When a plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down on April 6, 1994, the human cost proved far greater than the fatalities on board. The crash served as the catalyst for the Rwandan genocide, which caused 800,000 deaths over the following 100 days.

The Canadian Red Cross joined the international effort to assist over 1.9 million refugees who fled to neighbouring countries, as well as providing food and relief supplies to over 1 million internally displaced persons and repairing the sanitation and water infrastructure. When the genocide subsided in July 1994, the Red Cross deployed six delegates (including Pat Laberge, whose mission duffle bag is depicted here) on an initial three-month mission. By January 1996, a larger group was sent to assist the return of refugees from Goma, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of the Congo) to their homes within Rwanda. 

One of the crucial roles the Red Cross assisted with was tracing children left on their own amid the crisis. Over 47,000 Rwandan youth were reunited with their families. To give a sense of the volume of tracing work, between January 1995 and June 1996 over 4.6 million messages were forwarded by the International Committee of the Red Cross.