MANKATO — To an 83-year-old woman, the details can get a little fuzzy.

But School Sister of Notre Dame Alice Zachmann knows one thing for certain:

“I was never afraid.”

Not when she made her first visit to Guatemala in 1975 and was, in turn, empowered by the country’s stark beauty and decimated by its wrenching poverty and oppression. And not when she began speaking out about the human rights abuses she found.

She wasn’t afraid when her name showed up in Guatemalan newspapers meeting with farmers and union organizers during the 1980s when people were regularly tortured for associating with labor leaders.

And she remained unfazed when a fellow nun, Dianna Ortiz, was captured in 1989 by Guatemalan paramilitary forces who gang-raped and tortured her for 24 hours before she escaped. (Ortiz later won a $5 million civil suit in an American court against the former Minister of Defense of Guatemala Hector Gramajo, who incidentally attended Harvard University by invitation.)

Zachmann has dedicated her life to abolishing human rights abuses around the world. In 1982, she began the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission in the basement of a Croatian Mission in northeast Washington, D.C. Since 2002, she has worked with Ortiz at the Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition in an effort to publicize cases of governmental torture abroad.

She’s suffered death threats and her offices have been ransacked. But she’s never wavered from her convictions.

“We can’t let fear dominate our lives,” said Zachmann, iterating that faith has been the backbone of her conviction. “There are some issues that you just can’t compromise.”

Zachmann lives in Washington, D.C., where, despite going on her ninth decade of life, she still volunteers upward of eight hours a day. But once a year, during Good Counsel’s annual community celebration, Zachmann returns to Mankato and her former home on the hill.

On Wednesday, as lazy afternoon traffic lolled along Second Street, Zachmann and fellow SSND peace crusader Gladys Schmitz were holding picket signs, continuing the war protest that has taken place near the post office almost every Wednesday since November 2001.

Together, the two women have donated nearly 100 years of their lives to efforts of peace. Their missions and projects criss-cross the globe, from Sub-Saharan Africa to Colombia, from Guatemala to Nicaragua.

“We’ve been friends,” said Schmitz, pausing a moment to count the ages, “for many, many years.”

Now that she’s home, Zachmann said she’ll visit friends at Good Counsel and then travel to St. Michael where she grew up and still has family.

After a few days, she will return to Washington, D.C,. and resume her advocacy for torture survivors. She will resume fighting government secrecy and bureaucracy abroad, and the long days coaching survivors through recovery.

And even though Zachmann admits the names, faces and places have faded over the years, she knows for certain she has plenty of conviction left to give.

“I never dreamt growing up on a modest 80-acre farm that I would ever be working in Washington, D.C.,” Zachmann said. “I’m so grateful I was called to this.”