She escaped the genocide in Rwanda. Now, 27 years later, she can’t escape its politics.

In yoga classes, in downtown D.C. dance clubs, in her spreadsheet of the city’s newest restaurants that she and her 20-something friends frequent, Anaïse Kanimba found normalcy. And anonymity.

“Here in D.C., I am my authentic self,” she said. “It is my home now.”

In Washington, she isn’t the terrified orphan the world wept for in an Oscar-nominated movie. She isn’t the toddler hiding from a massacre while surviving on chicken feed after her parents were slaughtered. She isn’t the target of Rwandan spies hunting her famous family in Belgium. She isn’t Hutu or Tutsi.