News > Immigration In Minnesota

From Target to Defender: Celeste’s Refugee Story

Posted on Jun 14 2019

Celeste* cannot remember exactly how old she was, maybe six or seven. She does remember the attack, on the way home from the clinic where her mother and father worked.

“We were driving home from clinic and somebody waved down the car, asking for help,” Celeste recalls. “As soon as my father stopped, one guy was standing there, and said, ‘You were in an accident on Monday and the person in the accident died.’ This was Wednesday.”

It wasn’t true. Her father began to argue. The man pulled out his gun.

“Two other men came out of the bushes with their guns,” she remembers. “I was in the back seat. My mom was in the front passenger seat. My dad was in the driver seat. They told him to go in the back seat with me. One man got in beside him and the other beside me and they were pointing their guns at us. The other man took the wheel of the car.

“I passed out. In times of great stress and fear, sometimes children do.

“I was awakened by a big banging sound. The person who was driving may have been nervous or something, because they rear-ended a truck with a bunch of soldiers in it. The soldiers started running out to see what was going on. These men got scared and ran away because they were obviously in the middle of a kidnapping. They were going to kill us all, but we got into a car accident, so it didn’t happen.”

This attack happened in Uganda, the country of refuge where Celeste’s family had fled from their native Rwanda. As Tutsis in Rwanda, Celeste’s family had a history of persecution. The 1959 Revolution brought independence, and also Hutu rule that killed tens of  thousands of Tutsis  and drove more than 150,000 of the country. Her parents’ families stayed, but experienced discrimination. Tutsis could not get good jobs, could be kept out of school, or would get bad grades if they insisted on remaining in schools. In 1973, Tutsis were purged from universities, and targeted in a wave of killings. Her parents, then in middle or high school, had been forced out of their schools.

Eventually, they returned to school, becoming medical professionals. Her father, a doctor, “had a strong sense of speaking out” about injustice. That was not safe, and threats were made, though Celeste was too young to know exactly what happened. “From my five-year-old mind, I just remember that we got our things and put them in the car and left the house,” Celeste says. They drove for a full day, mother and father, Celeste, and two younger siblings.

Danger followed them into the Ugandan refugee camp. Her parents managed to take the family out of the camp and open a clinic in Kampala. “The clinic was for everybody,” she recalls, “but a lot of other Rwandan refugees would go there, because of language and a lower cost for services.”

Then Kampala became too dangerous to stay. The kidnapping was at least the second assassination attempt, and others followed. Her father applied to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for resettlement out of the. country. Eventually the family, now including a baby brother born in Uganda, got good news: they would be resettled in Canada.

“When we got on the plane, I didn’t know about Canada,” Celeste says. “I remember asking my parents, what is this white stuff on the ground. I had never seen snow. I didn’t know what it was. There were all these fires inside the house—fireplaces—I didn’t know what they were either.”

Her mother was re-licensed as a nurse, and the family became Canadian citizens. Her father, a doctor, faced a longer re-licensing process. When Celeste was thirteen, they moved to Texas, with her mother taking a job as a nurse there. That was right after the Rwandan genocide in 1994, in which about a million Tutsi people were killed.

Her father lost almost all his family members, with only one of his four siblings surviving. Only two of her mother’s six siblings survived, and one of those two later died because of circumstances related to the genocide.

“Seeing things unfold on the news, you are completely powerless,” Celeste says. “My parents were on the phone all the time. They would hear that somebody had died or that somebody had survived and they were in such and such a place. I think they sent relatives money to help them. We were largely powerless though; we watched but could do very little. A lot of people in our family didn’t make it through that.

“Had I not been resettled, I would have died like a lot of my relatives did.”

Celeste visited Rwanda when she was 27. She met the few members of her extended family who had survived.

“That was hard because there is very little to relate to when you have grown up in such different circumstances,” she says. “My cousins lived through the genocide and rebuilding of country. The standard of living there is a lot different than the standard here. It highlights how unfair things are and how luck plays into a lot of things. ”

Celeste went to college and later to law school. She became a U.S. citizen, “because I wanted to vote.” Her family is scattered across the country, all U.S. citizens now, all working and contributing their many talents to the country.

After law school, Celeste worked on refugee resettlement for the United Nations and other agencies. That work kept her abroad and moving: Kenya, Cameroon, Senegal, Zimbabwe.

Celeste’s work with refugees and stateless people was intense, sparking nightmares and insomnia as she imagined herself in her clients’ situations. She recalls  “a terrible case where a woman had been attacked by her husband. She came to the office with bruises on her neck that took the shape of a hand. She came to office at 4 p.m., so late in the day that I couldn’t find a safe place for her to stay. She  had to go back to her apartment where she had been raped and almost choked to death the night before. During that entire night, my eyes were wide open, and I stayed awake.”

Eventually, with her clients’ stories evoking her own childhood trauma, she needed a change. Returning to the United States, she settled in Minnesota and found work that did not immerse her in trauma every day. Though she is one step removed from the most searing contact with that trauma, she has  found ways to continue working for refugees and immigrants. A passion  for justice, formed and informed by her life experience, continues to inspire her work.

 

* We have changed Celeste’s name in this story. As a matter of policy, we usually change the names of immigrants when telling their stories. While the stories are real, and while the individuals have agreed to let us use their stories, we choose to protect their privacy by not using their real names.