KIGALI, Rwanda -- To get as far away as possible from her former life as a nun, Bernadette Kayitesi got married five years ago and had a son. The wedding, she noted, was at a registry, not a church. She even changed her first name from Marie-Bernard -- "that was my nun name" -- to leave no doubt in her own mind that this was anything but a fresh start.

Kayitesi left the Benedictines after the genocide, married and had a son, Clement, who was born in 2000.

Kayitesi is seeking refuge in the temporal world, which to her has every appearance of being superior to the life she had chosen as a nun of the Benedictine Order, sequestered away in the monastery at Sovu, in southern Rwanda.

The 1994 genocide stripped her of any illusions of the holy community of sisters that she had imagined when she entered the order in 1986.

"I thought this was a joyful place to be, a hopeful place to be, where I could serve God," she says, holding on to her 4-year-old son, Clement Gasangwa, in their Kigali home one recent evening. "I became a nun expecting that I would be in a place of sisters in the faith, of family members. But it did not turn out that way."

Ten years ago, as the government mobilized the majority Hutu to kill all members of the minority Tutsi in furtherance of a goal of a Hutu-only country, many Tutsi who lived in hilltop villages around the monastery, just outside the town of Butare, sought refuge on the grounds of the monastery. Among them were two of Kayitesi's brothers.

But the mother superior, acting as many religious leaders did, called in the killers instead. Kayitesi's brothers were butchered, along with about 7,000 others. Nine of the 36 nuns also were killed.

"This was a total betrayal of everything I believed in," she says. "It totally upset everything I had assumed."

Her shaken faith was delivered a final blow after the surviving nuns were evacuated to the headquarters of their order in Belgium at the end of the genocide. There, an embarrassed church hierarchy reacted to the scandal by rallying behind the accused mother superior, Gertrude Mukangango, and her deputy, Sister Julienne Kisito. The nuns denouncing them, including Kayitesi, were ostracized and many of them returned to Rwanda angry and disappointed.

In August 1995, the order sent a white priest, the Rev. Andre Comblin, who had once lived in Rwanda, to try to persuade the nuns to write a statement absolving the mother superior of any responsibility for the monastery massacre. They refused.

"This persuaded me that there was nothing about God going on here," Kayitesi says.

With attempts to cover up for the mother superior fast crumbling, Belgian authorities arrested her and Sister Kisito and held them in jail facing allegations of genocide. In June 2002, both were finally convicted and sentenced to 15 and 12 years respectively.

In January 1996, five months after the visit from Comblin, Kayitesi finally left the order and moved to Kigali to stay for a while with her sister, supporting herself with petty trading in consumer goods.

"When I walked out of there I felt a certain relief," she says, "but also sadness that what I had dedicated my life to was coming to an end."

She met Onesphore Gasangwa, who worked at an orphanage, after an aunt introduced them in 1998. A year later, they married. In May 2000, Clement was born. His mother was 41 then. While Kayitesi runs her stall in the local market, her husband is studying full-time for a degree in sociology.

Their home gives every appearance of a life restarted. It is sparsely furnished, but spacious and neatly kept. The only decorations on the walls are images of Jesus, suffering the children to come to him.

This new life, Kayitesi says, suits her just fine. "Compared with what others suffer, I am doing very well," she says. "I have not lost everything."

For this reason, she says, she clings to some faith that Christianity transcends its earthly representatives, that God remains good despite everything that happened. So she goes to church on Sunday, with Gasangwa and their little boy, close enough to her religion but, perhaps, not enough to be singed again.

She says she wished a way could be found to compensate the survivors, but that suing the church might be wishful thinking. "How can you sue the church?" she says, a tone of awe noticeable in her voice. "What court do you take the church to? The church is too powerful. It is beyond the reach of people like us."