Marie-Christine Williams survived 100 days of flight in the Rwandan wilderness and being shot, sliced with a machete and left for dead. She will tell her story at noon Thursday at Westminster College in Fulton.
The lecture, in the Hermann Lounge, is free and open to the public.
"Marie-Christine's powerful story of strength, determination and survival is an inspiring lecture not to be missed," Westminster President Benjamin Ola. Akande said.
In her lecture, Williams explores the nature of forgiveness and the healing power of compassion and service to faith, hope and the
triumph of the human spirit.
Williams, who now lives in O'Fallon with her son Shawn, survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide, in which 80 percent of the country's Tutsi population was slaughtered. During this genocide, extremist members of the Hutu majority in Rwanda turned against their Tutsi and moderate Hutu friends and killed 1 million of them.
Only 14 years old at the time, Williams hid in bushes in the family's backyard as she listened to her family members being killed with machetes. For the next 100 days, she traveled by night and hid by day, trying to elude the death squads on the road that were executing every Tutsi tribe member they found. She was captured twice but escaped.
When she was captured the third time, her captors shot her in the leg and back, hacked at her with a machete and pushed her off the bridge. Rebel soldiers from the Rwandan Patriotic Front heard her cries and pulled her from a pile of corpses.
Williams' harrowing journey to survival is captured in her book, "The Dark Side of Human Nature: The Rwandan Massacre of April-July, 1994 A Personal Story." Her book will be on sale at the event, and she will sign copies immediately following her lecture.
"Being caught in the evil bloodbath of a civil war, the despair was my silencer," Williams said. "Now I'm ready to tell my story so that in this time of challenges, sufferings, trauma, grief or whatever people are going through, they will come to know, as I have, that determination and compassion can save and even better their lives."