Thank you.

Thank you.

THANK YOU.

You could hear and feel those expressions of gratitude building to a crescendo Thursday as Immaculee Ilibagiza was welcomed into the hearts of those gathered at Walsh University in North Canton to see what faith in the face of true adversity looks like.

The miraculous survivor of the 1994 Rwandan genocide did not disappoint the audience of more than 2,000, nor the 800 students she met with earlier in the day.

You could see the love and absolute reverence in which she is held by the university with its no-stone-unturned presentation. First was the on-message music that preceded her entrance: One Love by Bob Marley, Let It Be by the Beatles, We Are the World by Michael Jackson and company; plus beautiful voices from the university's chorale group, and the engaging performance by Heartbeat Afrika (drums and dance).

Before Immaculee's arrival onstage to a standing ovation, Walsh University President Richard Jusseaume announced that she had been presented with an honorary degree, only the second woman to have received such an honor in the Catholic university's 50-year history. The other was Mother Teresa, who visited in 1981.

Jusseaume holds out hope that Immaculee will receive the Nobel Peace Prize like Mother Teresa. He outlined the reasons for recognizing her with the honorary degree:

-- For persisting in faith through the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s, bearing with grace apocalyptic loss of freedom, family, friends and country.

-- For vigilant devotion to learning and to prayer -- learning English in hiding with Bible and dictionary, silently praying through long hot days and dark nights of imprisonment.

-- For using her talents and degrees to tell the story -- written, oral and visual -- to advance the work of the United Nations and to help restore Rwanda.

-- For Christ-like ability to forgive unspeakable crimes, thus preserving capacity to love.

-- For charity toward Rwandan survivors, especially orphans.

"I still live with the pain of missing my parents 1/8both were Catholic schoolteachers3/8 and so many other members of my family and village," Immaculee told her captivated audience of all ages, races, faiths and socio-economic status.

Immaculee is known to many through her book Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust, and appearance on 60 Minutes. She was catapulted onto the world stage because of her incredible story of survival and her unshakable faith.

Her words were measured and emotionally charged as she spoke about returning home from college that Easter week to be with her family when the president of Rwanda was killed.

That was when the central African country turned against itself, resulting in the murder of more than 1 million villagers. Like Immaculee and her family, they were members of the Tutsi tribe and the warring faction were the Hutus.

She didn't want to leave her family, she said. "but my father insisted. And I accepted to leave out of obedience. He handed me a rosary, red and white; a summary of the Bible. He sent me to hide with a man from the other tribe."

Immaculee spoke poignantly about hiding out in a tiny bathroom along with six other women and a girl of 7 for 91 days in the neighboring home of a Hutu Protestant pastor.

"He told us not to speak and not to flush until someone flushed in the second bathroom," she said.

Immaculee could hear the voices of 300 or so enemies marching through the house, searching with flashlights, machetes and grenades and calling out her name.

"They never found me, but I found myself," Immaculee declared.

"If you want to question the power of God, ask him something impossible. Like 300 trying to find a bathroom but didn't."

As fate would have it, the house Immaculee hid in was the only house in the village with two bathrooms. And after a while, the warriors who were searching for her and the other Tutsi women trusted that the Hutu pastor wouldn't dare hide the enemy.

For the three months she was in the bathroom, wearing the same smelly clothes and not knowing whether she was going to live or die, Immaculee managed to trade in her futile rage for a deepening faith.

Her first emotion, she said, was anger. She even talked about editing the Lord's Prayer to exclude "forgiving those who trespass against us."

"I thought if I ever came out I would be a soldier and kill people," she said. "My anger was my gun."

Over time that changed and she "surrendered all. . . .I put down the luggage of anger. I'm not here today because I could run faster. . . .God protected me for those three months."

Yes, she questioned God. "Why did he let so many honorable people die?" The answer kept coming back that "God called them for another purpose."

Even so, she wasn't convinced at first. But she trusted in the word. She had to, she said.

French soldiers freed her and the others from the house. Immaculee talked about the "blessing" of being able to sleep out on the ground, the joy of looking up at the stars and the beauty of feeling the breeze on her face -- something she hadn't experienced in three months.

"I'm thankful for every single day. Every day is a bonus," she said with sincerity.

The lessons shared this evening were so many. But the main one was this:

"Please hold onto hope," she instructed. "If I can forgive after the rage I faced, anyone can forgive."

Today, Immaculee donates the proceeds from her books through her Left to Tell Charitable Fund to provide scholarships for the orphans in Rwanda to attend school.

In a grand effort to emulate Immaculee's faith into action, Walsh University's president announced eight scholarships (tuition, room and board) will be dedicated to eight academically gifted orphans of Rwanda. Currently, there are no students from that country at the university.

It was as if the words of the song One Love, played earlier, were becoming reality:

One love, one heart,

Let's get together and feel all right

Hear the children crying (One Love)Hear the children crying (One Love)Sayin' give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all rightSayin' let's get together and feel all right.

Jewell Cardwell can be reached at 330-996-3567 or jcardwell@thebeaconjournal.com.

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