While I
was only able to attend the Voices of Refugees presentation for one speaker,
the story that he told was incredibly moving to hear in person. Just like how
reading about a refugee’s experience and then seeing them “in real life” at the
ACC, being able to hear directly a refugee’s story was incredible to
experience. The first speaker of the evening, Naseebu (I haven’t a clue if I’m
spelling his name correctly) had a very interesting story to tell, talking
about his fleeing from Burundi, a very tiny country in central Africa that
honestly I had never even heard of before, and his movement to a refugee camp
in Kenya, and his eventual journey here, to America. His necessity for leaving
Burundi was the war that erupted there in 1958 between two of the native groups
of Burundi, the Hutu and the Tutsi. These two groups sounded very familiar to
me, and I soon realized that they were the two groups from the movie Hotel
Rwanda, which I had watched just earlier this year. After looking up that
Burundi is located just to the south of Rwanda, I realized that Naseebu was
stuck in the conflict I had just seen depicted through film not more than few
months ago. This again, was bringing stories I had seen before (some in more of
a fictional feeling/sense) to life. This person, standing here before me, has
gone through these terrible atrocities that I had read and seen. They didn’t
really seem real until just then. It was lines such as “So we were held hostage
in our own country” and “I escaped even from those who held me hostage. Who
forced me to use stones against another person. To even kill a person simply because
they belonged to another ethnic group.” That escaped Naseebu’s lips that
brought an intense sense of reality to all of the stories.
No comments:
Post a Comment