Immaculée Ilibagiza - A Spiritual Awakening in the Midst of Genocide

Immaculée Ilibagiza was a twenty-four-year-old college student in the spring of 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda erupted. At home to spend the Easter holidays with her devout Catholic family, she sought refuge, at the insistence of her parents, in the nearby home of a pastor. Ninety-one days later, she emerged from the minuscule bathroom she had been hiding in with seven other women in near total silence, her body emaciated and her soul on fire with an unshakable faith in God.

Ilibagiza speaks with editors Joel Pitney and Carol Raphael about her extraordinary ordeal and the transcendence she discovered through continuous prayer, self-confrontation, and a tenacious refusal to succumb to negativity and despair. She describes both the terrifying horror of machete-wielding killers searching for her within inches of her hiding place and the unimaginable joy she experienced in prayerful communion with God for up to twenty hours a day. In a story that stretches the boundaries of good and evil beyond all recognition, Ilibagiza reveals the indomitable power of the human spirit.

BIO

Immaculée Ilibagiza was born in Rwanda and studied electronic and mechanical engineering at the National University. She lost most of her family in the 1994 genocide. Four years later she emigrated to the United States and began working for the United Nations in New York City. Now a full-time public speaker and writer, she is the author of Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust and two new books, Led by Faith: Rising from the Ashes of the Rwandan Genocide and Our Lady of Kiboho: Mary Speaks to the World from the Heart of Africa.

Ilibagiza was awarded the 2007 Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Reconciliation and Peace and is the recipient of honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Saint John’s University. In 2007 she founded the Left to Tell Charitable Fund to support orphans in Rwanda.