Journal of Sacred Work

Genocide is the fruit of hatred.
   -Immaculee Illabagiza

   Each member of the coat-and-tied, finely dressed crowd was wondering the same thing about the speaker: could they have endured what she did? All of us wanted to think that we were as strong as she is. But I, for one, doubted my own strength. Immaculee was a victim of the horror of the Hutu effort to extinguish the Tutsis. In 100 days, one million were murdered. Immaculee survived by hiding, along with seven other women, in a three by four foot bathroom for ninety-one days. She is a sort of modern day Anne Frank except that, happily, she survived, whereas Anne, of course, perished in Auschwitz.
    "There’s a way for each of us to reach God," she told us. And in her telling, we sensed that she had found that pathway herself…

   Immaculee’s story is one of those seering reports that etch themselves into our minds. How could she endure being packed like a sardine for three months in total silence, living amid the voices of soldiers trying to find her and kill her? "I wanted to run away from my mind," she told us. And yet the experience seems to have burned into her heart the very imprint of Love’s presence.

   It appears that only traumatic events are able to move us from our lazy patterns of thinking.
   On the other side of hell, or perhaps in the middle of it, Immaculee found a grace which is apparent before she opens her mouth. She exudes the charisma of a hard won holiness. "What makes me smile?" she asks. "It is because I know that God exists."
   A powerful proof of her close encounter with Love comes when she speaks of confronting one of the captured men who had killed her friends. "You can do anything you want to him," the guards told her about the imprisoned Hutu in front of her, her arch enemy. "You can kick him, punch him, scar him. It’s fine with us." So what did she do in the presence of her enemy?
   "All I could think," she said, "was that I wanted to free him of thinking of me as an obstacle between him and God…As people, we need to love each other."
   Immaculee weighed only 65 pounds when she finally found freedom. She found something even more important than life. She now experiences a peculiar and powerful kind of grace after suffering humiliation, pain, starvation, and near death.
   Can we find such grace without such suffering? I doubt it. Yet, most caregivers live next to suffering every day. And on some days, perhaps this suffering brings them the kind of grace that Immaculee exudes all the time.
   After Immaculee’s speech to an audience of about four hundred, I watched people waiting impatiently in a long line for valets to bring them their cars. They had, perhaps, already forgotten the message of the woman, still inside signing books inside, who waited for months trapped in a 3 x 4 bathroom-cell with seven other women. Immaculee waited not for her car, but for Love’s rescue. And her wait was not in vain.

-Erie Chapman