Prayer sustained me during genocide nightmare, Rwandan woman says

CALDWELL, N.J. (CNS) - Immaculee Ilibagiza knows what it is like to rely on the power of prayer.

With nothing other than rosary beads and prayer to sustain her, she survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide by hiding in a small bathroom with seven other women for 91 days. She lived through the systematic slaughter, when an estimated 800,000 people -- including most members of her family -- were brutally murdered in the central African nation. She told her story of survival to students at the campus of Dominican-run Caldwell College April 18, just two days after a lone gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., before turning the gun on himself. That massacre was a disturbing backdrop to Ilibagiza's presentation. "Many people cry out: Why is there so much evil in the world?" she said when asked to compare her experience with the shootings at Virginia Tech during the question-and-answer segment of the program. "Don't hate back. People must pray for each other," she said. "Prayer is the practice of love," she continued. "It can change the world. It sounds so simple, but it is true. Hold onto hope and find peace in your heart. Put your trust in God." Her survival account is chronicled in her book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, published last year. Ilibagiza, raised in a devout Catholic family and a member of the Tutsi ethnic group of Rwanda, was a college student when the genocide began. Amid the atrocity she embarked on an inward, spiritual journey clinging to her father's rosary beads that he gave her just before she went into hiding. But the soul-searching was not easy. "I had a fight within my heart," she said. "I had to find my strength. The killers were outside my door. How do you forgive killers? There were days that I was sweating because of my anger. "I thought to myself: 'This is what it feels like to hate.' I started to say the rosary and felt the love of God. I forgave the killers and I started to pray for them. I know it's wrong what they did, but in my heart I wish them to change and find the truth," she said. When order was re-established in Rwanda in July 1994, Ilibagiza emerged from three months of seclusion looking like a skeleton. She regained her health and found employment with a local United Nations development office. She later married and today has two children. One of her brothers also survived the genocide and today he is a doctor in Senegal. Ilibagiza acknowledged there is a spiritually therapeutic quality for herself and her audiences in the presentations she gives speaking out against the atrocities in Rwanda. "I survived a genocide 13 years ago, but you must keep surviving. I'm a witness. If I can do this, then so be it," she said, referring to her mission as a public speaker.

Enjoy our RCIA class? Pay it Forward

---

Copyright (c) 2007 Catholic News Service/U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops