GISENYI was not designed to deal with hundreds of thousands of refugees. Expensive villas with well manicured hedges and climbing dog roses line the lakeside road from the border post with Zaire. Children splashed about in the water under yesterday's midday sun.
A few single gunshots could be heard from the direction of Goma, just three kilometres away in Zaire. Otherwise this beautiful upmarket African resort was quiet and peaceful.
Last week, however, the Zairean army fired several shells across the border into the town. Yesterday, another disturbance of Gisenyi's tranquillity suddenly seemed possible.
The rebels who have been fighting Zairean troops just across the border for several weeks declared a ceasefire, saying that it was to allow refugees who want to return home. If the fearful Hutus can at last be made return to Rwanda, many thousands are likely to pour through here.
Refugees are already trickling across into Gisenyi, but none is Hutu. Yesterday, three out of 35 on a UN bus from Gisenyi to a reception centre agreed to tell their stories.
Emmanuel Ndagano was six years old in 1959 when Hutu massacres of Tutsis drove his family out of Rwanda into Zaire. Yesterday, aged 43, violence and intimidation from the Zairean army forced him home again.
Two weeks ago, as the Tutsi Banyamulenge began advancing through eastern Zaire towards Goma, the authorities in the town registered all Tutsi citizens. They began to harass them. Finally they arrested Emmanuel and seven others and brought them to prison where they punched and kicked them regularly, he says.
Two days later the soldiers allowed Emmanuel escape from the prison after he bribed them. He hid in a banana plantation outside Goma for four days, finally crossing the border yesterday several kilometres away from the official crossing.
Well dressed Adidja Furaha (39) stood separated from the other refugees. She did not look at home, and she wasn't. A Zairean woman, she married a Rwandan Tutsi (also exiled in 1959) in her native Bukavu.
When the fighting began south of Bukavu her husband and nine children fled north. The Zairean troops in Bukavu were taking revenge on the Tutsi population for their losses further south.
Adidja stayed behind hoping to sell the house and its contents Tutsis are not allowed to own property, but she hoped to sell the house as a Zairean.
But the authorities were wise to her and to the identity of her husband. When she put the house on the market, it was confiscated. Adidja went north to Goma to follow her husband. When she got there, he had come here to Gisenyi. When she got here yesterday, he had gone to his original home area of Butare.
As a Zairean, she cannot follow him into Rwanda. He must come to collect her from the refugee camp.
Joseph Hitimana (51) crossed the border on Sunday night. A Rwandan Tutsi who has worked just over the border in Goma's Hotel du Grand Lac, armed men arrived at his house and began looting it earlier on Sunday. They were not Zairean soldiers, or Hutu militiamen, or Tots Banyamulenge, he says. "They were just bandits. I left them to loot everything. I walked to the border very fast."