Rosamond Carr

     Rosamond Halsey Carr, 94, an American expatriate who transformed her Rwandan flower shed into a refuge for children orphaned by genocide, died Sept. 29 at her home near Gisenyi, in the mountains of northwest Rwanda. Her niece Ann Howard Halsey said the cause of death was possibly pneumonia.

     Rosamond Carr arrived in Africa in 1949. She bought a 270-acre flower plantation called Mugongo and moved into an ivy-covered stone cottage and planted a formal English garden.

     Rosamond Carr had been living in Rwanda for more than four decades when, on April 6, 1994, a plane carrying the Rwandan president was shot down over the capital, Kigali. The assassination set in motion the mass slaughter of ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus orchestrated by the Hutu-dominated government. Carr tried to protect her Tutsi neighbors from roving bands of Hutu killers. She tried to stay, recalled David Rawson, U.S. ambassador to Rwanda at the time. "Belgian paratroopers knocked on her door and forcefully convinced her she ought to leave," he said.

     Matthew Bannister talks to Rosamond Carr's friend Charlene Jendry, Fredrick who went to Roz's orphanage and Ann Howard Halsey, Roz's neice, who co-wrote Roz's autobiography ' Land of a Thousand Hills: My Life in Rwanda' extracts of which are read by Liza Ross.

     After four months away, Rosamond returned to her farm, and at age 82 converted a flower-drying shed into an orphanage for 40 children.  This was the beginnings of the Imbabazi Orphanage in 1994.

     Rosamond Carr was born in New Jersey in 1912 . She died on September 29th 2006.