Peace activist, documentary subject works to change future

Growing up in the Congo, Rose Mapendo learned young that being female often meant suffering.

She was one of two girls in a family of nine children, but she and her sister had to stay home to work with their mother while the boys went to school. Years later, as civil war and genocide ripped through her country, rebels ordered her and other members of her Tutsi tribe to a death camp. Male prisoners, including her husband, were quickly executed.

"Women, they chose to kill them in a different way," Mapendo said. "They wanted them to starve. They wanted to kill women, but they did not want to waste a bullet."

Mapendo, who escaped Africa in 2000 with her nine children, is now a global peace activist and will share her story and work at Norfolk State University at 7 Wednesday night. A documentary about her life, "Pushing the Elephant," will be shown during the presentation.

Mapendo, 48, along with her brother, Dr. Kigabo Mbazumutima, have co-founded Mapendo New Horizons, a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating people about the effects of war on women and children, helping victims of war and providing medical care to underserved areas in Africa.

Her work has earned her honors from the United Nations and CNN. But her reward, she said, comes from talking to people, particularly young ones, about how they can make life better for others.

"No one can change my past," Mapendo said during a phone interview from Arizona, where she now lives. "But we can change the future and the present for the people who are in that situation."

Mapendo was born in the village of Mulenge in East Congo. She married at 16 and had her first child before she was 18. She made sure she sent all of her children - boys and girls - to school.

Then in 1994, Hutu militia in neighboring Rwanda slaughtered an estimated 800,000 Tutsi countrymen and others in 100 days. Violence spread into the Congo and, in 1998, Mapendo and her family, including her husband and their seven children, were rounded up and taken to a prison. Her husband and all the men there were killed.

Mapendo and her children were crammed into a room with other families - more than 30 children and women in all. On the days they received food, the entire group shared two cups of rice. Children often got diarrhea from eating the unripened fruit of mango trees, which were plucked bare, Mapendo said. People in the room began to die of starvation.

Shortly after arriving in the prison, Mapendo discovered that she was pregnant. As she watched her children struggle, she lost her faith, she said. Months later, she gave birth to twin boys on a concrete floor that was covered with feces and lice. She severed their umbilical cords with a piece of wood. Yet the experience helped her find God again, she said.

"They were born and lice is everywhere, everywhere," she said, her voice rising as if she still can't believe what she went through.

"But they did not have infection. Who can keep them alive like that? I believe that God saved my life for a reason. It is not to sleep and eat."

Mapendo named the twins after commanders at the camp to curry favor. It worked. She and her children were eventually sent to an International Committee of the Red Cross protection center. She and her family were resettled in Phoenix in July 2000 in a two-bedroom apartment. Mapendo spoke no English, had no job, could not drive and did not have any education.

"But we were alive," she said.

Mapendo struggled with depression as she pulled her life together. But now she has continued to learn English. She happily witnesses her children thriving in school. And her foundation helps women who were left behind.

"People say they can't believe what I went through; nobody can understand what these women are going through," she said. "It is not just enough to tell my story. I can speak for them. I can be their voice."

Denise Watson Batts, (757) 446-2504, denise.batts@pilotonline.com