Rusesabagina was born in 1954. He was one of nine children born to a Hutu father, a respected community elder named Thomas Rupfure, and a Tutsi mother in Murama, Rwanda. Although stating that he grew up poor, in a "house ... made of mud and sticks" and "without shoes", Rusesabagina described his upbringing as "solidly middle class by the standards of Africa in the 1950s". Rusesabagina's parents sent him to school in a town near Gitwe run by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. By the age of 13, he was fluent in English and French, as well as his native Kinyarwanda.