Refugees Celebrate Journeys, Dreams

Families who now call New Haven home gathered in East Rock Park to remember their journeys from Kenya, Burundi, Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan — and to build a community ready to welcome newcomers from all over the world.

The group, called the International New Hope For Refugees, celebrated a belated World Refugee Day (which occurred on June 20) in Edgerton Park on Saturday. They filled the sunny afternoon with music, dance, food, and personal stories. The picnic was organized by Jane Kinity, a Dwight resident and a delegate for the Connecticut Refugees Congress.

Community members played tunes from their home countries on the speaker, listened to the beat of a Guinean drum, and shared Kenyan chicken and rice along with Afghan and Sudanese dishes.

When attendees of the picnic formed a circle to hear one another’s stories, Oscar Havyarimana, a Newhallville Democratic ward co-chair, spoke of his son, who was 2 years old when the family arrived in the U.S. after leaving Burundi. Havyraimana recalled that it was difficult for his son to process that while his classmates in school could connect with extended family in person, he had no way of seeing his own grandparents. 

It’s hard to explain hard situations to young kids, Havyariama said, ​“but it’s good to talk to your children. We got closer to him every day” by explaining why his grandparents weren’t also in New Haven.

Kinity started the annual Refugee Day picnic three years ago, aiming to help the refugee community in New Haven ​“come together.”

“They needed a place of connection,” Kinity said. 

Kinity and her husband, Isaac Newton Kinity, used to live in Kenya with their five kids; Jane Kinity ran a school for kindergarteners, while Isaac Newton Kinity was the secretary general of the country’s civil servants’ union. The Kenyan government targeted Isaac for speaking out about corruption, attempting six times to kill him, before he and his family fled to Uganda, he said. They lived in a Ugandan refugee camp, sleeping on the floor and eating rice and beans every day.

In 2000, the Kinity family successfully arrived in New Haven as refugees. Like many refugees, they knew no one in the country. They gradually adapted to an American English dialect and learned to navigate the DMV. 

Jane Kinity now works as a Yale custodian and serves as a Ward 2 Democratic Co-Chair. She volunteers as an interpreter for Swahili-speaking refugees, helping them call landlords to advocate for home repairs. Once she spent four hours on the phone with a neighbor’s gas company.

Her husband Isaac has been organizing international anti-corruption protests and education initiatives. He stressed on Saturday that refugee crises partly stem from vast inter-nation inequality and rampant corruption that goes unregulated.

Over 20 years since her immediate family migrated to New Haven, Kinity’s sister and brother are still living in the Ugandan refugee camp. ​“There are other refugees left behind,” she said, urging governments to welcome more migrants to their communities. ​“Refugees are hard-working people,” she said.

Kinity also called for the city to provide more programming for young people, more support for both tenants and homeowners. And the city’s existing resources should be communicated in the broad range of languages that New Haveners speak, including French, Swahili, Arabic, and Farsi, she argued. ​“There are language barriers in every community.”

Local chef Azhar Ahmed can attest to those barriers. She and her daughter didn’t know a word of English when they arrived in New Haven, she said. 

Seven years later, Ahmed and her husband Fouad Dagoum now own their own house on Fountain Street, where they live with their kids Lameese and Kutti.

Ahmed and Dagoum fled Sudan’s Nuba Mountains for reasons they find difficult to revisit. They first went to Egypt, where they lived for 13 years — and where Lameese was born — before gaining refugee entry to the United States in 2015.

Over time, they built new lives in New Haven. Dagoum worked in a warehouse, and then as a night security guard at Catholic Charities. He took courses at Gateway Community College, and this Fall, he’ll start at Southern Connecticut State University, hoping to earn a Certificate of Public Accounting and learn business administration.

“Education is powerful,” Dagoum said. ​“It’s the key for any door.”

Ahmed, meanwhile, has worked for years as a chef at Sanctuary Kitchen. She’s now close to realizing a personal dream: to start a cafe of her own, serving Sudanese cuisine and ​“whatever the people would like.”

Calling for a culture that welcomes newcomers, Kazadi Joseph noted that people rarely expect to have to flee their homes, and that becoming a refugee can happen to anyone. ​“We saw what happened in Ukraine,” said Joseph, who grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo. ​“To be strong, we have to be together,” he said.

“No one wants to be a refugee,” added Fazila Mansoori, a Pashto interpreter at Yale-New Haven Hospital who left Afghanistan for New Haven with her daughter in 2015.

Ronahi Saeed, a refugee from Kurdistan who arrived in New Haven as a toddler after spending three months in a Guam refugee camp, recalled spending countless hours as a child translating medical and legal documents for her parents.

At school, Saeed’s classmates would tell her to ​“go back to your country.” The taunt confused her, since she felt that the U.S. was her country. Saeed made it through school and attended Southern Connecticut State University, where she studied sociology and psychology. Now she coordinates English as a Second Language programs at the local refugee organization Elena’s Light.

On Saturday, she shared a message for other refugees: ​“You do have space here. You can demand and create space here.”