The Newcomers

by Helen Thorpe

  Uganda has a friendlier attitude toward refugees than most countries, and it employs the word “settlement” to indicate that refugees are free to come and go. Uganda’s settlements have also been praised for fostering a culture of self-sufficiency. At Kyangwali, refugees were expected to grow their own food. “On arrival, everyone qualifies for land,” the commandant explained. “We also provide plastic sheeting, so that you can build a makeshift house as you prepare to build something more solid. Over time, we expect you to be able to put up a semipermanent structure to live in, and to start earning a bit of livelihood.” Refugees get full rations during their first three years, but after four years they receive only half rations, and after eight years they no longer qualify for rations at all. In that way, settlement officials tried to promote self-reliance.

  The commandant assigned a subordinate to show us around. From the field office, we drove through the main commercial area, a collection of adobe buildings with tin roofs that included a restaurant, a pool hall, and shops that sold sugar, salt, cooking oil, beer, and locally manufactured gin. After the shops, we drove past a series of mud houses with roofs of thatch or tin. To build a home, residents placed posts of saplings vertically around the perimeter, then bound more saplings horizontally to the vertical posts. After making a second grid, homebuilders packed mud between the two sets of saplings. The technical term for this is wattle and daub. A good roof was essential, or the mud walls would wash away when it rained.

  Many homes featured open doorways, though some had doors. On top of perhaps one-third of the structures, I spied a single solar panel, sufficient to generate enough power to charge a few cell phones and provide some lighting. Every house was surrounded by crops: leafy banana trees, tasseled rows of corn, beans growing on stakes, and cassava. Cassava was the starch of choice—basically, it is the potato of Central Africa. Every so often, a resident had beautified a particular home. One house featured two flowering trees in the yard, and another had been painted with the words GOD IS GOOD.

  The first primary school we visited served 1,606 students and had eleven permanent classrooms, as well as several large canvas tents that served as temporary classrooms. Wooden benches stood before wooden desks, but the rooms sat empty. It was the start of a new term, and most of the students had not yet reported back from their holidays. The canvas tents provided evidence that the school would be crowded when the children materialized, yet there was not a lot of education happening on the day we visited. Handwritten posters taped to the walls suggested a didactic teaching style. In one room, I saw a drawing of a fish with all its external parts labeled, and in another a drawing that described the formation of a rift valley—when two tectonic plates pulled apart, the floor of the valley dropped down in between. The posters had yellowed and their edges were curling.

  Kyangwali had eight primary schools and one secondary school. In the government-run primary schools, tuition was free, although parents had to pay for shoes, uniforms, and school materials. Uniforms cost about $20 apiece, and it was hard for families with no access to employment to come up with that much money. For children to continue at the secondary level, parents had to pay substantial tuition. The vast majority of children growing up in the settlement did not attend school beyond the primary level. Younger students received instruction in their home language, but older students received instruction in English. The English used by school administrators seemed a bit whimsical. Posted beside the door to the principal’s office was a hand-lettered list of strictures:

  1. Coming early at school is a must.

  2. We should always be smart.

  3. The class must be kept clean always.

  4. Teachers must be respected.

  5. No fighting in class.

  6. Eating in class is highly prohibited.

  7. No escapism from school.

  8. Going out of class is not allowed.

  9. Absentism [sic] is not allowed.

  10. Extra lesson is to all pupils.

  Of the 1,606 students served by this school, all but nine were Congolese. The principal looked blank when I described Solomon and Methusella; if the boys had ever gone to this school, she did not remember them.

  The second primary school we visited was privately run. It received funding from outside donors and appeared to be a model of public-private partnerships. Later I would be fortunate enough to meet one of the cofounders of this school, a well-known leader in the Kyangwali refugee community named Bahati Kanyamanza, after he accepted a resettlement offer and moved to Elizabeth, New Jersey. Coincidentally, Bahati knew Tamari, the woman who had helped us find the refugee settlement. She had been one of the lucky children who received a scholarship from Bahati’s organization to fund her secondary education. I knew that Solomon and Methusella had not attended a private school, but I told the principal about the boys anyway; again, there was no recognition.

  Before we left the premises, I was accosted by a woman who appeared befogged. Beside her mouth, she had a crust of drool, as if she had vomited recently. She thrust a set of registration papers at me. Perhaps she thought I held the power to choose which refugees got to resettle.

  “Is your name Espérance?” I asked, looking at one of the forms.

  The woman nodded. The word was French—it meant “hope.”

  Espérance had been born in 1967, the papers said. She was originally from the DRC, and she had three children. I wondered what had put a mother of three into an incapacitated state at eleven in the morning. Before I could ask more, however, the settlement official shooed Espérance away.

  “This one is drunk already,” said the commandant’s number two.

  He worried that she had been a nuisance. Actually, I had heard that substance abuse was rampant in refugee camps, and in her disheveled condition, Espérance had provided me with a glimpse of the issue firsthand. I did not know what had caused her to drink till she was weaving before lunch, but it seemed likely she had lived through trauma.

  We set off toward a health clinic. Along the way, we passed a group of boys in blue jeans walking down the road with a herd of skinny cows. Then four girls walked by carrying large bundles of firewood on their heads. The girls were maybe eleven or twelve years old, and the boys perhaps fourteen, but none of them were in school—they were busy helping their families survive.

  In the courtyard of the health clinic, seventy or eighty people stood in the shade of a big tree, waiting to see one of the clinic’s two doctors. The doctor who paused to speak to us wore navy trousers, a light blue dress shirt, and a white smock. He showed us the clinic’s most recent monthly report. In April 2016, the two doctors had seen a total of 2,183 patients. By far the largest complaint was malaria; that month, they had seen 449 patients with symptoms. “May will be worse,” the doctor told us. “Malaria is seasonal. When maize grows, it harbors water in the leaves that are close to the stalk, and the mosquitoes hatch there.” Other patients had shown up with diarrhea, sexually transmitted diseases, urinary tract infections, skin diseases, ordinary colds, and pneumonia. “We have twenty-nine pregnant women with malaria,” the doctor added. “We need to treat them, but it’s tricky because quinine can induce premature labor.”

  The doctor turned to a different stack of paper, a series of assault reports stamped CONFIDENTIAL. He estimated that he performed about two rape examinations per day, although when I studied the April report more closely, I saw there were twenty-seven cases of injuries due to gender-based violence at the clinic that month, which suggested the correct average might be more like one rape case per day. Clearly, the constant parade of women with injuries from sexual assault had worn on the doctor, for while he spoke of this subject his mood turned fuguelike. Noting that the Congo was known for its high incidence of rape, the Ugandan-born doctor said he believed the trend had increased with the arrival of more refugees from the DRC. Many of the cases required the doctor to make a court appearance, meaning a long, bumpy drive on bad roads to the courthouse in Hoima,
the closest big city. Wearily, he told us, “I’m supposed to go to court later today.”

  We let the doctor return to his patients. Our official tour was over, but I called Tamari, to see if she might be able to help us find the rest of Tchiza’s family. The more time we spent at the settlement, the more I felt the desire to trace their trajectory through this place. Which village had been theirs? What had their house looked like? I wished I could meet Stivin—Methusella’s closest friend. Finding one individual among the forty-two thousand residents of the sprawling camp seemed impossible, but I felt I had to at least make an attempt.

  Tamari said she would be glad to help. We picked her up and she made a few phone calls to various members of the refugee community. Using the settlement’s grapevine, she narrowed down our search to one village, where many former residents of North Kivu were concentrated. After a twenty-minute drive across the settlement, along red dirt roads, past a lot of banana trees and a lot of corn, we arrived in the center of that village. A small crowd formed—we were a novelty. Villagers invited us to sit down on blue plastic chairs, which they placed in the shade of a small tree. After the villagers conferred, Tamari reported they knew a couple who were related to Tchiza, but neither the husband nor the wife was at home. The husband was working in the fields, and the wife had taken a sick child to a health clinic.

  After some more group discussion, a villager ran off to retrieve the husband. Perhaps ten minutes later, the man appeared, wearing worn black trousers and an old gray polo shirt, darkened by sweat. Tamari called out a warm greeting; the man turned out to be a well-known pastor. I was still explaining myself to him when his wife materialized. She had a beautiful face with high cheekbones and wide-set eyes. This was Maman Roger (the honorific meant she had a son named Roger); she wore a lime-green polo shirt with a red-and-white cotton skirt, and she had a child tied to her back with a piece of red cloth. When I showed Maman Roger pictures of Solomon and Methusella, her face broke into a huge grin. They were her first cousins. But she reached out to take my phone into her own hands when I showed her a picture of Imani taken in Goma. Maman Roger beamed at my phone, transfixed by the sight of his face.

  “That is her brother,” Tamari explained. “The same mother, the same father.”

  Once upon a time, all of Solomon and Methusella’s relatives had lived together in Buganza, but the Congo’s violence had divided the family into four factions. Some remained in Buganza, others had moved to Goma, many more resided at Kyangwali, and a lucky few had resettled in the United States. In this case, war had put miles and miles of bumpy roads between a sister and brother. Four years had passed since Maman Roger had seen Imani. Her brother had traveled from Goma to the settlement by bus to attend her wedding, and it had taken him more than fifty hours.

  Maman Roger got into our car, along with the baby she was carrying, to show us the way to an uncle’s home. We drove past dozens of homes, and Maman Roger pointed to one—it was where Solomon and Methusella had lived. I saw a wattle-and-daub structure perhaps ten feet wide by twenty feet in length. Tan adobe had once covered its walls, but much had crumbled off, revealing dark-brown mud beneath. The house had one small window, two wooden doors, and a roof made of silver corrugated tin. I could see at a glance how far the two boys had traveled: Before moving to the United States, they had lived in a home with no electricity, no appliances, no running water, no heating, no light switches, no glass windowpanes, and no doorknobs.

  We turned down one side road after another, and every time we made a turn, the road got smaller. Eventually we parked near a house of dark brown mud riddled with cracks. On a blue tarpaulin spread by the front door, the family was drying cassava in the sun. Corn grew nearby. Maman Roger picked up a wooden bench and moved it into the shade, as her uncle stepped outside. He was a tall, stately man, wearing black trousers and an olive-green dress shirt. His hair was lightly threaded with gray. This was Samuel—the oldest of Tchiza’s brothers and the leader of the family that remained in Kyangwali.

  Samuel greeted us with weary grace and listened intently as we spoke. His manner softened when I showed him a picture of his younger brother. As I held up my iPhone, Samuel leaned forward to stare at the glowing photograph, which showed Tchiza standing inside the gold-domed statehouse in Denver, which we had visited together one day. My intention was to forge a connection with this man as best as I could, given the limited time we had together, and I thought it would be reassuring for him to see that I knew Tchiza. The chance to glimpse his long-lost brother had such a palpable effect on Samuel, however, that I forgot my questions and simply began sharing my pictures. As we went through my extensive catalog of images, additional family members gathered—Samuel’s wife, a daughter-in-law, a son, and several grandchildren. I wound up showing the crowd every picture of the boys that I had.

  “This is Methusella in his classroom,” I said at one point.

  “Metu!” the small children cried, crowding in for a closer look.

  Then I pulled up a picture of Solomon.

  “Gideon!” exclaimed Samuel’s wife.

  Solomon had grown since she had seen him last, and she had mistaken him for his older brother. This was discussed for a while—they could see the passage of time written on the boys’ faces. I remembered having conversations like this one when I was a child. My parents had brought us back to Ireland every other summer, where our freckled faces would be inspected closely by aunts and uncles, the smallest changes eliciting lengthy commentary. We were told that we resembled certain dead people we had never met, and then we would be released to play outside with our Irish cousins. Solomon and Methusella had not returned in person, but at least I had brought these high-resolution images. They were the first visual depictions this part of the family had seen of all that had transpired since the boys had left Kyangwali, and it was like a virtual homecoming.

  I described the litany of successes the two boys had won at school in the United States: They had earned top marks, they were skipping forward one full grade, Methusella was joining student government. Tamari, who spoke fluent English, served as our interpreter. Samuel put one arm over his head to lean against the side of his house, and stilled himself to listen with his whole being. On his face I saw warmth, caution, intelligence, and curiosity. I could sense why everyone turned to him for leadership. If we had experienced an emergency while we were together, I would have done whatever he suggested.

  Samuel asked if I could do him a favor. When camp officials had delivered the surprising news that Tchiza and his family had been granted permission to resettle in the United States, they had been told they would depart that same day. They had no time to walk around the sprawling settlement to say goodbye to the rest of the family, and Samuel had learned about what was happening in a rushed call on his mobile phone from Tchiza. At the time, Samuel had just borrowed a much-loved book from his younger brother. Would I return the book to Tchiza in America? Samuel ducked down to enter the mud hut and returned carrying a handmade book. Over the years, its leather cover had melted away at the edges, suggesting the book had been consulted frequently. It was a book of Christian hymns, written in Swahili.

  I promised to deliver the book. I asked if I could bring news of the family as well. How had everybody at Kyangwali been faring?

  “Tell them we send our greetings,” Samuel said, with tired elegance. “Tell them we are all doing fine. But tell them that we are still leading the refugee’s life—so they should stay in that place, where they are now.”

  He wanted to assure his younger brother that he had done the right thing by leaving—even though he had gone without saying a proper goodbye. As we drove off, I asked Tamari if she could help me understand what Samuel had meant. What was “the refugee’s life”? Tamari sighed audibly, and then explained that the plots of land assigned to each family measured only fifty by one hundred yards. This was a tiny amount of land, compared to the acreage the families had farmed previously. It was not possible to earn a real
livelihood on such a small tract; families could barely grow enough to feed themselves. Even if a family amassed a surplus, they could not readily sell the food, as few people in the settlement boasted spare cash. Also, while each family was permitted to cultivate land, they did not legally own property; all of the land belonged to the government of Uganda. Life was structured in a way that it was possible (barely) to subsist, but impossible to better your circumstances.

  Tamari’s comments were confirmed by the scholarship on Africa’s “protracted refugee situations.” In a far-reaching report about African camps, published by the UNHCR, analyst Jeff Crisp cited lack of economic opportunity coupled with material deprivation as among the top factors affecting well-being. Insufficient food was generally the number-one complaint. There was also a general psychosocial malaise; despair and low self-worth were prevalent. Many basic human rights were curtailed, among them freedom of movement (in most camps, residents are not permitted to leave), civil and political rights (they cannot vote in their host countries), and most legal rights (they are not official residents of their host countries). “The right to life has been bought at the cost of almost every other right,” wrote Crisp.

  Before leaving Kyangwali, we drove over to a primary school that Samuel had identified. I had told Methusella that I would try to find his friend Stivin. As it turned out, Stivin was Samuel’s grandson, and Samuel gave us directions to the right school. The principal asked us to sit down in his office and I described how I knew Solomon and Methusella. Then he informed us that he had no such boy named Stivin. We had made a mistake, apparently; I got ready to depart. Before we could go, Tamari spoke up in a gentle tone, to say perhaps the principal was mistaken, for the boy’s relatives had given us the name of the school very precisely. Also, she had been chatting with one of the teachers outside, and he had confirmed that the boy was present.