Sobrevivir Para Contarlo

The book consists of three parts. In part 1, The Gathering Storm, Immaculeé focuses on her life before the genocide. Born to a middle-class, devoutly Catholic, Tutsi family, her life was one of relative prosperity and tranquility, although a few childhood incidents illustrate that the Hutu/Tutsi distinction had an effect on her early life. She was in high school when the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), made up of expatriate Tutsi soldiers, entered Rwanda in 1990, and war broke out between them and the Hutu government’s military forces. In April 1994, Immaculeé, by then a university student, was home for Easter when they heard that the president of Rwanda had been killed. This event sparked the killing of nearly a million people in Rwanda over the next three months. As Hutu civilians armed with machetes started to kill Tutsis and moderate Hutus all over the country, Immaculeé’s parents, fearful that she might be raped and killed, urged her to go and hide in a nearby pastor’s house.

The second part of the book, Into the Bathroom, tells the story of how Immaculeé and several other Tutsi women remained hidden in a tiny seldom-used bathroom at the back of the pastor’s house for three months. During the three months that the women were hiding there, soldiers came to search the house several times, but never found the bathroom. Several hair-raising incidents stand out in this part of the story: former neighbors and even friends, who came looking for her by name, aiming to kill her; her suspicion that a young man killed brutally in order to “look at the brain” of a Master’s degree recipient was in fact her brother Damascene; the indifference of her Hutu boyfriend who was happy that she was in hiding so that he did not have to worry about

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