Immaculée Nyirabeza was fifteen years old during the 1994 Rwandan genocide. In one hundred days, she lost her parents, her three brothers, and most of her extended family. She survived by hiding in a crawl space beneath a neighbour's house for seventy-eight days.
The Hundred Days
The killers came to her village in Kibuye Province on April 11, 1994. Immaculée's father — a schoolteacher and Tutsi community leader — was killed first. Her mother and brothers followed. Immaculée escaped because a Hutu neighbour, risking his own life, hid her and two other girls beneath his floor.
For seventy-eight days, Immaculée lay in darkness, drinking rainwater collected through a gap in the floorboards. She could hear the killers searching outside. She could hear her neighbours being murdered. She held a rosary her mother had given her and prayed until the words lost meaning, then prayed some more.
When the RPF liberated her area in July, Immaculée weighed thirty-two kilograms. She had no family, no home, and no reason — by any human logic — to do anything but hate.
The Gacaca Court
In 2006, Rwanda's Gacaca courts — community-based tribunals designed to process the overwhelming number of genocide cases — began hearing cases in Immaculée's village. She was called to testify. The man in the dock was someone she knew — a neighbour named Célestin, a man who'd shared meals at her family's table before the genocide. He had led the group that killed her father.
Immaculée looked at him. He was thin, aged, unable to meet her eyes. He confessed to what he'd done. He said he'd been drinking banana beer, that the propaganda had told him Tutsis were cockroaches, that he was sorry.
The court asked Immaculée if she had anything to say. The room — two hundred people from her village — went silent.
The Words
"I forgive you," Immaculée said.
The room erupted. People shouted. Some in anger — how dare she forgive? Some in shock. Some in tears. Célestin collapsed. Immaculée continued: "I forgive you not because what you did was okay. It will never be okay. I forgive you because Jesus forgave me, and I won't carry your sin in my heart any longer."
She visited Célestin in prison afterward. She brought him a Bible. He became a Christian before his death in 2015.
Immaculée now leads a reconciliation ministry in Kigali. She speaks at schools, churches, and community gatherings about the power of forgiveness — not as a theological concept, but as the most practical survival tool she knows.
"Unforgiveness is a second genocide," she says. "The first one killed my family. The second one would have killed my soul. Jesus saved me from both."