Refugees to start over in North Carolina

HIGH POINT -- Just over a month ago, Niyimpa Schadrack lived beneath a tarp propped on sticks, one of thousands of Burundians locked within the gates of refugee camps in a remote region of central Africa. He and his wife cooked dinner for their three children over a wood fire and slept on blankets on bare ground.

Now, after 13 years in the camp, the family has moved to a two-bedroom apartment in High Point, about 90 miles west of Raleigh. Their children -- 3, 6 and 8 -- are living for the first time with electricity and running water.

The family is among the first wave of about 9,000 refugees from Burundi, some of whom have been living in refugee camps for 35 years, who will be resettled in the United States in the next two years. Several hundred are moving to North Carolina, some of them to the Triangle.

Like most newly resettled refugees, Niyimpa, 37, and his family live in a modest apartment with used furniture, bare walls and a stained carpet. They sleep two beds to a room and eat from mismatched plates. The children's only toys are a few hand-me-down stuffed animals and balls. Their air conditioner is broken, and the temperature in the house sometimes reaches 90; Niyimpa doesn't know whom to call to fix it. He does not have a phone yet, anyway.

Still, Niyimpa, who has a job assembling furniture in a warehouse, says he thanks God for a life in which fear and desperation have been replaced by hope, for a place where his children will go to school and armed bandits don't attack in the night.

The Burundians who are quietly moving into apartment complexes across the state -- often speaking only native dialects and with no ties in the United States -- are the living victims of a 1972 genocide, in which more than 200,000 of their countrymen were killed because of their Hutu ethnicity. The years since then have been marked by violence and poverty.

After leaving their homes, thousands of Burundian refugees moved to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, only to be forced out by more ethnic violence in the mid-1990s. They have survived since then in isolated camps, relying on the United Nations for meager rations of food and tarpaulins to protect them from the elements.

Those who remain in the camps have survived one of the longest refugee crises in the world.

Childhood as a refugee

Niyimpa (in many African countries, the family name is written before the given name) left Burundi when he was 3 years old, never to return. He has no memory of the tiny country where he was born.

His family spent several years bouncing between refugee camps before making a home in Rwanda, where he said Burundians filled a neighborhood and were treated as natives. He finished eight years of school, which is all most Rwandans got, and made a living selling clothes on the street. He built a home, but civil war came to Rwanda before he was able to move in.

Niyimpa said he was eating lunch with his parents and four siblings on that day in 1994. They heard shooting, and he went to the door to see what was happening. People were running in the streets, a few possessions atop their heads, fleeing the country in droves. He and his family joined the masses, running for their lives, Niyimpa limping on crutches because of a recent bicycle accident.

He lost his family in the crush of people and has never seen or heard from them again.

He said it took him a month of walking to make it over the border of neighboring Tanzania, his crutches broken and his shoes worn through, kept alive on the scraps of food that other travelers offered him along the way.