As an office clerk in her 20s in Japan, Mami Rudasingwa never imagined herself as someone who would go on to help thousands of people in Rwanda with missing limbs.
Rudasingwa, 49, founded the nonprofit organization Mulindi Japan One Love Project in 1996 with her Rwandan husband, Gatera, and has since made and supplied artificial limbs for free for roughly 6,000 amputees in the East African nation, which went through years of civil conflict.
"Certainly there were rough times, but I have always been encouraged by the smiles people in Rwanda show when they put on artificial limbs," she said, looking back on the last 16 years.