Diocese of Lafayette
Rwandan genocide survivor shares message of hope
Immaculee Ilibagiza signs a copy of her book after her Feb. 16 presentation at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church in Carmel. (Photo by Lisa Wilson-Cotillier)
By Lisa Wilson-Cotillier The Catholic Moment
Nothing hurts us more than a lack of love.”
— Immaculee Ilibagiza
CARMEL — Hope can be found, even in the darkest of places.
New York Times best-selling author and Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculee Ilibagiza shared that message with hundreds at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Church Feb. 16. “What amazes me and gives me strength is the saying that God never gives you anything you can’t handle,” she said. “God will give you the grace to endure it.”
Ilibagiza recalled the day the holocaust began. Tensions between ethnic majority Hutus and minority Tutsis erupted when Rwandan President Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu, died after his plane was shot down above Kigali airport in April 1994. Within hours, Hutu rebels and militia began killing Tutsi civilians. No one was spared. “Easter vacation that year changed everything in my life,” Ilibagiza said, recalling being awakened early on the morning after the president’s death. She was told that she would have to go into hiding.
My father told me that I had to leave, that I was not safe and that he and my mother did not want anything to happen to me,” she said. “He told me I had to go to a neighbor’s house to hide. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave my family, but my father told me not to worry — that it would just be for a few days and that everything would be OK. He handed me a rosary. It was the last gift he would give me.” She went to the neighbor’s house as her father had directed. There she hid in a 4-foot by 3-foot bathroom with six other women and a young child for three months.
We were told not to speak to each other, not to say a word and not to flush the water unless water was flushed in the other bathroom in the house,” Ilibagiza said. As she huddled in the cramped room, rebels began searching every home in the area for Tutsis. She remembered them coming into the house where she was hidden.
They were screaming, ‘Kill the cockroaches! Kill them all!’” she said. “How do you wait for someone to find you and kill you? It was so painful in my soul to wait for them. I remember praying to God. I remember saying, ‘God, you can do all things. You are almighty. Please don’t let them find me. Please save me.’” But a voice of doubt crept in. “The voice said, ‘Your God is not real,’” Ilibagiza said. “So I asked God to give me a sign.”
Just as her hiding place was about to be discovered, the rebels called off the search. “I knew it was God,” she said. “Only a miracle kept them from finding that door.”
As the days wore on, Ilibagiza said, “I prayed the rosary. The rosary became such a great prayer in my life. Over and over again, I would meditate on the Sorrowful Mysteries, and I found hope in the promise of eternity.” But still, she said, she held hatred in her heart for the killers. That loathing taunted and plagued her as she prayed.
I was angry about everything,” she said. “I was angry at the Hutus. Hate for them weighed heavy on me. I recall praying the Lord’s Prayer. I would come to the part in the prayer where we say, ‘Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us’ and I knew that I was lying every time I said it because I held so much hatred in my heart. I remember thinking, ‘I can’t live one more hour in this pain.’” Ilibagiza realized that for her prayers to be meaningful, she had to believe them.
I had to meditate on the words and really mean them, and that was not easy,” she said. “There was a battle going on in my heart and mind, because I did not know how to forgive the people who were killing. The searches didn’t stop. I remember meditating on the Sorrowful Mysteries and wrapping myself around the cross and begging Jesus, ‘Please don’t let them find me.’ I heard him say from the cross, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do’ and I surrendered for the first time in my life. In that moment, I let go of the anger. When I was able to let go, I felt like I had left the bathroom and entered paradise.” The day she was able to leave her hiding place, Ilibagiza learned that her mother, father, two of her three brothers, and many in her extended family had been killed. Forgiveness gave her peace, even as she faced great loss.
I mourned the loss of my family,” she said. “I still cry for them. For the first time I understood what it meant to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Today, Ilibagiza lives in New York City with her husband and two children. She travels the world to tell the story of her survival, which is detailed in her book Left to Tell.
I realized those many long days in that bathroom that we must choose love or hate,” she said. “If you truly believe you are God’s child, you will choose the side of love. You will want his people to unite.”
(Go to the website of The Catholic Moment) †