Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (20 page)

AS THE WAR DRAGGED ON, THE PASTOR BECAME INCREASINGLY worried about what he was going to do with us. “If the fighting lasts many months more, I’ll run out of food to feed you. It will be impossible for me to keep you,” he fretted.

I remembered the gun that had been slung over his shoulder and wondered what he planned to do when the food ran out. I couldn’t allow myself to believe that he’d turn into a killer—not after risking his life to save us. But I certainly knew that he was capable of kicking us out of the house in the middle of the night, just as he’d done to Augustine and Vianney. I also knew that the countryside was crawling with killers and that we wouldn’t last an hour outside of the bathroom.

The pastor must have thought a lot about it, and finally he decided that he needed God’s help. One night he asked us to pray with him that God would help the government soldiers win the war. We just looked at him . . . didn’t he realize what he was asking us to do? I couldn’t believe how insensitive he’d become to our suffering.

Nevertheless, we were in a tight spot—what else could we do? We all put our hands together and pretended to pray with him. What I actually prayed for were the souls of the thousands and thousands of Tutsis who had already been murdered. Then I prayed for the killers to come into God’s powerful light and be changed by His love:
Touch
them with Your Divine love, God. Only then will they drop their machetes
and fall to their knees. Please, God move them to stop their slaughter.
Forgive them.

I also prayed that the pastor would not grow too callous toward us, that his heart would not harden at the sight of us, and that he would remember that we were human beings.

As soon as we’d finished praying with him, Pastor Murinzi shocked us by revealing what he intended to do with us after the war: “There will be no Tutsis left in Rwanda once the killing is over, so I’ll have to smuggle you out of here without anyone seeing. And you’ll have to go someplace where no one knows you, where no one can find out that I was the one who hid you during the war.”

It turns out that he planned to send us to live on a remote island 50 miles away in the middle of Lake Kivu to become wives of Abashi tribesmen!

We looked at each other in disbelief. The Abashi were a primitive tribe who lived deep in the forest and had virtually no contact with the outside world. They had no schools, churches, or even jobs; they wore no clothes except loincloths; and they ate only what they could forage or hunt in the forest. Rwandan parents scared unruly children into behaving by threatening to send them to live with the Abashi—it was like being sent to live with the bogeyman. Just about the worst thing you could tell a Rwandan lady was that she’d marry an Abashi man.

“What else is left for you? There is nothing to discuss,” the pastor said with finality, and left us to ponder our fate.

I HATED THE WAY THE PASTOR HAD COME TO THINK OF US, but I could understand his mind-set. If the Hutu extremists finished what they started, we’d be the last living Tutsis in Rwanda—we’d be orphans in a hostile homeland.

But I didn’t feel like an orphan at all. I’d been praying continually for weeks, and my relationship with God was deeper than I’d ever imagined possible. I felt like the daughter of the kindest, most powerful king the world had ever known. I surrendered my thoughts to God every day when I retreated to that special place in my heart to communicate with Him. That place was like a little slice of heaven, where my heart spoke to His holy spirit, and His spirit spoke to my heart. He assured me that while I lived in His spirit, I’d never be abandoned, never be alone, and never be harmed.

I sat stone-still on that dirty floor for hours on end, contemplating the purity of His energy while the force of His love flowed through me like a sacred river, cleansing my soul and easing my mind. Sometimes I felt as though I were floating above my body, cradled in God’s mighty palm, safe in His loving hand. In my mind, I heard myself speaking in exotic languages I’d never heard before—I instinctively knew that I was praising God’s greatness and love.

During my waking hours I was in constant communication with God, praying and meditating for 15 to 20 hours every day. I even dreamed of Jesus and the Virgin Mary during the few hours I slept.

In the midst of the genocide, I’d found my salvation. I knew that my bond with God would transcend the bathroom, the war, and the holocaust . . . it was a bond I now knew would transcend life itself.

I lifted my heart to the Lord, and He filled it with His love and forgiveness. Being in that bathroom had become a blessing for which I’d be forever thankful. Even if my parents had perished in the bloodshed outside, I would never be an orphan. I’d been born again in the bathroom and was now the loving daughter of God, my Father.

ONLY THE YOUNGEST OF PASTOR MURINZI’S TEN CHILDREN, his son Lechim and daughter Dusenge, had been living with him when we arrived. But as the war progressed, his other kids returned home, and the house began to fill up. It became more difficult for the pastor to watch over us alone—so after five weeks or so of keeping our existence a carefully guarded secret, he unburdened himself to Lechim and Dusenge, the two people he trusted most in the world.

Lechim was a good man with a wonderful heart, and Dusenge was a very kind girl who’d been a dear friend of mine for a long time. I’d overheard them speaking on many occasions and knew that they were truly appalled by what was being done to the Tutsis.

The pastor told us that he was bringing them to see us, and when he opened the door, all I saw in his children’s eyes was pity and compassion. Dusenge greeted me kindly, while Lechim took my hand in his and held it tightly. “Oh, Immaculée,” he whispered before falling silent. We’d last seen each other on the day I went into hiding, and we couldn’t find the words to describe what had happened since. He squeezed my hand and said, “I’m so happy that you’re hiding here . . . thank God my family can do something for you. We will keep you safe.”

His kindness reminded me of the good feelings of our innocent relationship years ago. I was coming to see that God created no coincidences—He’d brought Lechim and me together years ago so that now I could be saved while hiding in his house.

Seeing my old friends was a great comfort to me, even though neither had news of my family or the whereabouts of my boyfriend, John. (It was difficult to communicate in the country because phone lines had been down since the beginning of the war.) But Lechim and Dusenge did bring some tenderness to the bathroom, and on occasion, the rare pleasure of a simple cup of tea.

Pastor Murinzi may have written us off as orphans, but his youngest children had adopted us.

LATE ONE NIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF MAY, the bathroom door flew open. Suddenly, two young Interahamwe killers towered above us. We flinched, expecting a machete blow at any second, but then we heard the pastor’s voice whispering that we should sit still and not worry. A moment later we realized that the figures weren’t killers at all, but two Tutsi women desperate to join our hidden sorority.

We were happy to see two other living, breathing Tutsis, but we couldn’t find a place for them to sit. The pastor shoved them into the room, and they fell on top of us. “Don’t make any noise,” he reminded us again, and closed the door. The girls’ faces were just visible in the dim light seeping through the window. We tried talking to them in our sign language, but of course, they didn’t know what we were saying. We risked a few minutes of hushed conversation to find out where they’d come from and what was happening in the outside world.

Their names were Malaba and Solange: Malaba was about my age—I’d seen her a couple of times while growing up but didn’t know her well, and Solange was a teenager whom I’d never met before. Unbeknownst to us, Marianne, one of the pastor’s elder daughters, had been hiding the two girls at her home in northern Rwanda since the genocide had started. The civil war with the rebels was fiercest in the north, and the Hutu extremists were looking everywhere for Tutsi spies. Marianne had a reputation for being kind and compassionate, which made her highly suspicious in the eyes of the extremists. Her house had been searched several times, and she feared that sooner or later Malaba and Solange would be discovered.

Somehow Marianne managed to obtain a fake identity card for Malaba and disguised both of them in costumes similar to the ones the killers liked to wear. She put the machetes, guns, and hand grenades that the Interahamwe had given her to kill Tutsis into her car and seated the girls beside the weapons. Then, as the fighting raged all around them, they began the long, dangerous drive south to her dad’s house, where she hoped they’d all find safety.

Malaba and Solange told us that every few miles, Interahamwe killers would stop them at roadblocks and ask for their identity cards. Because Solange didn’t have a card, the women thought that they’d be killed at every stop. Having no identity card was as bad as having a Tutsi one . . . which was a death sentence.

“One man handed them his Tutsi card and they chopped his head off right in front of us,” Solange whispered hoarsely, shaking her head, unable to believe what she’d witnessed with her own eyes.

“They even killed Hutus who had forgotten their identity cards at home,” Malaba said. “I recognized one of the men they killed—I knew he was a Hutu, but they didn’t. He was a little taller than they were . . . that’s all it took. They called him a Tutsi spy and shot him. Then they killed another Hutu because he argued with them . . . all he said was that it was wrong for them to be killing Tutsis.”

Before they began their journey, Marianne told the girls that they’d better be able to act like killers if they wanted to survive. So every time they were pulled over at a roadblock, they picked up a machete or gun and shook it in the air.

“We screamed like crazy women,” Solange said. “We’d shout, ‘Hutu Power! Hutu Power! Kill all the cockroaches! Kill those Tutsi dogs!’ The killers loved seeing us act like that—they’d tell us to keep up the good work and wave us through. Wanting to kill Tutsis is like having a passport . . . the country has gone mad. And most of those guys were drunk or high on marijuana. In fact, we saw soldiers pull up in Jeeps at two checkpoints and pass out drugs and alcohol to the killers to keep them motivated.”

The two sisters told us that they’d passed so many dead bodies on the road heading south that it took them a long time to realize that they were seeing corpses. “There were so many, and they were stacked so high that we thought we were passing by piles of old clothes and garbage. But when we looked closer . . . when we stopped and rolled down the window, we knew. You could hear the buzz of the flies over the sound of the car engine. And there were hundreds of dogs eating the bodies, fighting over body parts . . . it’s all so sickening. The whole country reeks of rotting flesh,” Solange said. Her face was pale, and she trembled as she spoke. “I can’t get those images out of my head . . . even when I close my eyes, all I see are dead bodies.”

We would have had a hard time believing what they described if we hadn’t already heard similar horror stories on the radio and from the pastor. It sounded like the apocalypse had arrived, and Rwanda was the first stop.

We asked if they had any news of our families, but they didn’t even know where their own were. Marianne was Malaba’s godmother, which was why they’d been visiting her when the killings began.

Malaba was weeping as she adjusted her position in our laps. “If Marianne hadn’t taken us in, we’d be lying in one of those piles of corpses, being eaten by dogs.”

The image made me shiver. I wondered for the millionth time where my parents and brothers were and silently asked God to watch out for them:
You’re the only family I can talk to now, God. I’m relying
on You to take care of the others.

IT WAS MUCH MORE CROWDED THAN USUAL IN THE BATHROOM THAT NIGHT. As I cradled sweet seven-year-old Sanda in my lap while she fell asleep, I thought about how each one of us in that little room had been torn away from our families, or had had our families torn from us. I stroked Sanda’s hair and wished that my own mother could have been there to cradle me.

I drifted off to sleep shortly before dawn and had the most intense dream of my life. I saw Jesus standing in front of me, his arms outstretched as though he were about to embrace me. He was wearing a piece of cloth wrapped about his waist, and his long hair spilled down around his shoulders. I remember being struck by how thin he looked: His ribs protruded, and his cheeks were lean and hollow. Yet his eyes sparkled like stars when he looked at me, and his voice was as soft as a gentle breeze.

“When you leave this room, you will find that almost everyone you know and love is dead and gone,” he said. “I am here to tell you not to fear. You will not be alone—I will be with you. I will be your family. Be at peace and trust in me, for I will always be at your side. Don’t mourn too long for your family, Immaculée. They are with me now, and they have joy.”

I awoke relaxed and happy. Dreaming of Jesus was a beautiful treat, and I relished the warm afterglow, thanking God for sending me such wonderful thoughts. But as the day wore on, my heart became heavy. Jesus had said that my family was dead . . . and I desperately wanted them to be alive. I wanted to see my parents, tell Vianney how sorry I was for letting him go that night, and watch Damascene’s smile spread across his face. After all my prayers, why couldn’t God spare their lives?

I closed my eyes and comforted myself, thinking that if it were only a dream, my family could very well be alive . . . and if it hadn’t been a dream, then God had promised to care for me always, and I’d never known God to break a promise.

NOT LONG AFTER THAT DREAM, I HEARD PEOPLE TALKING outside the bathroom window about some recent killings they’d witnessed. One of the men chose to tell the story of the capture of a young man who’d been hiding in the area since the beginning of the war: “This boy had a master’s degree from university, and the killers kept taunting him about it—they asked him why they’d caught him if he was so smart. One of them said he wanted to see the brains of someone with a master’s degree, so he chopped the boy across the head with his machete. Then he looked inside the skull.”