Immaculée Ilibagiza was a twenty-four-year-old college student in the spring of 1994 when the genocide in Rwanda erupted. At home to spend the Easter holidays with her devout Catholic family, she sought refuge, at the insistence of her parents, in the nearby home of a pastor. Ninety-one days later, she emerged from the minuscule bathroom she had been hiding in with seven other women in near total silence, her body emaciated and her soul on fire with an unshakable faith in God.

Ilibagiza speaks with editors Joel Pitney and Carol Raphael about her extraordinary ordeal and the transcendence she discovered through continuous prayer, self-confrontation, and a tenacious refusal to succumb to negativity and despair. She describes both the terrifying horror of machete-wielding killers searching for her within inches of her hiding place and the unimaginable joy she experienced in prayerful communion with God for up to twenty hours a day. In a story that stretches the boundaries of good and evil beyond all recognition, Ilibagiza reveals the indomitable power of the human spirit.

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