PORTLAND, Maine — Ornella Igirubuntu was 18 when she and her four younger siblings were forced onto the streets of Burundi’s capital, Bujumbura, after watching armed government officials handcuff her father and take him away, locking the door behind them.
“They came and took my father,” Ornella, now 19, said recently. “We didn’t know where my mother was — she left our house in 2012. We lost everything we had. We didn’t have anywhere to go, and we didn’t have any money to get a visa.”
Two years later, the kindness of strangers, a lot of luck and more bravery than most adults could muster have allowed Ornella and one of her brothers, 18-year-old Christian Irutingabo (different surnames are common among siblings in Burundi), to create lives for themselves, far from the civil war-torn country where their parents and three younger siblings remain.
The two attend Deering High School, where Christian is on the swim team. The small apartment, which they share with a roommate and afford only with help from General Assistance housing aid, provides far more quiet for studying and sleeping than the homeless shelter where they stayed when they first arrived in Portland. General Assistance also provides vouchers for food — enough, they say, so they’re not hungry.
The siblings regularly attend Mass at Sacred Heart/St. Dominic Parish just down the street.
Christian, who through a special program was able to acquire a work permit as a juvenile, works as a lifeguard at Greater Portland YMCA. Ornella has filed for asylum status and is waiting the required 150 days for a work permit before she can get a job.
‘They came into our house and took my father’
Gathered in their apartment Friday afternoon with another roommate and a friend, they spoke of their journey to Maine and the lives they have established here. They also spoke of their mounting fear as they watch state officials in Augusta make decisions about continuing General Assistance — and decisions about their lives.
Ornella and Christian arrived in the United States last August after a harrowing experience following their father’s arrest.
“We didn’t have anywhere to go at this time,” Ornella said quietly. “My father was not political, but he was like … like a victim. … They came into our house and took my father and they locked the door and we went outside.”
The five children spent two weeks on the streets of Bujumbura until international aid organization Terre des hommes found them guardians. At first, all five children were together, but eventually they were split up: Ornella and Christian went to one family, the three younger children went to another.
Ornella and Christian knew that if the government were aware they were still alive to speak about their father’s arrest, they would be in danger, so the family found the money to secure visas for them and get them out of Burundi.
Speaking very little English and with no idea where they were headed, the two boarded a plane in Bujumbura and stepped off first in Detroit, then in Columbus, Ohio.
They stayed inside the Columbus airport for hours.
‘We don’t know where to go’
“We were just standing around, thinking,” Ornella said. “We told each other, ‘You go first and ask someone where to stay.’”
“I didn’t want to ask a white man, so the first black person I saw was a woman,” Ornella said. “The first thing I asked, ‘Do you speak French?’ By chance, she said, like, ‘I do.’ It was like a dream, because we can’t imagine that.”
“I said, ‘We are in America but, we don’t know anybody here. We don’t know where to go. We just need one place for this night,” she continued.
The woman offered to take them to her house, where they stayed for nearly two weeks before she put them on a bus to Portland — “a safe place, she said, where they are generous and they can help you.”
When the siblings arrived in Portland, they asked the same questions, and found themselves at the teen center, where they stayed for a month until they arranged to get vouchers for rent and food.
They started at Deering High School but found the shelter only reopened at 8 p.m. each day, leaving them on the street again when they tried to do their homework.
Through a school social worker, the two were connected to Lucky Hollander of Portland, who works to find legal guardians for minors to allow them to apply for asylum more quickly.
As she has with dozens of other teens, Hollander sent out an email to a network of people eager to help. Sue Gabrielson of Yarmouth responded, and is now the siblings’ legal guardian. They visit Gabrielson’s home for dinner sometimes and on holidays. Christian plays guitar with Gabrielson’s husband, who is in a band and who gave Christian a guitar — they played together at the Portland Farmers Market last weekend.
On Christmas Day, Christian celebrated his birthday for the very first time, with the Gabrielson family.
“It was a good one,” he said through a bright smile. “It was exciting. We played some games and went to a restaurant in Freeport, and we came back and played some music.”
Lingering trauma
Neither Ornella nor Christian talk much about their lives in Burundi. They don’t know where their parents or younger brothers and sisters are and, as difficult as their father’s arrest is to recall, the siblings shared other experiences they simply can’t speak about because, Christian said, “it makes me remember.”
“It’s really hard for girls to survive in Burundi,” said Chanelle Irakoze, who also left that country as a teen and lives with Hollander when she’s not attending Wheaton College. Irakoze carries shrapnel fragments in one leg from a grenade that exploded when she was 16.
“It’s worse for women. Women are really vulnerable,” she said. “You get kidnapped, you get raped. It’s really, really bad and it’s disturbing and scary. It’s like, we are out here and we are safe, but we’re also not safe because our families are still back there.”
Molly McMahon, a licensed clinical social worker with Portland Community Health Center, works with many people seeking asylum who also are attempting to heal from the trauma experienced in other countries. The uncertainty resulting from the ongoing — often caustic — political debate over General Assistance, she said, is retraumatizing many of these people, who had only just begun to find stability when they learned General Assistance might be cut.
“With the body already working so hard to cope with the complex trauma most of these people seeking asylum have lived through … now they have gone many steps back because of the uncertainty of their future,” she said. “And the other piece is, they really did come here with that hope that there was going to be safety and justice, and this isn’t justice. I’ve spent many years bearing witness to trauma, but over the last few weeks, it’s been so hard. It’s my government; it’s the United States citizens who are doing this to people.”
A brighter future?
Despite the challenges they have overcome so far, Christian and Ornella have even bigger dreams. Ornella wants to be a doctor.
And Christian?
“I want to be a pilot,” he said, drawing laughter from his sister.
“Always people are choosing to be a doctor or a nurse — but me, I don’t know,” he said. “I’d really love to fly a plane. That’s why I need more physics, so next year I have physics and geometry.”
But without assistance, he said, “we will have no place to go. We may go to the shelter, but the place is not safe if we want to study, to focus. A lot of people drink; they make noise. It’s not a place for kids who want a future.”
“The GA doesn’t help indefinitely,” Ornella said. “If you get the papers for work then you leave the GA. It just helps until you get the papers. … That’s why, if they cut GA right now, we’re going on the street. Even though [Christian] has the paperwork, he’s not working [full time] yet. He has to go to school.”
Christian said he loves living in Maine and loves the people he has met.
“Even though the government is talking about [cutting GA], there are other people who care about us and they help us. Also, the teachers love kids — they love us and they help us to learn English.”
“The weather is a little bad,” he admitted, smiling. “But living in Maine, we have peace. We’d rather live here.”
Ornella said she sometimes wonders what the people making decisions in Augusta are thinking as they cast their votes.
“I think that this person, sometimes, that they don’t have a heart because you can’t see … like, maybe a father who has a family and has kids — think about sending outside these kids at the same age,” she said. “We were children. I think … sometimes I say, ‘Maybe God forgive them because they don’t know.’”