Stories of Movement

After twenty plus hours of traveling via DC and Ethiopia, the plane finally landed in Entebbe, Uganda. It wasn’t my first time there, but it was my first time alone with only a Nigerian contact (a friend of a mutual acquaintance) whom I had never met. Previously, I had traveled on a bus from Kenya with other young hopefuls wanting to be world-changers. We were naïve and ignorant. Seven years later, in 2017, I felt I might be less so as I tagged along with a group of Jewish missionaries I had just met, to avoid being singled out and searched as we went through customs. The news of what was going on in South Sudan had struck my heart in a way I didn’t know possible and through phone calls and emails, I found myself exiting the airport into the comforting presence of Uche. My travel day would continue the following morning when we would board a bus with another group to drive the 8.5 hours North from the capital to Arua and after that my contact would take me on hours of bumpy dirt roads to refugee settlements where over a million South Sudanese refugees now lived. I was at least familiar with bus rides in Africa, but I was about to get an education in the world of displaced people and hear movement stories I would never forget. Living in a country full of different people, I knew of many refugee communities, but I had never stopped to think about the steps that got them there.

As the car dodged goats and people walking the dirt roads, Uche gave me an overview. It became clear that I would see things the news headlines didn’t discuss. The world is good at relegating people to a statistic and grouping them into one experience, as if all refugees go through the same thing. It’s one thing to want to move, it’s another to be forced. This kind of movement isn’t your snowbirds leaving Northern Minnesota for the warmer Southern places in the winter. Uche tried to prepare me, but the stories of brutality and trauma were an eye-opener into how much suffering the human body can withstand. Many were children who had witnessed and experienced what no child, no person, should ever witness. The people I met all had accounts of rape, torture, constant gunfire, bombs obliterating homes, or soldiers murdering their families in front of them. They talked of the anger and hatred that burned in the eyes of their attackers and the constant fear they still felt. The story of one woman was one that is etched into my memory. When the soldiers came for her and her kids, they spared them death but raped her. She knew they would come back so they fled in the night, heading for what she hoped was Uganda. Like most fleeing South Sudan, they chose to travel in the cloak of darkness and hide in the daylight. She eventually crossed a border and found herself in an area where she looked up to see fellow refugees hanging from trees. Congo was not friendly to the fleeing people of South Sudan. After she was raped again, they ran back the way they had come, eventually finding the crossing into Uganda. Hopelessness and exhaustion hung heavily over her and everyone else I met. The evil carnage they lived through still haunted them awake or asleep, giving them no break from their reality. Some were so traumatized they couldn’t even speak of what happened. Thousands of South Sudanese families have been separated, and thousands of young ones are now orphans of another war. A war that came so soon after the war that gave them independence from Sudan, six years earlier. That was a time that should have finally been free from terror and an opportunity to rebuild the country. Unfortunately, where there is oil there is corruption and a battle for control. When land holds power, innocent people get hurt while the powerful get richer.

In America, we read heartwarming success stories of refugees and immigrants overcoming impossible odds as if it should be a celebrated normal. As if our own laws and fear of others haven’t set up these obstacles, in a world that is quick to close its borders to anyone trying to move in. Forgotten is the fact that many people who flee already have established lives with careers. They were doctors, nurses, teachers, lawyers, farmers, and business owners. While I was in Uganda, my own country was planning to build a wall at the Mexico border and was secretly separating children from their families who crossed over. The rhetoric against immigrants and refugees was cruel and dehumanizing. There was collective ignorance to the fact that our privilege and freedom allotted to us by our government has always come at the expense of others. How many conflicts were started after the influence of Western nations and where do the guns come from that are used to murder and terrorize? Who picks our food and packs our meat while they themselves live off the scraps of our nation? As I raised money to go to Uganda, a wealthy woman from a church met me at Whole Foods for coffee. She discreetly handed me a check for $400 and said she couldn’t tell her husband she was supporting me because he was against refugees. I knew they had started out in poverty but built up a successful business and quite a bit of wealth while employing immigrants (most likely some being undocumented). I was too stunned and spineless to refuse the money.

As I got to know my new friends in the refugee settlements, it was obvious the impossible task ahead of them and the heartbreaking unknowns. Malaria, malnutrition, and other infections were running rampant among the children. Walking by huts, I could see skinny limbs lying on dirty mattresses delirious with fevers. When the refugees ran out of their portion of food from charity, they had to wait for the next delivery (which was often late and getting less). Parents were now parenting kids they had never met before entering the settlements, while older siblings cared for younger sisters and brothers. Life for refugees is a lot of waiting day in and day out in places where they essentially have no rights. Some talked about going to bigger towns to find work, but money had to be spent carefully. Children wanted to continue their education and some walked hours one way to receive it (when funds were available). Resources to survive are inadequate, so most of the aid from humanitarian organizations is directed at immediate needs like food, water, and medicine (even those are inconsistent). Education gets put on a back burner, and as time passes, children miss years of schooling. What happens when the war is over? Hundreds of thousands, now adults, return to their country uneducated; and the humanitarian crisis continues. Young women told me of fighting the pressure to stay home and take care of the younger children, knowing they will probably be married off. Women who lost their husbands, now fended off other men who wanted to claim them as their own. They struggled to feed their kids, without resorting to selling their bodies for food. They would, however, do that if it meant preventing their children from starving. Like the people trying to get to the United States, mothers and fathers will do whatever they can to give their children a possibility at life, no matter the dangers.

There was spunky Theo, a little boy who had been sent to Uganda by his parents on his own. He was only six when his parents gathered what little money they could and packed a small bag. The soldiers and their constant gunfire were getting closer, and they knew this was Theo’s only chance. They couldn’t afford the whole family to go, so barefoot and terrified Theo fled. He was told to try to find Uganda and go to a Refugee camp. If he had stayed, there was a high likelihood that he would be murdered, die of starvation, or be recruited as a child soldier. Fleeing South Sudan gave Theo a chance at a future and continuing his family line. His story wasn’t much different from the unaccompanied minors entering the US from places like El Salvador, one of the most violent nations in Latin America, with high murder rates. If you could afford to send your child, you would, even if it meant they had to go without you. There is truth to what Somali British writer Warsan Shire says in her poem Home: “you have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.” You don’t leave the life you built unless the only other option is death or worse.

Back in the States, I digested the hundreds of stories I had heard and went through all the emotions from complete hatred to hope. It’s horrifying what humans can do to other humans and makes this life feel meaningless at times, especially when we see it done to children. If traveling to 21 countries and volunteering in 16 of them has taught me anything, it’s that people’s stories are important and that we are all connected in some way. Walking down dirt roads in villages far away next to those who have seen a lifetime of struggle was humbling and I would be reminded of the privilege that brought me there. Elders with wrinkles that represent tales of suffering and pain; yet smiles that tell of resilience. Younger people with worry lines mapping a story most of us could never imagine. Children with innocent hope and expectation for good things to come. Their voices filled my ears, and my eyes saw lives I could never imagine living. It made me appreciate the beauty and power of someone’s story. Refugee stories that bring hope should be admired but are by no means stories that justify the evil done. They don’t make it okay that millions of people are forced to flee their homes every year due to violence, poverty, climate change, and wars.

Before that recent trip to Uganda, I hadn’t paid much attention to social media or news. After, I noticed my news feeds were full of divisiveness, hateful words from leaders, and the devaluation of those trying to save their families. The woman who donated money to me was still a leader at her church and her husband a big donor, all while believing refugees and immigrants were what was wrong with the country and supporting a President who pushed that narrative. I was angry but I also knew the separation of families didn’t start with that administration, though they made the dehumanizing more evident. The hatred of immigrants also didn’t begin with them. I could see it in childhood, growing up in a farm town with many migrant workers. If the workers weren’t living in shacks near the farms, they were with those of Latino descent mainly segregated to the other side of the train tracks. The movement that had brought them to my hometown was because they desired for their children to have a better education and to send money back home to their families. They weren’t there to take resources from anyone but no matter what they did, they couldn’t shake that stereotype.

When people say they are against immigrants or refugees, most of the time they are stuck in an echo chamber full of exaggerations and lies meant to cause fear and hatred of others. While I continued to be a correspondent for Uche and assisted where I could, he and our refugee friends were the ones truly making a difference. They started a school under a tree that eventually grew into buildings and now teaches thousands of students. His organization started a small business grant program, school scholarships, reading groups, English teaching, a feeding program for the students, farming, and partnered with a successful trauma counseling operation. Although I may not have deserved to hear their testimonies, I was present. As I reflect on my privilege in a world of need, I can share the stories of those forced into a cycle of movement, but we must make space for all voices to tell their own story. There is a thread that connects humanity, and our freedoms and liberations are tied together. The whole world benefits when there is peace, when children get an education, when economies thrive, and when we all say no more to violence. Some walls exist without being physically built, but those walls are so much easier to tear down through humanizing people and their experiences. No matter where we are, there is always someone with a story to tell of a time when they were forced into movement, and it doesn’t take much effort for us to simply listen and learn.