At just 10 years old, Valentine Iribagiza suffered through one of the most brutal ethnic cleansings in human history, the Rwandan genocide of 1994. She watched blood-crazed killers butcher her family in a church. She lost half of her right hand to a machete. She hid among dead bodies for 43 days as the murderers returned again and again. She finally escaped, but her climb out of the nightmare of trauma had only just begun. Valentine’s extraordinary story of survival touches the darkest evils of humankind — and her inspiring choice to forgive illuminates the divine abilities within us all to heal from unspeakable pain.
With a radiant beauty that belies her hellish past, Valentine has been a Texan for the last four years. She lives in Bedford with her husband, Francois, and their two young children, 5-year-old daughter, Shalom, and 3-year-old son, Trevor. Now 35 years old, Valentine spends her days like most of us: She works, goes to church, and tries to keep up with her children. She likes walking in the park, and she loves eating barbecue. Valentine has found a new home and new hope in Fort Worth, but only after clawing her way back from absolute despair.
Twenty-five years ago, mass genocide swept across the country of Rwanda, leaving a million corpses in its wake. Tensions had been building for centuries, and perhaps millennia, between the area’s two main groups: the Hutu and Tutsi. Since at least the 1700s, the minority Tutsi had been dominant. Historians debate whether Hutu and Tutsi represent different races or just different social classes; their origins are unknown. We do know, however, that the two groups speak a common language, share the same traditions, and live side by side in Africa’s mountainous Great Lakes region. Rwanda is one of the smallest countries on the continent and also one of the most densely populated, with 1,326 inhabitants per square mile in 2019 (compared to 93 people per square mile in the U.S.).
When European powers sliced up the map of Africa in 1884, Germany drew the lot for Rwanda. German colonists favored the Tutsi, whom they considered ethnically superior. Germany ruled through the existing hierarchy of the Tutsi monarchy, providing military strength and social preference to the Tutsi while ignoring Hutu disenfranchisement. Belgian forces took over in World War I and continued the trend until the 1950s when they flipped sides to align with the Hutu. It was a desperate grasp for control as revolution broke out, inciting new clashes between the Hutu and Tutsi.
Rwanda became an independent country in 1962, and the Tutsi monarchy was replaced by a Hutu-led republic. Sporadic attacks between the two groups plagued the nation for the next three decades, finally erupting into the Rwandan Civil War in 1990. Hutu extremists began planning a “final solution” to exterminate the Tutsi, stockpiling machetes, arming farmers, and training youth for combat. When Rwanda’s Hutu president was assassinated on April 6, 1994, the violent reaction quickly combusted into full-scale genocide.
For the next 100 days, Hutu soldiers and civilian militia massacred every Tutsi they could find. Many of the perpetrators were ordinary citizens, neighbors who murdered the people they had lived next to for years with machetes, saws, and clubs. Babies and children were killed in front of their parents. Systematic rape was employed as a weapon of war on half a million women. HIV-infected men were recruited out of hospitals to intentionally spread their infections.
The Tutsi army finally put an end to the madness three months later. Seventy percent of the Tutsi population had been annihilated, along with thousands of moderate Hutu who refused to participate and 30 percent of the Twa, an aboriginal pygmy people. Two million refugees fled the country. Hundreds of thousands of widows and orphans were left behind in the carnage, including one Tutsi girl who somehow managed not only to survive — but to forgive.
After the bloodshed began in her village of Nyarubuye, Valentine ran to the Catholic church with her parents, two sisters, and four brothers. Only two of them would ever leave. The family believed that the building’s sanctity would protect them from harm, as did 5,000 other Tutsi who joined them in hiding. But the mob of Hutu that surrounded the church complex showed no mercy. Led by the mayor, they broke down the doors and rampaged inside for four horrific days. They tossed grenades into the crowd. They hacked with knives and smashed skulls with stones. At night, they rested. When the orgy of violence finally ended, the killers had slaughtered almost everyone inside.
Almost.
Hiding under the rotting corpses, a little girl lay perfectly still. Her head bled profusely from the deep slices of her neighbor’s machete. The fingers on her right hand were so beaten and broken that she would later lose them all. She had watched her father and brother die. Her mother’s body lay on the floor beside her. She was surrounded by thousands of dead bodies and completely covered in blood.
But Valentine was alive. She was among the handful of now-orphans who lived through the massacre by pretending to be dead as the murderers came back over and over. Feigning death wasn’t that difficult for the severely wounded child. “I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t do anything physically or mentally,” Valentine remembers. She prayed that she would die.
Valentine hid among the bodies for the next six weeks. She drank rainwater and searched for food scraps, only able to drag herself with immense pain. She fought off stray dogs at night and grew weaker by the day. After an eternity, the Tutsi army arrived, and Valentine was found by a French journalist. The nightmare was over — but her ordeal had just begun.
Valentine spent half a year at a nearby hospital before discovering a miracle: Her younger brother, Gahini, had also survived. The siblings’ bond proved to be instrumental on the arduous road to recovery that was to follow. They were among the youngest children in the orphanage where they lived, and both had been seriously wounded. Valentine was gradually adapting to life with half a hand. “We were struggling,” she says. “I was kind of strong a little bit, but my brother was traumatized all the time.” They cried together. They prayed together. “Some days we just asked, ‘Why God? Why did you let this happen?’”
After months of baby steps, Valentine realized that survival wasn’t enough for her — she wanted to heal and with her brother by her side. A fierce determination set in. “We decided to do whatever we can do … to grow,” she says. “Heavy or not heavy, we can do it … no matter what, we will do our best, nothing else.” They took care of each other and relied on themselves. School became their new priority. “We didn’t need a lot of help. We just needed to do it ourselves: Go to school, be serious and study, come home and see what there was to eat on our own. And we did,” she proudly recalls. “That’s how we coped.”
But the siblings’ paths would soon diverge. Valentine, along with thousands of others, had provided an eyewitness account of the massacre to Rwanda’s national genocide memorial. A group of student filmmakers from Vermont found her testimony online and searched for its author. Surprised to hear that Valentine was still alive, they traveled to her home to visit her face to face and further document her experience. “I couldn’t speak any words in English,” she says. She could only tell her story through the words of a translator, and the students wanted to change that. After Valentine graduated from high school in 2004, the group arranged a student visa — and her healing journey brought her to America.
When she first arrived in the U.S., Valentine studied English at the University of New Hampshire in Durham and then at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston. New England was “very different” from her current home in Texas, she says. “The people living in Boston, some of them don’t even know how to drive.” In 2008, she was granted permanent political asylum in America and has stayed here ever since. But her brother, Gahini, still lives in Rwanda. Unable to acquire a visa to travel, he hasn’t seen his sister in years. “He graduated two years ago; he does everything good,” she says. “He’s a man now.” Gahini still suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, particularly in April.
Valentine’s recovery from her traumatic past has been empowered by her conviction to share her story with whoever is brave enough to listen. She was profiled by The New York Times and dubbed the “Girl Who Refused to Die” on the PBS documentary television show “Frontline.” She has recounted her experience in videos and interviews and traveled to speak with audiences across the U.S. and Europe.
By 2012, Valentine was living in Wisconsin where she found someone new with whom to share her story: her husband, Francois. The two had long been friends. “We knew each other in Africa when I was young. I knew his family; he grew up in Congo.” Like Valentine, Francois came to America as a university student. “At that time, I was just his friend … just a friend of his family.” Love blossomed from friendship and marriage followed. But there was one serious problem.
“He didn’t like the snow,” says Valentine. “I like snow so much … but he said he cannot handle it.” The couple moved south to North Texas, where Francois’ sister lived with her husband and two children. Soon Valentine would have two children as well. Her family grew even larger when she joined a weekly support group of genocide survivors in Fort Worth. The group’s 50 members come from many different places in Rwanda, but they share a common wound. They also share their stories; talking together helps everyone to heal.
“We like to share how we have overcome,” Valentine says. “We have to talk to each other … we have to share our stories, because we have to open up [about] our problems before we can grow.” The group is growing, too, recently celebrating the arrival of new babies and a wedding in August. They throw each other baby showers and witness each other’s milestones. “That’s what we need … to help each other, to talk to each other. To know each other … sometimes, I just need someone to understand.”
Like Valentine, every member of the group is Tutsi. “We don’t meet with Hutus … our survivors don’t want to share with them how they killed us. No.” Rwanda’s government has encouraged the opposite approach between the two groups, making reconciliation the cornerstone of its efforts to rebuild. After the genocide, the country’s judicial system was overwhelmed with more than one million accused perpetrators. Many were processed through traditional community courts, where they were encouraged to confess their crimes and ask for forgiveness directly from the people whose families they killed. After doing so, thousands of low-level convicts were released from prison with work sentences and ordered to reconstruct the communities that they had destroyed. In many cases, victims and perpetrators are neighbors once again.
Valentine feels positive about the situation in Rwanda today. “After [the] genocide, it was just … night. But now is clear,” she says. “They grew a lot.” Following the events of 1994, aid flowed in from a guilt-ridden global community that had turned a blind eye as the genocide unfolded, including the U.S. President Clinton had feared a repeat of the Battle of Mogadishu, which had taken place in the African country of Somalia just a few months before — and had ended with the bodies of Americans being dragged through the streets. It wasn’t an image that Clinton wanted to repeat. He would later refer to our government’s failure to intervene in the Rwandan genocide as one of his biggest regrets.
International aid funded numerous programs to assist the countless widows, orphans, and traumatized survivors left in the aftermath of the genocide. In addition to the human toll, Rwanda was also physically destroyed. Houses and schools were demolished. Churches were burned to the ground. The country is rebuilding even today, but considerable progress has been made. Children with no living memory of 1994’s horrors study in new classrooms, happy to go to school.
“Rwanda now is such a beautiful country,” says Valentine, who longs to return for a visit. She hasn’t been back since 2008. “I wish I could go now, but I need to wait [for] my kids to grow a little bit.” And when her children are ready to hear the story of their mother’s survival, she will tell them, with the same serene acceptance that she speaks with today.
Valentine’s sense of peace with her past stems from her remarkable choice to forgive the people who maimed her and murdered her family. “I am able to forgive because as a normal person, I believe that I cannot do revenge … I cannot do something bad back to someone,” she says. “That’s how I survive. That’s how I’m able to forgive.” Her religion has played a crucial role in her recovery; as a Christian, forgiveness is at the heart of her faith. “I go to church and I listen to the Word, and they always teach you how to love each other and how to forgive.”
Valentine grew up Catholic, attending the village church where her family would later perish. Some genocide survivors turned away from their religion, unable to reconcile the slaughter they saw (by Christians of Christians) with the values that the faith espouses. It wasn’t easy for Valentine. “I changed religion a little bit,” she explains, shifting from her childhood Catholicism to a nondenominational faith.
Pope Francis formally apologized for the Catholic Church’s role in the violence in 2016. In the decades leading up to the genocide, the church’s sincere efforts toward social justice for Hutu had produced unintended consequences. Missionaries seeking to help underprivileged Hutu inadvertently fostered a powerful group of elites that sparked the ethnic cleansing. Many priests, clergymen, and nuns took part in the bloodbath themselves.
Resentment still lingers, but not for Valentine. Her reasons for adopting a more inclusive faith were more practical. “At the time I arrived here, I didn’t find Catholics around me … and I didn’t have a car to drive.” She now attends Impact Mission Church in Hurst, where the focus is on local and global outreach. Valentine is an active member of the congregation, an usher, and a deacon.
She takes the same active approach to forgiveness, epitomizing the words of Martin Luther King, Jr.: “Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.” And for Valentine, it’s fundamental. She has seen the effects of anger destroy the lives of fellow survivors. “It’s better to forgive … [it] helps me to heal,” she says.
Healing from trauma can be a difficult journey, but stepping onto the path toward recovery is the most important choice that a survivor can make. Trauma became part of the American lexicon after the Vietnam War when so many soldiers returned home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD and related anxiety disorders can develop after terrifying events like natural disasters, sexual assault, or car accidents — as well as from ongoing interpersonal trauma such as domestic violence, emotional abuse, or childhood neglect.
More than 50% of women and 60% of men will go through at least one trauma in their lives, and every one of them will deal with it differently. Many heal by finding meaning in their painful experiences or by turning to religion and forgiveness like Valentine. Choosing to face a troubling past takes great courage. Some survivors lose themselves along the way to numbness, distraction, or denial — which our modern society provides at every turn.
Each of us possesses the power to heal ourselves, but only when we take ownership of the process. “They can come teach us the therapies and teach us the psychologies,” says Valentine, but the key to recovery is found within: “It is a person’s choice.” But taking ownership of your healing journey does not mean traveling alone. Social support is essential, as it has been for Valentine. Her relationships with fellow survivors, along with her personal experience, have provided Valentine with unique insight for others who want to reclaim their lives from trauma.
“They need to be patient,” she says. “They just need to try their best to not hold the anger, to not let anything get them down. And to try to love. I’m not saying to love. Loving someone who didn’t do good to you is not easy. Just try.” We may never be able to understand why something horrible happened, but we can always choose forgiveness — or at least, we can try.
With new roots in North Texas, a new family, and new faith in the future, Valentine has come a very long way in the last quarter-century. She hopes that she has found a permanent home here in Fort Worth. Although there are many more people in the city compared to her village in Rwanda, “… they are good. If I see my neighbors, they are kind. When I go to work, the people are kind.” But Texas’ legendary friendliness isn’t the foremost reason why Valentine likes living here.
“First of all is the weather,” she gushes, perhaps the only person in the state extolling its climate in the middle of September’s extended heatwave. “I’m not wearing boots anymore. My boots and my scarf, I threw them away. I say no more boots,” she laughs.
We may not see Valentine Iribagiza in cowboy boots anytime soon. But her independent spirit and determination to survive against the odds make her more of a Texan than any cowhide ever could. Her story will live on — and her courageous choice to heal and forgive will forever shine a light for others who walk the path of trauma recovery.
