My name is Evariste Emmanuel. My friends call me Eva. I work for Free City International. This is my story.

(Missed the first part of Eva’s story? Read it here.)

THE CAMP

I traveled to the refugee camp with my brother. Once we got there, we thought, “Here we go again.” There was a lot of suffering. That was the time that I was hopeless. Once you’re a refugee, you’re nothing. There’s no value. You never accomplish anything. People say, “You should have died in your country, so even to be here you’re lucky.” And you hear that and you’re like, what’s the difference? It’s like even an animal can have more value than you.

They give you a certain amount of food every 15 days. They give you beans in a cup about the size a 20-oz coffee cup. They also give you salt, flour, and maize.  That was given twice a month. And the food is given by size—it doesn’t matter whether you’re one month or 30 years old – they just give it by size.  You have to manage for 15 days. If you don’t, you die. That’s why they call refugee life “survival.” Once you go to collect those foods, guess what – it isn’t just you. Our camp had probably 5,000-10,000 refugees, so you had to make lines. There were lines everywhere. We would have to wait, but if you moved a little bit, they would beat you like an animal. Even though they beat you, you don’t get out of line. You need that food. You need it so bad. You’ll take anything to get food.

You get 20 liters of water every day, if you are single. You’ve got to take your shower, cook, with those 20 liters a day. To cook, they give you wood, and you make your own fire with a big stone.

There were all kinds of dangerous things there – scorpions, snakes, a lot of stealing. All of the village guys that live close to the camp lock all of their things. People don’t just steal empty-handed; they steal with a gun. Once you have the little things you have, you hold them. You don’t want anybody to see them.

I was with my brother the whole time, and he was always depressed. Once he’s depressed, he doesn’t talk, doesn’t share; he shuts it all off. That’s really bad. But it wasn’t just my brother. All of us – because of losing everything – we created something within ourselves: hatred. You start hating. You stop complaining, but you still have the pain – so guess what, you start hating.

So I lived that life as an orphan. Sometimes you get a little frightened. People might threaten you because you don’t have anybody to look up to. People who are not with you can say a lot of words. You feel like you are very hopeless. You feel like, “Hey, if death is there, I’m ready.” Sometimes you cry, you cry until you’re tired. And then you just start asking God every day to kill you. You cannot kill yourself – I was taught a long time ago that if you kill yourself, you go to hell. But you think, if death is there, I don’t really care.

We lived in the camp for 7 years. Every year people would migrate to the United States, Canada, Australia – you name it. The countries all have different criteria. UNHCR would tell you the requirements. If you meet some of the requirements, they would see your case and see if they can help you out. At one point, they were looking for orphans. I was an orphan. The UNHCR called me to screen me—to make sure it was really me. Then they sent our case to the United States immigrations. It’s a process to approve whether they’ll give you a visa or not.

When they told me I might get sent to the United States, it was a really, really exciting moment for me. It would give me another day, another hope. There was a hope that I might become someone else. That was overwhelming, so exciting. But still, I had the pain in me, because the thing that I missed my whole life was love. That’s what affected me the most.

More to come…

My name is Evariste Emmanuel. My friends call me Eva. I work for Free City International. This is my story.

DRC

I was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in 1988. I have 4 brothers and 3 sisters. We lived in a city called Kalemie until 1994, when we moved to a city called Ubundu. In 1996, the war started. My mom was the first one to be killed. If you ask anyone who lived in the DRC at that moment—in 1996—many of them will tell you they had a mama killed. Then I ended up separated from three of my brothers and my three sisters.

In 1998, life got difficult for me and my brother. When I was 10, I ended up joining the rebels. I was thinking that being a rebel—a child solder—was how I was going to survive, to get food, stuff like that. But it’s hard to be not good. You know, killing. I took a lot of people’s lives. My uncle was working for the rebels too, but his job was different from mine.  I was a soldier and he was more of a spy. In 2000, someone told him that I had joined the rebels. I was so young—at that point I was 12—and my uncle was like, “No, come back home.” So he took me out of the rebel group and brought me and my brother to his place, and we lived with him for 7 months.

I didn’t like that lifestyle as a rebel. The only thing pushing me to live that kind of life was starvation, needing to feed myself. But I didn’t like my uncle’s lifestyle either, because in order to survive he had to betray people. He used to walk with a little radio, talking to you about the rebels, but he wanted to get what you were talking about and tell it to the rebels. There was this group of people who heard about my uncle, and they were thinking, “This is not cool. He caused a lot of people’s death. So instead of him continuing to take people’s lives, we are going to take his life.” One night he was watching TV in the living room, and my brother and I were in the bedroom. These guys just came in and slaughtered him. We hid ourselves under the bed and watched him die.

It’s simple for me to say, but once you see somebody die, it’s different feeling. I lived a life that for me, music was bullets. Anytime I heard the gun, it was like notes of music. When you drive in your car, you listen to music – for me bullets were the music. I just grew up listening to this kind of stuff. I didn’t choose that, but it’s war, you know. There was nowhere to go.

The next day, we told my uncle’s friend, and he came over. He said, “Those guys will come back for you two. They killed him, and the next people will be you.” And then he said, “I have a friend who is a truck driver. He transports fish from country to country. I’ll ask him to give you guys a ride and take you to a safe place.” So that same day, the truck driver told us, “I’m going to unload these fish and you can get in the back of the truck.”

So we got in the truck with the fish. Yes, it’s crazy. Sometimes, when you want to survive, you have no options, no choice. You do a lot of crazy stuff for your own life.

KENYA

We slept in the truck for two days. We ended up in Nairobi, Kenya. The driver dropped us off and said, “I don’t have a place to take you guys, but this is the only place that I think is safe.” We saw a flag that said UNHCR—United Nations High Council for Refugees. That was December 25, so the office was closed, and we didn’t know anything. I was 13 by that time, and my brother was 17. My brother’s kind of shy. After being a rebel, a child soldier, I’m not really shy. Once you have the gun, you don’t think like you’re young—you think like an old man. But I was a little bit nervous. We were there with no money, no nothing. It was the first time we were in a country where we don’t know the first thing about ourselves. Then we told a UNHCR security officer that we came from Congo. We didn’t know any English, only French, and he couldn’t even understand us. But he said the office wasn’t going to open until January 5.

We thought, “This is disaster. This is really disaster. We don’t know anybody. Where are we going to sleep?” In Africa we have these little areas of open kiosks, with no doors. Sellers will come at 6:00 am, hang their clothes or merchandise, and when it gets dark around 5:00 pm, they take all of the things and go back home. So we thought, “We’re going to turn this into our house.” So we timed the sellers. Once they left, we cut up pieces of moving boxes. No blankets, only boxes. My brother had one and I had one. That’s where we slept.

To eat, I start asking people for money. Begging was the only option I had, other than becoming a thief—and becoming a thief in a country you don’t know is very dangerous. So I started begging people for money. People who had the heart to give, they gave; other people slapped me, stuff like that. You didn’t want to put your hand up because some people would spit on you, and you cannot do anything. I used to cry every day. I even cussed the day I was born.

On January 5, we went to the UNHCR office. They gave us an appointment to meet the protection officer, but we had to wait three months. You have to be accepted to be a refugee. They wanted to find out why we chose Kenya instead of going to Rwanda or Burundi or the other closest countries to the DRC. We didn’t even know where we were going when we left. So we waited for three months. We had no place to go.

So that was my daily life. Begging. Homeless. We would wait for those guys to go, and then take over their space. It’s just wide open, wide open. It was very cold – that was wintertime in Nairobi. And 5:00 we had to wake up. If you didn’t wake up, you got in big trouble. This is Africa; they don’t need to call the police, they can take care of themselves. They would beat you. You don’t have a watch, so you have to kind of sleep with alarms in your head. You listen to the Muslim’s prayer – if not that, then you listen to the chicken’s crow.

After three months, we went back to the UNHCR office. But there were problems within the organization, and they had to postpone our decision date until July. I lived in Kenya for a total of seven months, homeless. Finally, we were approved as refugees and sent to the refugee camp, which was probably 2,000 miles from Nairobi.

Read Part 2 of Eva’s story here.