Mayange became Rwanda's first Millennium Village last year, part of a program between the government and donors. The Rwandan government plans 29 more villages, one in every district.

The villages test the idea that $75 per poor person a year can lead to self-sufficiency in five years. They also show that peace and prosperity go together — the World Bank has long concluded that the best way to predict civil war is to look at a country's economy.

For Xavier and Cecile, Mayange is hope. As Cecile laid bricks for the new village alongside Xavier, she slowly learned to accept that he was only a pawn in the genocide. It helped that they went to the same church, the church where Cecile's family once hid.

She is still not quite sure how or when they became friends, as she sits in her four-room brick house with a tin roof that Xavier helped build.

"A sense of closeness would begin to form between us — we just found ourselves together," she says, smiling at how inadequate the explanation sounds. The strength of her will is clear — it is almost as if she is willing peace and believes any less would be a betrayal of her faith and her village.

Food production in Mayange has now tripled, and malaria cases have dropped 75 percent. More children are in school, and women's groups get good money to weave baskets that end up in department stores across North America.

Jacqueline Nyiramayonde, a genocide survivor on the project's board, says villagers are too busy making money to think much about the past. She sits like a relaxed chief executive in the living room of the new house she built with profits from her farm.

"We have a lot of meetings for this project, and through these meetings ... we have actually come to see each other as brothers and sisters," she says. "This way of living has helped us get rid of our hatred and anger. I don't know how it happened, but one day I realized, these people are my friends."

Mayange and Rwanda still live in the dark shadow of the first genocide in modern African history. Across Rwanda, there are Hutu killers who remain bitter and Tutsi survivors who will not or cannot forgive. Just three miles from Mayange in Nyamata Mission Church, the bones from 10,000 genocide victims are carefully stacked as a memorial to what few here can forget.

But hope lies in the economics. Rwanda's economy is growing by at least 6 percent a year, and Fatuma Ndangiza knows how much peace depends on a full stomach and a watertight roof.

"Sometimes you don't motivate people with words alone," says Ndangiza, who runs Rwanda's National Unity and Reconciliation Commission. "If someone is hungry or they don't have shelter or they don't have the basics, you cannot go far in changing their minds."

Hope also lies in the demographics. About 40 percent of Rwandans were born after the genocide, like the children of Xavier and Cecile. These children live in a Rwanda without ethnic identity cards, where it is no longer acceptable to identify yourself as Tutsi or Hutu.

Xavier is determined that his children will grow up in peace and tries to pay for his past by helping Cecile and going to church. Both Xavier and Cecile agree that people can only move on from the past if they have a future and that they need what he calls "security of the stomach."

"If your stomach is empty, you will have to think of ways to fill it," Xavier says with a sudden and unexpected seriousness. "And that will lead to disruption."