It turns out it’s impossible to merely dip a toe into the world of refugees. Write about a Bhutanese refugee one day and the next you’re in an office full of Somalis, Sudanese, Congolese, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Burundians, Ugandans and, well, you get the picture. Africa is a big place.
An open house is underway for the Colorado African Organization, which has moved to a new home in southeast Denver. About 7,000 African refugees have been resettled in Colorado in the past 20 years. Waiting to greet you is Ndayishimiye Emmanuel of Burundi, who arrived here Sept. 24, 2007.
He is a 23-year-old who grew up in refugee camps and who speaks English, Kirundi, French and Swahili. He is dressed in a suit, and when you visit the office several days later, he will be equally dapper, his dress shoes polished to a high sheen.
“My parents want me to dress like someone who is wise,” he will say, blushing. “I want to show I am on the right path.”
The office is filled with the hubbub of many languages — often within a single conversation. French gives way to Swahili, which swings into English and then do-si-dos back to French. “You hang around Africans, you’ll have to get used to that,” a woman tells me.
I’m here because Adrien Mangituka called. He is originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He’s fluent in six languages, has a law degree, certification in auto mechanics and computer programming. I last saw him last four years ago. He was going to apply at a downtown hotel as a busboy.
Something about the refugee story draws us. There is the drama itself, the suffering, the deprivation of forced exodus. This happens in places most of us will never see. They are experiences to which most us of cannot relate. As such, the power of the story lies not so much in its facts but in its recitation by those who survived. Their very existence is an affirmation of the human capacity to endure and, beyond endurance, to rise and step forward again. Because it is necessary. Because we believe good days must follow bad, that work and faith will be rewarded.
A busboy? I remember asking Mangituka in 2006. “How I begin again does not matter,” he replied.
A refugee who comes to this country does not escape hardship. He or she finds only a different version of it, and this version may last years.
What is the difference between those who adapt with ease and those who do not? I ask Kit Taintor, CAO’s executive director.
Language skills, education, Taintor says. The younger refugee integrates faster, with less friction. Think of this, she says: You have spent many years establishing yourself and your career and then you must start over in a refugee camp where you may spend years seeking safe haven. You arrive, finally, in that place and must start yet again.
You are an ophthalmologist now making hotel beds. You are a math teacher driving a cab.
When I find Mangituka at the open house, he leads me, beaming with pride, to his new office. He was just hired as a case manager at CAO, a nonprofit helping African refugees achieve self-sufficiency. We’ll revisit CAO later. For now, it’s enough to say the need for its services, including English and computer classes and help with job searches, has become critical.
From October 2008 to October 2009, only 39 percent of all refugees on the state caseload were employed. The caseload includes everyone who arrived not just that year, but in the previous four years.
More refugees are arriving at a time when jobs and resources are scarce. “We’re resettling refugee families into welfare, and we don’t want to do that, at all,” Taintor says.
Mangituka did not become a busboy. In the past four years, he has worked as a manager in a second-hand store. He worked in a gas station/convenience store. He worked as an interpreter. He went to school to become a nurse’s aide. He moved to Colorado Springs and became a case manager for a refugee resettlement agency. He drove a limo. He cleaned cars for a rental chain and then was promoted to customer service, which he still does when he is not helping other Africans find a way to succeed in Colorado.
“I like to help people in need,” he says, and I watch him help a Somali woman negotiating the Medicaid bureaucracy. “They say I am no longer eligible because of my income,” she says. “My husband is a cabdriver. We make less than $1,000 a month.”
I ask him later what advice he tries to impart to his clients, and he says: “No matter what, there is always a way out. Look back to your past, but do not dwell there. Look to where you were, where you are and where you want to be.”
He talks about taking more college classes, about working one day in the medical field. Mangituka is 42 years old, a man with big plans.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
