Outcasts United

by Warren St. John

  Eventually, Paula Balegamire and her children joined her husband in Brazzaville. The house on the rue Lweme was overcrowded with the men who had fled Kinshasa, so their wives and children stayed with other refugees around Brazzaville so as not to draw the attention of local security forces who were hostile to the refugees pouring into the city. The plan was to lie low until the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) could place the families in a safe refugee camp, or even better, in a country far from the violence.

  On January 16, 2001, a few weeks after the men had fled Kinshasa, a bodyguard approached Laurent Kabila at the presidential palace there and fired at least two shots into his back. The assassin, a man named Rachidi Minzele, was immediately shot and killed, taking with him the only definitive knowledge about the motives behind his deed, which spawned a confounding web of conspiracy theories. Kabila’s son Joseph assumed control of the country ten days later, when Laurent-Désiré Kabila died of his wounds.

  Back in Brazzaville, news of Kabila’s death sent a shudder through the men who had fled Kinshasa weeks before. As they feared, the younger Kabila immediately began a crackdown against his father’s political enemies—especially those associated with Anselme Masasu Nindaga. Nindaga himself was executed. Scores of others were rounded up, thrown into prison, and tortured into implicating friends, neighbors, and associates. Countless more were killed or vanished.

  The crackdown didn’t stop at the banks of the Congo River. Kabila’s security forces had been cooperating with the government in Brazzaville to patrol the riverbanks for refugees and fleeing political rivals who could be detained as suspects in the quickly growing conspiracy. In the middle of the night of January 28, police descended on the house on the rue Lweme and arrested the men inside, including Paula’s husband, Joseph Balegamire.

  Paula was five months pregnant and had five children when her husband was arrested. She and the wives of the other men who had been arrested began a panicked search for their husbands. They besieged the local UNHCR office, demanding to know the whereabouts of men who had applied to the UN for safety. Pressed by the UN and Amnesty International for an explanation, the government in Brazzaville at first denied any knowledge of the men’s whereabouts, then later said they had been moved to the interior of the country for their own safety. Days later, through a report on an African radio news service, the wives and families of the men learned the dreadful truth. The government in Brazzaville had handed the nineteen men over to Joseph Kabila, in obvious violation of international law, which forbids nations from sending asylum applicants back to countries where they may face harm. No one knows exactly why the men were handed over. A rumor circulated that they were given to Kabila as part of a prisoner exchange. Perhaps Kabila’s government simply paid a bounty. But whatever the reason, there was little doubt about what awaited the men when they arrived into Kabila’s hands.

  The men were jailed in one of Central Africa’s most notorious prisons: the Central Penitentiary and Re-education Center in Kinshasa, known to most locals by its old name, Makala. Makala was—and is—a place of extraordinary brutality. A 2003 U.S. State Department report on human rights in the Democratic Republic of Congo stated that at least sixty-nine people had died in the prison during the previous year, some from torture, others from malnutrition or disease. Inmates at Makala were regularly deprived of the most basic necessities. For several weeks in September 2002, the State Department reported, the prison provided inmates no food whatsoever.

  The nineteen men from Brazzaville were stashed, along with other Kabila rivals and political dissidents, into a high-security section of Makala called Pavilion One. They were held incommunicado, and without formal charges. Eventually, they were lumped into a group of 135 people who were charged in the assassination of Laurent Kabila and the plotting of the supposed earlier coup attempt. In trials that were roundly denounced by human rights groups, the nineteen were eventually given life sentences. They were among the fortunate. Some thirty of the supposed Kabila plotters were sentenced to death.

  The United Nations—embarrassed by the handover of men who had sought its protection to such obviously dire circumstances—responded by expediting resettlement proceedings for the wives and children of the men whose trust the institution had violated. But resettlement in Europe or the United States presented the women with a painful decision. Separated from each other and half a world away, they could not advocate for their jailed husbands as effectively as if they stayed together nearby. Further, inmates in Makala depended on family and friends to bribe guards to get them food and other basics. But Paula had her children to care for. She could not return safely to Kinshasa, and even Brazzaville was becoming risky. Congolese security forces from Kinshasa were now combing Brazzaville for Kabila’s political enemies, and violence against Tutsis was becoming widespread. Paula lived in Brazzaville for nearly three more years, in a state of unrelenting fear. Her children couldn’t attend school. She had no reliable income. But she held out hope that things would calm down and that her husband might be freed. At one point, it seemed possible. Kabila announced an amnesty for some of the men imprisoned at Makala, but in the end, Joseph was not among those released. The final straw came, Paula said, when she and another woman were nearly corralled by a mob intent on burning them alive. The two women escaped, and Paula resolved to get out of Brazzaville however she could. The UNHCR offered her resettlement in the United States, and in November 2004, Paula left Brazzaville with her five children, destined for Georgia.

  Paula and her family—Josue, the oldest; Grace; daughter Christelle; twin boys Manace and Ephraim; and a newborn baby girl, Gloria—were placed in an apartment complex called Willow Ridge. Through the International Rescue Committee, Paula found a job as a seamstress at a factory that made sports jerseys. The work wasn’t bad, but the commute was more than an hour each way, requiring Paula to leave home at five-thirty each morning. Through contacts in the refugee community, she eventually met Luma, who encouraged her sons Grace and Josue to come out to play soccer and eventually hired Paula to work at her cleaning company. Since arriving in the United States, Paula’s only contact with her husband has come through telephone calls he was able to make on cell phones borrowed from the friends and family members of other inmates at Makala. Grace, who was just five when he last saw his father, said he can barely remember his face. If the family is to be reunited, Paula said, it would have to be in the United States.

  “There’s no point in thinking about where to go back to,” she said, “because there’s nowhere to go back to.”

  Chapter Seven

  “Coach Says It’s Not Good”

  On September 26, 2005, a weary twelve-year-old boy named Bienvenue Ntwari slowly opened the door of his Clarkston apartment and, squinting against the sudden blinding light of the midday sun, took his first real look at America. Two days before, Bienvenue had set out with his mother, Generose, his older brother, Alex, and younger brother, Ive (pronounced EE-vay), from a refugee camp in Mozambique.

  The family landed in Atlanta at night. They wandered off the airplane into a vertiginous swirl of strange images, sounds, and languages. They walked through the long corridors of the airport, past moving sidewalks, blinking murals, stands of strange-looking food, and a rush of people who all seemed to know exactly where in all that chaos they wanted to go. The family was met eventually by a caseworker from the International Rescue Committee, who helped them load their things into a car and drove them past the shimmering towers of downtown Atlanta, toward Clarkston. Along I-20, a vast and open superhighway that divides Atlanta into north and south, cars glided past with improbable speed. The streets in America were bizarrely smooth. From within this quick-flowing hallucination, it was impossible to make much sense of the images flowing by the windows. It was as if the family had been beamed magically from one world to another; they had little feeling for the miles traveled, the continents or oceans crossed, or the time elapsed. After a thirty-minute ride, the caseworker pu
lled into the Willow Ridge apartment complex, an assemblage of two-story buildings that sits atop a hill and abuts the roaring interstate highway they had just exited. The parking lot was quiet. Street lamps cast eerie pink-tinted orbs of light on the cracked asphalt. There was no one around. The family unloaded the car in a daze and followed the caseworker through a doorway hidden in a dark recess beneath a stairwell and into a bare-walled ground-floor apartment with mattresses on the floor. Generose, Alex, Bienvenue—“Bien” to friends and family—and Ive collapsed onto the mattresses and slept.

  AS INTERMINABLE AS the journey was, it was really just the final leg of a wandering that began nearly five years before in Bujumbura, the bustling capital of Burundi, where Generose grew up and raised her boys. Bujumbura sits alongside the tranquil waters of Lake Tan-ganyika, at the foot of a fissured mountain range that rises sharply out of the flats and glows orange on clear days, when the sun sets over Congo to the west.

  Burundi, the size of Connecticut and home to some 8.5 million, lies south of Rwanda, east of Congo, and north of Tanzania and is among the poorest countries in the world. In 2005, the annual per capita gross domestic product of the country was a mere four hundred dollars—which ranks it ahead of only the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe among nations for which any data is available. As in Rwanda, a Tutsi minority had ruled over a Hutu majority in Burundi, with the blessing of the country’s colonial stewards—first Germany and later Belgium—and continuing after independence in 1962.

  In the early 1990s, though, hope for ethnic reconciliation began to emerge. In 1993, with the country’s first free elections and the election of the country’s first Hutu leader, a moderate intellectual named Melchior Ndadaye.

  Four months later, in October 1993, he was assassinated by Tutsi hardliners. Soon after his death was announced by radio, enraged Hutus took their revenge on Tutsis, killing scores. Firmly in control of the military, Tutsi hardliners responded in kind, wiping out whole villages of Hutus. This tit-for-tat violence soon blossomed into all-out massacres. Within a year, 100,000 were dead. In the creeping ten-year civil war that followed, some 300,000 died, and countless tens of thousands fled into the mountains and into refugee camps in Tanzania and Mozambique.

  In 2000, the killing was still going on. Hutu rebels fought for control of Bujumbura. Generose, fair skinned and with narrow facial features that identified her as a Tutsi, fled the city with her boys.

  The family made it to Mozambique, where they lived for four years in two separate camps, hoping the whole time to hear from the United Nations office there that their application for asylum had been accepted. That day came in August 2005. The family learned they would be going to the United States, to a place called Atlanta, of which Generose was only faintly aware. She told her boys the news about two weeks before they were to depart, with strict instructions to tell no one.

  “My mom told us not to go around the camp too much because she thought they might do something bad to us because they were jealous,” Bien said.

  Soon they were off. They flew through South Africa to New York before eventually arriving in Atlanta. It was the first time any of them had been on an airplane.

  “All I remember,” said Alex, now fifteen, “was that it was scary.”

  THAT FIRST MORNING in their apartment outside Clarkston, they awoke exhausted and disoriented. Generose groggily told her boys to gather their things and to get ready to leave again on the next stage of their journey. The boys laughed. Generose hadn’t understood that they had reached their final destination, that the empty apartment where they had spent the night and where they were now gathered was where they would live. They were, in some confusing sense of the word, home.

  Bienvenue wondered for a moment how much of what he remembered from the night before had been real and how much a dream. He decided to look outside. He opened the front door of the apartment and was blinded by a cascade of daylight. As his eyes adjusted, a few cars came into focus. He saw some other buildings, and some trees hovering in the distance. Bienvenue decided to venture outside. He walked up the concrete stairs to look around, and spied a boy, about his age, standing in the parking lot. Bien was nothing if not outgoing. He decided to try a few words of English out on his new neighbor.

  “Hello, what your name?” he asked.

  “Grace,” the boy said, using the French pronunciation, Grahss. “Grace Balegamire.”

  “American?” Bien asked him.

  “I’m from Congo,” Grace said.

  “Congo!” Bien said. “Unasema Kiswahili?” Do you speak Swahili?

  “Ndiyo,” said Grace. Yes.

  The boys stood and talked. Bien explained that they had just arrived the night before, that he didn’t know anyone or anything about America. He wanted to know what American kids were like. Were they nice? Were they different?

  Grace laughed. Were they different! The boys at school, he told Bien, wore their pants low around their hips—almost to their knees, not like in Africa, where boys and men wore their pants around their waists, with belts and tucked-in shirts. American boys wore their hair long, in braids, like women. They weren’t so nice either. Some had guns. They fought with each other. They made fun of people from Africa. Boys and girls got together and did things you weren’t supposed to do.

  It wasn’t at all what Bien had expected to hear.

  “He told me here in America,” Bien recalled, “they got some bad action.”

  Grace cut the conversation short. He was late, he said.

  “For what?” Bien asked.

  “Practice,” Grace said.

  “What practice?”

  “Soccer practice,” said Grace.

  Bien loved soccer. In the camps in Mozambique, he’d played the game in bare feet with a ball made from plastic bags tied in a bundle, in friendly but fierce matches between boys from Burundi and from Congo. He fancied himself a natural, and wanted to know more. Grace explained: There was a soccer team for refugee kids like them, with lots of Africans and kids from places he’d never heard of. They played nearby. The coach was a woman. Grace offered to ask her if Bien could come to the next practice.

  “I live over there,” Bien said in Swahili, pointing toward the door beneath the stairwell behind them. “Come to my house and tell me what she says.”

  “Okay,” Grace told him. “I will.”

  The boys went their separate ways, Grace to practice, and Bien to his new apartment to tell his brothers Alex and Ive of his discovery. There were kids who spoke Swahili right outside, in the parking lot! It was a big relief, and quickly transformed his view of what his life in America might be like.

  “I thought we would be the only ones who spoke Swahili,” Bien said. “We didn’t think we’d have anybody to play with.”

  AT PRACTICE THAT afternoon, Grace asked Luma if he could bring a kid from Willow Ridge who had just arrived from Burundi. He didn’t speak English, but he liked soccer. Maybe he was good. Grace wanted to know if he could join the team.

  Luma was used to such requests. Caseworkers at the resettlement agencies often sent just-arrived kids to her, knowing that through the Fugees they might quickly make friends, that they’d be well looked after, get a chance to get exercise and, possibly, a release from some of the potentially overwhelming anxiety brought on by relocation. Her established players frequently brought along new arrivals as well. More than those flyers she posted around town at the beginning of each season, the players were her best recruiting tool.

  Bien, like many of these newcomers, had arrived in the middle of a season, when the Fugees’ roster was full. But Luma agreed to let him practice with the Fugees even if he wasn’t eligible to play in games. He would be expected to follow the same rules as everyone else, and to show up on time or not to come at all.

  That evening after practice, Grace came home to Willow Ridge to find Bien and his older brother, Alex, in the parking lot outside. Grace told Bien the news. The next practice would be the day after tomorr
ow, he said. They could go together. Alex could join Luma’s older team with Grace’s big brother Josue. The team was pretty good, Grace said, and the coach was strict. It was almost a warning. Bien wasn’t intimidated, and he didn’t care about rules.

  “The only thing I wanted was to play soccer,” Bien said later, recalling that day. “I didn’t ask too many questions.”

  THE ARRIVAL OF new players like Bien and his brother Alex brought new talent to Luma’s growing soccer program, along with new complications. Each addition potentially shifted the social balance of the team, as players connected over shared languages or cultures. Luma developed new rules on the fly to compensate. She forbade boys like Grace and Bien from speaking to each other in Swahili and required them instead to speak English—the team’s lingua franca. She found she had to keep a constant lookout for emerging cliques, especially among players who were inclined to stick with their own kind.

  “I’d say, ‘Get in groups of four for a passing drill,’” Luma said, “and every single time people would group up with people from their own country. So I started saying to myself, ‘I need a Liberian there, with a Congolese, an Afghan, and an Iraqi.’”