Photography by Jason Millstein/illume photography

As her family embraces their new lives in Phoenix, Rose Mapendo fights for people in her native Congo who still need protection. And even though her country wanted her dead, she can’t help but long for her homeland. After all, her name means ‘great love.’

Despite the Congolese government’s efforts to kill her and her family, Rose Mapendo loves her country.

Held captive in a military brigade-turned-death camp from 1998 to 2000, Rose watched helplessly as her husband was stripped, bound and beaten, his bones shattering from the soldiers’ relentless blows. With a gun pointed at her temple, she desperately clung to her teenage daughter – one of seven children she had with her at the time – fighting and pleading with her captors not to take her as their sex slave. She struggled in darkness and silence as she birthed twins on the waste-covered concrete floor of her cell, afraid of what the guards would do if they heard her cries.

For 16 months, Rose fought for her family’s survival as they suffered torture, sickness and starvation, simply for being Tutsi, an ethnic group victimized by genocide in Central Africa. Yet, even as guards mercilessly scraped away at any remaining flecks of dignity or hope she possessed, Rose prayed that God would grant her the strength to forgive them.

But she will never forget. In publicly sharing her ascension from listless prisoner to tireless advocate for peace and refugees in Africa, Rose hopes others will listen to and remember her story – not for her, but for all the refugees who still need protection.

Today, Rose and eight of her nine children share a large two-story home on a cookie-cutter cul-de-sac in Peoria, just nine years removed from the prison they expected to die in. Watching her kids ride their skateboards, laugh with friends and send text messages on their cell phones, it’s clear they’re thriving in their new lives in Arizona. But while her family embraces life in America, Rose’s heart remains in the Congo.

Rose, 46, was one of 10 children born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s eastern province of Kivu, near the Rwandan border. Her father raised cattle and crops to provide for the family. Their village had no running water or electricity, the closest hospital was a day’s walk away, and wealth was measured in cows. Still, life was comfortable, and Rose looks back at her childhood fondly.

“My life in Congo, it was a good life,” she says during a recent interview with PHOENIX magazine. “Many people in our village respected our family and my dad because he’d do anything for his family.”

Music filled her home. Rose discovered her natural talent for singing at an early age and always had requests to sing for her family and friends. When she was 10, she started a choir in the church where her father was also a pastor. She continued singing in church choirs well into adulthood.

“When I started to sing when I was young,” she says, “it was like a gift.”

Though Rose’s father spent his days in the fields and Sundays at the pulpit, he made education a priority for his children. The eldest child, Anne, was the first female in their entire tribe to graduate with a high school diploma. She became a village celebrity for her accomplishments, and her younger siblings would all follow suit – except for Rose, who sacrificed her education to help her mother raise her younger brothers and sisters.

Because she was not in school, her path was very different from her siblings. In Congolese culture, girls who didn’t go to school worked and married young. When she was 14 years old, the father of a young man in their village named Moise Nyana asked her dad if his son could marry Rose. And so did the fathers of five other boys.

“It was confusing for me to choose which one,” Rose says, laughing shyly, her eyes revealing a hint of embarrassment. “Even [if] you don’t know that person for that long, you can feel some connection.”

The connection she felt was with Moise. Two years later, at the age of 16, she married Moise and moved in with her in-laws to live and work while he finished his schooling. Once he earned his diploma, their family expanded quickly with the birth of seven children. As in her childhood, music was always present in their home. Moise played guitar while Rose and the kids sang.

“We sing a lot in our house,” Rose remembers. “It was the most good time we have.”

Even though the two did not know each other when they became engaged, their connection only grew stronger over the next 20 years through the love of their children, God, music and each other. “I tell people I would be the left hand and he would be the right hand,” Rose explains, raising her hands to illustrate the point.

Never did Rose expect they’d be ripped apart. Never did she think she would lose her “right hand.”

In 1994, the genocide in Rwanda resulted in the slaughter of nearly a million of the country’s Tutsi minority by ethnic Hutus. Rose, a Tutsi, was stunned by the atrocity, considering that Hutus and Tutsis in the Congo mixed, for the most part, without incident.

“Where I lived it was not which one was Tutsi or Hutu,” she says of relations between the two ethnic groups. “We just grew up as Congolese people.”

Rwanda borders the Congo, yet the idea of such a massacre was far from anything Rose could fathom. She says she never believed that the fallout of the genocide would soon spill into the Congo, igniting a spiral of hatred that would scar her family and her country forever.

For the past few decades, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a central African nation the size of all U.S. states east of the Mississippi River combined, has been one of the world’s most volatile countries. Political corruption, tribal conflict, continent-wide competition for valuable resources and all-out war have decimated the country, shredded its infrastructure and choked off its ability to govern or maintain any semblance of law, according to Amnesty International.

A portrait of Rose’s father hangs in the two-story home in Peoria where Rose and her children now live. Rose’s parents also were brought to Arizona as refugees of the Congo and are still alive today.

Without proper law enforcement, warring tribes freely ravage, murder and cannibalize their rivals as a means of domination and oppression. The country’s women have been brutally victimized through a violent campaign of rape and enslavement, detailed in Lisa Jackson’s award-winning 2008 documentary, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. The intent has often been to annihilate foes from the inside out by shoving objects into the women’s uteruses, destroying their ability to reproduce and, thus, proliferate their people.

According to the International Rescue Committee, in the past 10 years, between 5 and 6 million Congolese have died as a result of the country’s ongoing war – nearly equivalent to Arizona’s entire population.

Ubiquitous corruption, a war-torn landscape and demolished transportation routes severely hinder the formation of any viable government or police presence outside the country’s capital of Kinshasa. This instability allows armed rebels and tribal militias to roam virtually unfettered throughout the country’s eastern regions, including the Kivu province.

Eastern Congo’s lawlessness and mountainous terrain became a hotbed for Hutu factions fleeing Rwanda after a vengeful Tutsi-led government gained control following the genocide. The Rwandan government frequently sent troops across the border to hunt down Hutu rebels.

Displeased and undermined by Rwanda’s invasions and the growing Tutsi uprising in the east, Congolese president Laurent Kabila ordered that all Tutsis be expelled from the country. Those refusing to leave would be attacked and arrested.

An August 1998 government radio broadcast called for Congolese citizens to “bring a machete, a spear, an arrow, a hoe, spades, rakes, nails, truncheons, electric irons, barbed wire, stones and the like, in order to kill the Rwandan Tutsis.” All non-Tutsis in the country were given carte blanche to impose another genocide. In an instant, neighbors and countrymen became enemies.

Even though Rose’s tribe, the Banyamulenge, had roots in the Congo for centuries, “you could not tell the difference from Rwanda Tutsi and Congolese,” she says. The mere fact that they were Tutsi made them subject to the same consequences. The country that Rose loved so dearly wanted her dead.

“I could not ever, ever, ever think that they would come and kill Congolese people who are born there,” Rose says with tears filling her eyes. “Why? For what?”

The threat was immediate and imminent. As soon as she heard the president’s order, Rose sent her husband into hiding, assuming that Tutsi males were the ones who were in danger, not women and children. He hid for two weeks before returning home. Almost on cue, three truckloads of soldiers came for them. Moise wanted to defend his family, but Rose coaxed him into hiding under the house. If there was not a male in the home, maybe the soldiers would move on, she thought. When she told the soldiers her husband was gone, they grabbed her, rounded up her seven children and hauled them to prison. Five other families from their village were also abducted.