Keep hope, faith in God, Rwanda refugee says at conference

Submitted on September 10, 2009

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Joseph Kenny

“No matter how bad things can be, don’t give up on hope.”

Immaculee Ilibagiza’s advice comes from experience. During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda she and seven other women spent 91 days huddled silently in a cramped bathroom.

With members of the Tutsi ethnic group like herself being hunted down, she hid with the others in the room in a Hutu Episcopal priest’s home. Though Hutu gangs repeatedly came to search the house, they missed the refugees each time. Ilibagiza emerged weighing just 65 pounds and found out that her family had been brutally murdered, with the exception of a brother who was out of the country.

Ilibagiza told her story Sept. 5 at a national meeting of the St. Vincent de Paul Society USA in St. Louis.
Rather than succumbing to rage, she turned to prayer. She found solace and peace and eventually the ability to forgive her tormentors and her family’s murderers.

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