This book is a personal account of the author's experiences during a 100-day genocide in Rwanda in 1994.
Rwanda was then under attack by Tutsi rebels. The Hutu president's plane was shot down and everyone in it was killed. The ruling Hutus revenged themselves by beginning a genocide of any and all Tutsis. Estimates of the number of Tutsis killed ranges from 800,000 to 1,000,000. Everyone in her immediate family was killed except for an older brother who was then attending studying in Senegal.
After the killing started, her family asked a neighboring pastor to take her in. He hid her, along with six other women, in a bathroom just large enough to hold a shower and a toilet - the size of a deep closet. This lasted for two months, when the pastor's family judged it was too dangerous to hold them any longer and took them to a nearby camp of French soldiers.
She got through the experience by praying, fervently, and used her sense of faith and moral conviction to hold off two angry mobs.
Much of her account is about how her relationship with God deepened in this crisis and how she used her faith to survive the tremendous psychological pressure of hiding in such cramped conditions, and to rebuild her life after the genocide was over. She recounts in detail her thoughts, state of mind, and prayers to God during her ordeal.
The purpose of her book seems to be to memorialize her family, in part, and to bear witness not just to their lives but to the importance she places on her ability to forgive the killers of her family in order to live a spiritual life.
Today I learned about a new book by Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. I find it hard to believe that that's true but I hope that it is.
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