back to Kigali through a forest. They had earlier been separated from their mother and with the help of their uncle found her hiding in another house.

Eventually the Tutsi fighters rescued them and the 100-day ordeal ended.

As the girl grew up, Marie Claire began to smile again. A love of traditional dance helped her relax. She sang African music and decided to see the world.

Two decades later, she wants the chance to thank her rescuers. The family had been losing hope. ''It was really the end.''

Daniel Flitton is senior correspondent.