THE two women were delighted to be offered a lift towards their home. The mother and her teenage daughter with bundles on their heads had walked eight days from a refugee camp in Zaire and were now just five miles from home.
More than 30 miles inside Rwanda they said they were excited but a little afraid. Afraid of what? Afraid of being killed, the older woman said.
Two miles from their home village, rain and mud made the road impassable. They set off again on foot, excited but a little afraid.
There have been no reports yet of any overtly hostile reception for returnees, but the process has only started. Those who find their homes occupied can give two months' notice to the occupants to quit, according to a law designed to ease the return. Property disputes are certain to follow.
But most of those who arrived home since last Friday went to relatively welcoming villages. This area of north-west Rwanda always had an even larger Hutu majority than the rest of the country. There were few Tutsis and therefore relatively few killings. Many of these Hutu returnees have family members to go back home to.
In villages where there were massacres and where there is a significant Tutsi presence, there may be more problems. But so far there have not been reports of revenge killings.
Back on the road home, the tension is sometimes palpable. On Monday night the refugees outside the Nkamira transit camp, 25 miles from the border crossing at Gisenyi, fell silent as a truckload of singing RPF (the official Rwandan army) soldiers went by. Their song was proclaiming victory over the Hutu forces.
The same night a senior figure in Rwanda's National Committee for Repatriation arrived in the Red Cross Federation's medical aid post at the border crossing and said that everyone must leave. There was to be no delay in the return home.
Protests from aid workers that some were too sick to move went unheeded. One of the men who arrived with the senior figure started hitting people with a stick. The Red Cross agreed to closeup, as did the British organisation Merlin, which also operated a medical post at the border.
On the road yesterday, the RPF presence was generally low-key and soldiers were courteous to the returnees. At a couple of points, however, soldiers marshalling queues for water and medical attention shouted and hit people with sticks as if they were keeping prisoners in line rather than welcoming their fellow citizens home.
The return has been slowed by the almost complete lack of food on the route. For two years the UNHCR has urged the refugees to come home, saying that there would be food, water and medical attention on the route.
Outside the Nkamira transit camp thousands of refugees wait for food. This was supposed to be the point where refugees would stay overnight to be fed and receive medical attention. Instead they stare through the wire at the empty UN World Food Programme stores. Many appear determined to go no further until they are fed.
UNHCR plans to distribute food to people once they reach their home communes but a short drive off Rwanda's main roads yesterday showed the impossibility of that. It is the rainy season and the country's dirt roads are regularly turned into mud baths. Having failed to provide food on the route, the UNHCR will have great difficulty in providing food in people's homes.