It still feels like it was yesterday, but it’s been 10 years since my family came to this country (the U.S.) as refugees. When my mother, two siblings, and I came to the U.S. we did not know anyone. It was a hard adjustment for the first few years. Things such as climate to culture shock were difficult to adapt to, and that is a common experience among immigrants. We were lucky because we got to know people around us who blessed us with their time and resources to slowly walk us through the ropes to adjust to this new life. This is paramount for immigrants to successfully integrate into the broad society. One of the ways people helped ease our transition was connecting us to resources for navigating various aspects of living in the U.S. – job searching, school enrollment, cultural education, civic engagement, etc. We were blessed to come at the time we did because my siblings and I were still young enough to attend K-12 education. Attending school here in the U.S. was a gift that we have not and never will take for granted. I graduated from Calvin University and now I’m working. My sister is in her third year at the U.S. Naval Academy and my little brother is in his second year at Harvard.
Being displaced from your home country for any involuntary reason is hard on people. For us, after being so many years from our country, Rwanda, we miss a lot of things we enjoy and people we used to know there. Those are experiences we can’t replicate, though we are creating new ones. This is especially true for our mother because she was in Rwanda for most of her life. She tells us stories of what it was like for her growing up in Rwanda. She is more than grateful for what we have and where we are now, but she sometimes longs for home and the relationships she had. She has also found a growing community of fellow immigrants from Rwanda among other countries here with whom she shares an experience of displacement. They help one another navigate and understand their new home.