On the morning of Friday, October 22, 1993, Maggy Barankitse woke up in her village on Nyamutobo Hill in Burundi and walked with her seven adopted children into the nearby town of Ruyigi. Maggy was headed to her job at the church where she worked for the diocesan office, and the children were on their way to school, except Chloe, who was home from her university on holiday. When they arrived in town, they found that school had been canceled, and then Maggy heard the news: a day earlier, a faction in the Tutsi-led military had assassinated the Hutu president Melchior Ndadaye. The first democratically elected president of the country, he was just three months into a five-year term. With warnings that vengeful Hutu were wreaking havoc on Tutsi villages in other parts of the country, Maggy went to the bishop’s residence to retrieve valuable documents related to her adopted children, who were both Hutu and Tutsi.

A young woman finds her vocation amidst the atrocities of a genocide.