HCH photo by Anna Weaver

Immaculée Ilibagiza speaks in the Blaisdell Concert Hall, Jan. 15.

A year after her first visit to the islands, author and Rwandan genocide survivor Immaculée Ilibagiza returned to Hawaii for several speaking engagements and shared her story of survival, hope and forgiveness.

Five hundred people gathered at St. Anthony Church in Wailuku, Maui, on Jan. 13 to hear Ilibagiza talk. The next two days she spoke to about 1,600 people at the Blaisdell Concert Hall with local group Na Leo Pilimehana opening both nights with a short concert. Ilibagiza was also the guest speaker at the Red Mass on Jan. 17.

At her Jan. 15 Blaisdell talk, Ilibagiza spoke freely for more than an hour, with passion and humor, without even a pause for a drink of water.

“You don’t need the permission of the other person to forgive,” she said to the attentive crowd toward the start of her speech. “It’s a gift you give yourself.”

In 1994, Ilibagiza was a college student, home on Easter break and enjoying time with her family. Up until that point her life, she said, “I thought it was my right to live happy and be taken care of.”

When the Rwandan president was killed on Apr. 6, 1994, it initiated mass murder by the Hutu, the majority ethnic tribe in the country, against Ilibagiza’s Tutsi tribe and moderate Hutus. Ilibagiza’s parents sent her to the house of a sympathetic Protestant minister for protection. He hid her and seven other women in a 3-by-4 foot bathroom for three months as nearly 800,000 people were killed throughout the country.

When it was all over, Ilibagiza’s parents, grandparents, two of her brothers and many other relatives, neighbors and friends had been murdered. She said that she began her days in hiding with fear and anger against those carrying out the killings.

“When you’re angry you can be very creative,” Ilibagiza said of her thoughts of what she would do to the murderers if she could.

But during her time in that tiny bathroom, she said she gradually managed through prayer to slowly make her way towards forgiveness, undergoing “the act of surrendering to God.”

“When we act out of anger, we don’t measure the consequences that are to come,” she said.

Ilibagiza, who is Catholic, spent much of her three months in the cramped bathroom praying the rosary and reading the Bible. “I felt I had moved from the bathroom to a beautiful place,” Ilibagiza said. She added with a laugh, “To Hawaii.”

After emerging from her hiding place, she was “so grateful about every single thing.”

“Why do I have to invest in this little thing when I can invest in eternity,” she said she thought.

Eventually she moved from a refugee camp to the house of a woman who had once been helped by her parents. When she was looking for work, Ilibagiza found a job at the United Nations building in Kigali with the help of a compassionate UN official.

Ilibagiza also eventually met with some of the people who participated in the genocide and offered her forgiveness.

She later immigrated to the United States, and worked for the UN in New York City. Ilibagiza has since written a book about her experiences titled “Left to Tell” and established a charitable fund with the same name to help orphans of the Rwandan genocide and other countries.

Ilibagiza says that meeting with people around the world and hearing their tales of forgiveness “really gives me hope that there can be peace in the world.”

She closed her evening talk by saying, “Just remember that no matter what you go through, there is always hope in life.”

Ilibagiza’s Blaisdell talks were co-sponsored by the Alec and Belle Waterhouse Lecture Series, the Hawaii Family Forum, and Hawaii Catholic Conference.