A Saint in Hell… in the Great Lakes Region
Pascal Maitre
pour Geo Allemagne
In the heart of the Great Lakes region, there, in the midst of chaos which has left devastation in its wake in Rwanda, Burundi and Eastern Congo, where hundreds of thousands of people were killed in the violence, and where hundreds of thousands more had to flee struggling to survive in the largest refugee camps in Africa, where prisons were packed with tens of thousands of people, where tens of thousands of other lives have been decimated by poverty and AIDS, there in darkness without any apparent glimmer of hope, a woman from Burundi – Marguerite Barankitse, known as Maggy – has brought light and hope, building a future for thousands of children orphaned by war and AIDS.
Preview
Fifteen years ago, Maggy managed to escape the machetes wielded by Hutus. Ten years ago, during the civil war, she risked her life every day saving children whose parents had been murdered because of their ethnic background. Today, Marguerite Barankitse is still working, building up a society, indeed an entire world, around the orphans she has saved – more than ten thousand of them.
Maggy; a Tutsi princess and a fervent Catholic, has taught “her” orphans – Hutu, Tutsi and Twa – to live together. Any prospects of recovery and revival in Burundi must be based on reconciliation, in particular reconciliation between victims and their persecutors; there is no other way. To achieve this, Maggy has taught the children the need for forgiveness; they must be able to forgive despite their own personal experience of atrocities.
She is a great builder; her constructions include 550 homes providing shelter for these “families” of orphans, a hospital said to be one of the best in Africa, a movie theater, and farms set up on land which Maggy inherited from her own family.
Her enemies say that Marguerite Barankitse is crazy, but she believes that life and hope will always be the strongest forces. Hatred, she promises, will never prevail in Burundi.
