Rose Mapendo: death camp survivor tells her story

Violent hate calls for violent forgiveness.

That's the motto Rose Mapendo, a survivor of ethnic violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, chooses to live by. She shared her story with a group of 275 people in the UCF Student Union at an event sponsored by Global Perspectives.

"People call me a survivor now that I'm here in America," she said. "The truth is that I became a survivor the day that I decided to forgive."

Her speech was centered on an avid acknowledgement of one Lord: Jesus Christ. This strong faith echoed through every word she shared.

Mapendo was held captive in a death camp for 16 months where she saw her husband murdered. She was forced to live with her seven children off of two cups of rice a day and green mangos which made them ill with diarrhea. She also survived a pregnancy giving birth to twins without ever visiting a doctor.

She bore the twins on the concrete floor of a prison cell, which had not been cleaned once and was full of blood and dysentery. Mapendo cut the umbilical cords with a bamboo stick and tied it off with strands from her hair.

The situations Mapendo faced are all too common in eastern Congo; it's only rare that she lived to tell the story on an international platform.

The ethnic violence in Congo is a result of political tensions after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, where Hutu's committed mass murder against Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Tensions between the tribes spilt into eastern Congo, resulting in an estimated 5.4 million deaths in ten years, according to a Reuters report released in 2008.

She said she doesn't share her story because she wants to be angry, but because she wants people to understand forgiveness.

"Anger is highly contagious," she said. "No one can change negative when they themselves are negative."

Mapendo sang songs of praise to God in her native tongue before the audience and gave a vivid account of her turning point, which lead her to forgive. She named her twins after her persecutors as a sign of reconciliation. This became a key factor that lead to her freedom. Mapendo was eventually flown to a refuge camp in Cameroon where she was relocated to the United States.

Her passion for forgiveness and reconciliation left some students somber and curious about their beliefs on activism and personal reconciliation.

"I've considered myself an activist who strongly believes that people who commit violence against innocence should also be retaliated against," said Manny Hernandez, a junior micro and molecular biology major. "But after listening to her message of loving passivism, I wonder what kind of activist I really am. I wonder if that's even the solution or not."

The speech left people in tears and after a few questions from the audience, Ambassador Harriet Elam-Thomas took the stage with Mapendo

All the degrees and titles in this school cannot amount to what was spoken a today, she said.

Mapendo's story has been chronicled in the documentary film "Pushing the Elephant." She now works to speak out against genocide and help those who have endured through it. She co-founded New Horizons, a non-profit organization committed to informing the world about the effects war has on women and children. She has been honored by the White House, and in 2009 was named the Humanitarian of the Year by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

"I remember learning in one of my classes that [the] U.S. is the largest nation with incoming people," Candace Treadway, a psychology major, said. "Knowing that our country can be a refuge to people like Rose makes me very proud. It's hard to know everything that's going on in the world, but when people like her speak out, their first-hand accounts affect the actions of other people."