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ROUTE TO PEACE
THE CRIES OF FORGOTTEN
REFUGEES IN DEADLY CAMPS
By
Fidel Nshombo
2008
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ii
Route To Peace
The Cries of Forgotten Refugees in Deadly Camps
Copyright ©2009 by Fidel Nshombo
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means,
electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or by any information storage and retrieval
system without written permission from the author, except
for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.
Borderline Publishing
305 N. Steelhead Way
Boise, ID 83704
www.borderlinepublishing.com
ISBN 978-0-984190279 (Paperback)
Cover design by Keith York, Boise, Idaho
Printed in the United States of America on post-consumer
recycled paper
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iii
This book is dedicated to
the seventy-two refugees
that were deported to
Democratic Republic of
Congo in 2001 from
Zimbabwe for
demonstrating about
refugee rights. I was oneof 12 people that avoided
deportation by escaping.
I also dedicate this to my
family who experienced many of the same
situations while being
separated from me for
many years...
Fidel
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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION........................................................ ‐ 1 ‐
PREFACE ................................................................‐
10‐
CRIES OF THE FORGOTTEN ..................................... ‐ 13 ‐
LOVE OF THE NATION............................................. ‐ 15 ‐
LACK OF LOVE ........................................................ ‐ 20 ‐
SELLING SHORT ...................................................... ‐ 22 ‐
REFUGEE CAMP...................................................... ‐ 25 ‐
JUST LIKE
A
DREAM................................................
‐34
‐
THE WORLD NEED PEACE ....................................... ‐ 36 ‐
AFRICA................................................................... ‐ 40 ‐
THE WARS NEED TO END........................................ ‐ 42 ‐
RUNNING............................................................... ‐ 44 ‐
TAKES COURAGE TO BE A REFUGEE ........................ ‐ 47 ‐
HOW DID YOU MANAGE ........................................ ‐ 49 ‐
MOM ..................................................................... ‐ 50 ‐
THE WORLD HAS NO FUTURE ................................. ‐ 55 ‐
FOR LOVE............................................................... ‐ 59 ‐
HOME IS HOME...................................................... ‐ 62 ‐
THE END
OF
KADOGOS...........................................
‐66
‐
A NEW HOME A NEW LIFE ...................................... ‐ 72 ‐
HELL....................................................................... ‐ 75 ‐
I WISH.................................................................... ‐ 79 ‐
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v
KILLING .................................................................. ‐ 81 ‐
HAPPINESS............................................................. ‐ 84 ‐
I AM ME................................................................. ‐ 88 ‐
CHOICE ..................................................................‐
90‐
WHERE DO PEOPLE GO AFTER DEATH..................... ‐ 93 ‐
THE ROOF .............................................................. ‐ 97 ‐
LISTEN ................................................................... ‐ 99 ‐
HARD PART .......................................................... ‐ 105 ‐
SURVIVING .......................................................... ‐ 106 ‐
SUFFERING........................................................... ‐ 107 ‐
ENDURANCE ........................................................ ‐ 109 ‐
WAR .................................................................... ‐ 115 ‐
LONELY ................................................................ ‐ 118 ‐
LIVING WITNESS................................................... ‐ 122 ‐
LET PEACE
RAIN ...................................................
‐125
‐
DEATH OF A LOVING FAMILY MEMBER................. ‐ 128 ‐
ABOUT THE AUTHOR .......................................... ‐ 137 ‐
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Introduction
Social, friendly and loving. Don't you
think we miss it? Oh life in a well culturednation. My Africa. My Congo. My village,
Bukavu.
Days full of activities, without taking a
look at a clock, without marking on a
calendar... Oh, what a wonderful life I ammissing out on back home. I miss the daily
activities, farming. schooling, hunting,
playing soccer and many more...This is
how it goes daily in most Congolese
families.
Most families spend two hours
worshipping before bedtime. Do kids need
bedtime story? No! "Good night kids and
God be with you." That's all they need.
Deep and peaceful sleep and wonderfuldreams all night long. No alarm clocks, but
they keep the schedules... busy schedules.
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My mom used to put a Bible under my
pillow saying it's protection against the
power of evil to keep me from having
nightmares.
God is good indeed. Three-thirty in the
morning, the roosters will crow. Will they
last long? Couple of seconds, may be a
minute. Even though every body in the city
will hear it, they don’t get up. Thirty
minute later, the roosters crow again. This
time the crowing will last longer. Who
doesn't know that it's four in the morning?
Great sleep. Wake up now...it's morning!
People will start getting up, this is the
beginning of an African day (four am).
Every woman will be preparing to go to a
morning prayer service. Most parents go
along with the entire family. Will parents
excuse us because it is a school day? No!School start at 7 am. Morning prayer
service starts at 5 am and goes to 6am.
School comes after prayers. “Every body,
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it is prayer time - get up!” Unlike in
America, we don't have heaters or bath
tubs, therefore we take a quick cold
shower and put on our blue bottom/white
top uniform. We check in the kitchen if
there is any leftovers to feed our stomach,
then spring out of the door in a moving
freezing crowd to morning prayers.
My nearby church was called Chapelle
Doms. It was small and made out of wood
in a girls school yard. Actually, some of
my seven sisters where attending that
school. At 6 am the prayer is done and in a
blink, there thousands of blue/white peoplecrowding the street, which signals you that
you are still on time...
My mother would stay home getting the
house clean and food ready for us after
school. My dad would go to work rightafter the morning prayer and we won't see
him until seven at night. While at school,
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the teachers take full control of us and we
have to abide by their rules.
Today it's different and we watch studentssay whatever they want to teachers and get
away with it in other countries. What we
call discipline in Congo, it's called child
abuse in the United States. We grew up
with that total respect we needed from
school to our homes. At the end of the day,
we go home and find mother had
everything under control. The sisters will
help her with few works around the house.
The boys will go play soccer with friends
until six in the evening when everybodyneeds to be at home and take another cold
shower before supper. Then pray again and
sing for hours in family and sleep again.
As you can tell, I miss that routine since I
had to become a refugee. I was driven outof my country by war, separated from my
loving family and left living in woeful
conditions in foreign countries.
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At the age of about 13 I had to travel
illegally from Zaire to Tanzania, Zambia
and then Zimbabwe.
I spent a long time in Zimbabwe - a place
where I matured and learned how to
endure, persevere, tolerate, and fight for
what I believe in. It wasn't that easy at first
as I was crying every instant, missing my
family, but six month later I toughened up
and just assumed they were all gone
forever.
I had to learn English, Shona and Ndebele
in Zimbabwe in order to integrate in thesociety. Six month went fast in a scorching
refugee camp of about three hundred
people, with me being the youngest
unattended child. I could speak English a
bit and grasped the I.C.M.C scholarship to
attend a boarding school in the nearbyvillage.
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Later on there were many problems
happening in the country with the
Zimbabweans abhorring refugees, saying
they are taking opportunities belonging to
them and destroying their country. That
brought plenty of tension between us
(refugees) and the citizens of Zimbabwe.
At some point, the refugee camp got hits
by a flood and we all had to leave, walkingsome six hundred miles to Harare.
Between the flood and the fights, we had
to negotiate with the United Nation High
Commissioner For Refugees seeing if they
had any durable solution option for us
rather than returning to the washed out
camp. This never worked and we were
punished for discussing our rights. All the
adults in the group were jailed for a year
then deported, while the women and
children were placed in a detaining campbefore deportation. I and three women
escaped and all but one ended up in
Botswana.
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That was the second phase of a long
adventure: one year in a Dukwi refugee
camp in Botswana, crossing borders
illegally to South Africa and struggling on
the streets of Johannesburg for weeks
before meeting with a friend that helped
me reestablish stability. Three years later I
was on another adventure to Angola, and
then back to Zimbabwe. With so muchhappening in Zimbabwe, I was detained
again, kidnapped and tortured before the
UN High Commissioner For Refugees
finally granted me protection and resettled
me to Boise, Idaho in The United States of
America.
Boise was a place I never dreamed of, a
place I never heard of, a place where today
I think I really was destined to be all along,
a place of peace, love and prosperity, a
place that allowed me to search for myself,
my family, my dream. I am now at peace
and can depart with a peaceful heart.
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In Boise I had to start life with the healing
process, medical healing as well as
emotional healing. I was still traumatized
by the things I saw, the things I did, and all
that I heard while I was in war fronts,
refugee camps and in forests running for
my life. Taking therapist classes and
medications daily, having anxiety and
many sleepless nights ended up with mecollapsing and ending up in a psychiatric
clinic.
My Therapist urgued with me to start to
use writing as a healing process, every
night that I can’t slee I will wake up and sitat my donated laptop and start typing my
emotions until I feel relieved. This was the
beginning of my writing. I would later on
decide to let the rest of the world share my
experiences. I had to start breaking the
long stories in short summarized ones that
I finally decided to put in a poetic form.
This was to try and see if young people
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would know what may be ahead of them
beforehand.
My history teacher used to tell me "historyrepeats itself" and that tells me that
whatever I went through, will still be
repeated by someone else. So by me telling
hard paths, maybe it may be simple for
who ever will face them in the future to
understand and solve them without trauma.
I feel freed and relieved whenever I am
speaking to a crowd about my life. It
occupies my mind and saves me from a lot
of anxiety and stress that I would be
having about where I am going in life.
Let God Himself reign and lead me in the
path ahead.
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PREFACE
Most refugees have lived their lives
already. Be they 1 year old or 99 yearsold, the best part of their life was when
they were in their home countries.
Being rescued from war and persecution
by bringing them to foreign land, it’s a lifesaving opportunity, but it never takes them
long to realize that the best life was back
home.
Help restore peace in our countries for usto continue our lives.
In these poems, our voices (refugees) are
weeping about;
Peace in our land,
The losses we had,
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The family we left behind,
Hatred in our own heart,
Your prayers for us,Your love for us,
How you can help us,
Without forgetting,
I, Fidel, have love for all creatures,
And as every one goes to bed at night,
My heart wakes,
My mind gets at work,
And all I dream about is me in the war,
Is me in the refugee camp,
Is me fighting together with those refugees
I left behind to bring peace,
I have never found peace,
Reason why I am writing to you,
To hear our voices in the empty space, Blowing in the wind, seeking to catch the
ears of the merciful,
I know I have done wrong,
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I am not a righteous man,
But please!
Do not hate me,For the bible say no one is.
I may not have wealth, but I am not
greedy,
I am a poor refugee, and for that I am
proud,Proud of every thing God has made me
and put me through.
But I do not use my gift to relegate others,
Or to humiliate others,
I love all creatures, and bear the pain withthem always.
“Every human being has an experience;
never let yours pull you down by trying to
lean on it your entire lives … use it to
improve yourself and not to discourage yourself.”
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CRIES OF THE FORGOTTEN
I thank you father,
For all the goods,
That you’ve done for me,
In my entire life,
Since my childhood,You loved me so,
And you gave me life,
And again your protected me,
Thanks to you God almighty,
You are my light,
Again my shield,
Even if I suffer,
I won’t fear a thing,
Thanks to you God almighty,
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“Many refugees feel ashamed of being
called "refugees," others feel minimized or
relegated, but until you know how much it
has impacted your life, you’ll never stand
in front of people and proudly shock them
with you fascinating experiences. Being a
refugee is learning subjects such as
patience, hopefulness, endurance,
perseverance, tolerance, humility, love,and struggle.
These are the subjects you don’t learn in
school. These you learn from the world
and as refugees, our status allows us to
earn a degree in these majors. Since we aresaved from the refugee camps, it is the
time to implement all the lessons you learn
while struggling to succeed in this world.”
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LOVE OF THE NATION
Refugees of war in a foreign country
Failing to cope, in the new cultureThey had a home one time
And a beautiful life too
But all was lost and they were forced out,
Leaving all behind
Surely, I can hear their voices crying
As they are abused and denied their right
People are making fun of them
Reminding them of their lossesForgetting that, they once been at peace
And are now living the next stage of life,
People going home from their works
Leaving them pondering,
Pondering of how they will get peace in
their land
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In the middle of the night
Others dream,
Dreaming of how they will buy cars, Dreaming of how they will by houses,
Dreaming of how they will get married,
All he dreams about,
Is the peace of his country?
When the people will stop killing oneanother like flies,
All he dreams about is the of the being
When all man will be allowed to live
equally,
And as he gets ready to sleep he cries
again,
Ooh Lord, I am getting my soul to bed,
I ask you to bless our nation
Whatever happens in this night?
War or massacre
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I pray you to rest the souls of those that
will be the next victims.
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“For those refugees that have been
resettled, now you can go to school, have
dreams and have much higher percentages
of achieving your dreams compared to the
99 percent risk of poverty those refugees
in third world countries have. I had wealth,
I lost it. I had a family I lost them. I was in
school, I stopped. I had a home, now I
don’t… These are the stories we were in,but remember! After all that, we carried on
suffering for years in refugee camps and
wished we would be saved.
Now we are somewhere were we can
rebuild our lives again, the memories maycome back to haunt you. These memories
coming back to take back the courage you
gained while struggling, the strength, the
endurance, hope, perseverance and to
make you depressed and traumatized even
more compared to when you were in the
refugee camp. Please! Do not let this
happen to you, you are a hard worker, not
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lazy; you had been living with hope for
years. That's how you became who you are
today, hoping, Refugee Day after Refugee
Day … you endured the pain of living in a
tent, of farming in the desert of Botswana
where it never rains or sleeping in the
street of South Africa, while you were
crossing those borders illegally and putting
your life on the line walking in the middleof the wildest forest ever, that’s the
courage we need now to rebuild, that the
hope we need to make our life better, that
the endurance we should have when it
comes to learning English, looking for a
job, trying to integrate into this new
countries”
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LACK OF LOVE
Didn’t know we were all one
Until I looked in the bible and read God created man from his image
Why are we killing each other
Why are we killing our own brothers
Why are we killing our own people
While we know that already
They are hurt and victims of war and
abuse
They are still in pain of brutality
They are still in pain of discrimination
They are still in pain of slavery
And all we do is killing them
Are we humans or animalsOr we lovers or haters
Who are we that we don't have compassion
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Still loosing touch with our love ones
Still loosing touch with our families Like my mother told me
" Son, love is everything"
While we standing there,
Killing our own brothers without mercy
We shall all die one day
Love is what we lack
Love is what we need
Love is everything....
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SELLING SHORT
I did it for my kids,
For their education,
For their stomach,
For their well being,
We were selling ourselves short.
To get scholarship with would a daughter,
You will need to sell yourself short,
With a daughter she will need to sell
herself short,
They are doing all this In order to get assistance,
Poor we are, no one seems to care,
We are selling our body for our kids
education,
We are selling our body for our kids
stomach,
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We are selling our body for our kids
future,We are selling ourselves short.
They work for us,
Something so called charity,
However, for us to get them we need to sellshort,
We were induced to sell our body to get
assistance,
They are taking advantage of our poverty,
They are taking advantage of our vulnerability,
They are taking advantage of our refugee
status,
We are selling our body for our kids
education,We are selling our body for our kids
stomach,
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We are selling our body for our kids
future,
We are selling ourselves short
We carry their kids,
Abort their pregnancy,
We parish from their illness,
Hiv and std’s ,We throw our lives away for the sake of
our kids,
Feel mercy on us.
We are selling our body for our kidseducation,
We are selling our body for our kids
stomach,
We are selling our body for our kids
future,
We are selling ourselves short