Gitega, Burundi
October 21, 2009
Not in Burundi
With a hardened face and chiseled features, Mathias looked older than his age of 23. Born to a farming family in Muramvya—a town on the route between Bujumbura and Gitega—Mathias grew up extremely poor. This hardship limited his ability to attend school and so Mathias devised another way to work his way up and out: he joined the FNL in 2005 in the hopes that someday members of the rebel forces would be integrated into the Burundian army where, he explained, he wanted to be an officer.
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