Voices of Refugees

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.