Trainees

Teke was born in 1959 in Uvira, DRC at the northern tip of the longest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Tanganyika. He has fond childhood memories of his homeland: mountains, lush forests, swimming, hiking, and of course, football (soccer). He completed 6 years of school and then worked for many years as a fisherman, even owning his own boat at one time. By 1999, the violence that started in DRC in 1996 nearly reached Uvira, so Teke fled along with many others. He traveled for miles by lake in an overcrowded, unstable boat. When he reached the Nyarugusa Refugee...

Some of you may recall meeting Selemani as a trainee. Selemani graduated in 2021 only to discover that first jobs don’t easily accommodate the schedule of a single parent of four children, two with special needs. He did take part-time work cleaning a church. Meanwhile, we started calling on him for help when short-staffed. Selemani is a terrific worker and a terrific person: reliable, trustworthy, thorough, considerate, multi-lingual and a gifted trainer with our youth. Eventually, we invited him to enter our market training to work on customer service and to help with fulfillment. His daughter even joined our youth...

On August 26, 2021, the Kabul airport was overwhelmed with refugees seeking to save their lives. Nomanullah can tell you about it first-hand. He, with a brother and uncle, had the papers to pass through the famous airport gate. A half hour later that gate was bombed. Their plane took them to Germany where they slept in bunk beds filling a football-sized field. Forty-some days later they were in Virginia. In December he arrived in Rhode Island. Nomanullah is one of six children, the son of a surgeon, who grew up in the lush, temperate, and diverse city of Kunduz....

Lidwige speaks bittersweetly about Haiti. Born in Port au Prince, she grew up with 9 siblings, 7 boys and 2 girls.  She liked school and went to college for accounting before taking a job as a school secretary. She also lived through the terrible 2010 earthquake that destroyed so many homes and lives and devastated the Haitian economy. She stayed for the recovery, but with so much violence engulfing her country, she finally fled. Lidwige has temporary protected status (TPS) and came to Rhode Island this past June to live with her mother, aunt, and cousins. She immediately enrolled in...

Afuwa was born in a village in Congo called Baraka. Her parents were teachers and she was the youngest of three children. She left Congo when she was 5 to end up in a refugee camp in Burundi.  This was a terrible period for her family. She was at the camp for 17 years and came to RI in 2022 with her children, ages 16, 14, 10 and 2. She was very nervous about leaving and what life would be like in the USA. She giggles a bit when she says that she was surprised when they landed in the...

Zainab was born in Aleppo, Syria and has fond memories of school, friends, and neighbors until the war came and “ruined everything.” She was 12, and the eldest of 6. At first, war was in the distance, but then it arrived with all its terror, and life changed. No school. No electricity. Limited water. Missile strikes. A neighbor’s house hit. She felt sick all the time. She recalls a candle falling while they were filling oil lamps and then the room was on fire. She saved her younger brother, and her father and the neighbors put the fire out. After...