And what did the women have to eat? Not much.

"I remember sometimes we used to eat just like, beans. And there was this little insect that came out of the beans. And he brought it. It was 'Jesus, well how am I going to eat it.'"

But after a while, she managed to eat, by closing her eyes. Still, Immaculee said she lost 40 pounds - one third of herself disappeared during her three months hidden in the bathroom.

During the evaluation, she related that her parents and siblings had been murdered in the spring of 1994 and that she had been severely wounded. The perpetrators, thinking she was dead, had thrown her into an open public toilet, where she lay for one week among feces and maggots-white maggots resembling bloated grains of rice-feeding on the avocados that fell on her from a tree above the toilet.

Although suffering is experienced by the individual, it is in this particular context based on an interplay between perpetrator and victim. It is therefore to a large extent a social experience (Kleinman, Veena, & Margaret, 1997Kleinman, A., Veena, D., & Margaret, L.(1997). Introduction: Social suffering. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. [Google Scholar], p. ix; Wilkinson, 2005Wilkinson, I. (2005). Suffering: A sociological introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar], p. 80). Many years after the Rwandan tragedy, reconciliation among Rwandan people, both in Rwanda and abroad, is still a big challenge, since many Rwandans are burning with anger, hatred, deep frustration, and dashed hopes (Nowrojee, 2005Nowrojee, B. (2005). Your justice is too slow: Will the ICTR fail Rwanda’s rape victims (Occasional Paper 10). Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development. [Google Scholar], pp. 2−4).