Edith

What is it like to be a child refugee? Edith, a former child refugee shares her story.

In 1994, at the age of three, I was forced to flee my home in Rwanda to escape the Rwandan genocide. I still remember running in the forest as a little girl – running over dead bodies, hearing gunshots, and seeing people killed with machetes. I remember arriving in the first foreign country where we were told that we were not welcome and that we needed to go back to where we came from. There was no way we could go back home and survive. So we went into hiding, hoping that we would not be found and sent back home. With a war going on in my country, it was not safe to stay. We had to leave as soon as we could to try and find shelter in another country. I remember seeing people running all over the forest and I was running alongside them. We were instructed not to go to particular parts of the forest because people were being killed there. I was so scared; remaining positive was not easy. I don’t think we ever slept while we were hiding in the forest because everyone was scared about being killed in their sleep. For the people who stayed behind in Rwanda, almost a million of them were killed in just one month.

One thing about war is that it is not hidden from children, no matter how little they are. Kids were included in conversations about hiding, survival and running as fast as you could, even if you got separated from your parents.

I became separated from my parents and I never saw them again. A woman in her 70’s found me on the forest floor, and she became my caretaker. We fled to Uganda, and then to Tanzania, before finally settling in Nairobi. I lived with her in Nairobi and called her grandmother, until I was 16, when she died. I remember meeting the RefugePoint team a year before my grandma died. When she died, I had nobody else, and RefugePoint helped me. RefugePoint was more than just an organization to me. For the first time, I met people who really cared about helping me.

I remember when a woman from RefugePoint went with me to pick out a coffin for my grandma, and helped me to plan the funeral and buy a burial plot. It felt to me like RefugePoint took over the responsibilities of a parent. Now, living in the U.S., and thinking back to what they did, I realize that is something that a parent would do. In what I was going through, those were things that parents would have been handling, and RefugePoint did all of that to support me. So to me, RefugePoint felt like more than just an organization. I felt that they were more like a family.

After my grandmother died, I was approaching high school graduation, and I knew I only had one choice – to get married, stay home, and raise a family. Although I was positive that was not what I wanted, the reality was that I had no choice. So I continued to pray to God every day and never lost hope that God works in mysterious ways.

At this point, RefugePoint became involved in prioritizing my resettlement case. They really advocate for refugees, and they are the voice of refugees and those who are not usually heard. After graduating high school, I was offered a once in a lifetime opportunity – I was told there was a chance I could be resettled to the U.S. as a minor, but I was running out of time because I was almost 18. It is much more difficult to qualify for resettlement once you are considered an adult. The odds of me being resettled were slim because I only had a few months before my 18th birthday. Resettlement cases can take five years or more. Fast forward to a few weeks before my 18th birthday, a family in Michigan received a call about a refugee girl who desperately needed a home. The family (now my parents) prayed about it and they agreed to take me into their family. When I was told that I was going the U.S., at first I thought it was a joke. I couldn’t believe the news I was hearing.

I remember someone from the RefugePoint office showing me a map of the world and pointing to Michigan and saying, “This is where you are going,” and I remember being like, “Oh, I remember learning in U.S. geography about Lake Michigan; I wonder if I will live near that big lake?” Three days before I turned 18, I stepped onto U.S. soil and settled into my new home in Grand Haven, Michigan! And guess what’s so popular about Grand Haven? The beach right on Lake Michigan! Fast forward to almost ten years since I arrived in the U.S., I now hold two college degrees, I am happily married to my wonderful husband Adam, and I have the privilege of working as a registered nurse at one of the busiest level one trauma emergency rooms in the country. After 22 years as a refugee, I finally became a citizen of the United States. I finally belong to a country.

It was about a year after my grandmother died that I was resettled, so I was by myself for a year, but I never felt like I was alone, because I had RefugePoint. I would go to the office and visit often, and no one said, “Hey, we are working, and you need to leave.” They took the time to talk to me and ask me how school was going. I remember when I graduated, two RefugePoint staff members came to my graduation party and they took pictures and made me a graduation cake. I think that was the first time that I had ever had a cake!

RefugePoint not only helped me in the financial sense, but also uplifted me. I remember going to counseling sessions with Clotilda, and that was the first time I had ever met a counselor. And me, being from Africa, where people don’t talk about their feelings, that was something new. Clotilda inspired me to really work hard and never give up. She is a major reason why I didn’t  struggle with depression. I took her words literally, so when she talked about always being positive, and remembering that your past doesn’t define you, I took that literally – that my past did not define who I was.

In November of 2018, many years after being resettled to the U.S., I returned to the RefugePoint office in Nairobi, Kenya to see how they are continuing to serve at-risk refugees, many of whom are children like I was. RefugePoint was like a home for me, and when I went back, I was trying to just stay composed and not cry. But there were so many memories. When I was younger I did not have a complete understanding of everything that RefugePoint did. This trip gave me the opportunity to get to know about the work in detail, see how much they have grown, and hear that they are in so many countries all over the globe. It was absolutely amazing.

It is one thing to be like, “Oh, RefugePoint helps people” – but me, being a product of what they have done – I know that what they are doing works! It means so much more than you will ever understand. Having people like those at RefugePoint that advocate for refugees, and especially refugee minors, and that is who I was, is really important because they give young people and teenagers an opportunity to be able to go to school and it definitely gives minors an opportunity to have a bright future.

To read more about Edith’s Story, check out her recent feature on the blog Love Matters: https://www.lovewhatmatters.com/as-a-little-girl-i-remember-running-in-the-forest-over-dead-bodies-hearing-gunshots-and-seeing-people-killed-by-machetes-i-was-so-scared-i-dont-think-we-ever-slept/