Refugees Gather For Picnic, Connections

Amina Maniriho stood laughing and dancing while the trees at the edges of the park reverberated with the Swahili lyrics of ​“Dunia Haina Hurumu” — the world has no mercy. Her seven children jumped and wove about the new friends she has made since she arrived seven months ago. Above her, a strong South wind whipped the American flag mounted on a tall white pole.

Maniriho was one of the guests sharing chicken, fried-chickpea patties and bookies at a refugee picnic held in Town Center Park in Hamden this past Saturday. A single mother of seven, she arrived from a refugee camp in Uganda in February, where all but her two oldest children were born after she fled the Democratic Republic of Congo. She is one of the many new arrivals whom Jane Kinity is helping adjust to life in the U.S. She now lives in New Haven, and recently began work at a Marriott.

Kinity was one of the organizers of the picnic, along with Connecticut Delegate to the Refugee Congress Esmail Dezhbod and volunteer Azhar Ahmed. The event, the first of its kind, aimed to bring refugee families together to expand their networks.

Kinity, a nurse’s assistant at the Saint Raphael Campus of Yale-New Haven Hospital who lives in New Haven’s Dwight neighborhood, spends time almost every day helping the many refugee families she has taken under her wing. She recently founded her own organization — International Refugee Migrants — which supports refugee families and helps connect them with one another.

Since she speaks Swahili, she, and her sons, are a major source of support for Maniriho. Her son Geoffrey said he sees Maniriho and her children every day. If he doesn’t show up at their house, the kids will come to his. He recently bought bikes for three of her children, and is still looking for more. Geoffrey works in housekeeping at Saint Raphael’s.

Kinity arrived with her family in 2000 as refugees from Kenya. Integrated Refugee and Immigrant Services (IRIS) set her up in an English class and helped her find a job. She later went to school to become a nurse’s assistant. She started volunteering at IRIS and at Yale-New Haven Hospital as a Swahili interpreter.

“I was a refugee, and some people helped me, and this is my time to help,” she said.

Kinity said she hopes to make the picnic a bigger event when she holds the next one, tentatively set for November.

In addition to Maniriho and her family, Suzy Doub came and her two sons, who arrived from South Sudan three months ago and now live in New Haven. Moshair Gameel and her children, who came from Sudan one year and eight months ago, also came. Gameel is a daycare provider for IRIS, and her husband works at Propark in New Haven. They live in West Haven.

Whom Do You Call?

The gathering began at a cluster of picnic tables under a large maple next to the playground at the park. On a plastic fold-out table was a spread of food that Ahmed and Dezhbod had brought.

After the families, huddled against the bracing wind, had filled and emptied their plates, Maniriho got up and started dancing. For about a minute, she and Kinity sang and danced and laughed. Once they had finished, Kinity explained: Maniriho was singing her thanks for the event. In the words of New Haven City Clerk, who was sitting next to Kinity, she was ​“saluting mother Jane.”

Kinity said that many of the families she works with are struggling with the same challenges she faced when she arrived. Foremost among them, she said, is English. When refugees face problems, they often struggle to figure out how to solve it because they can’t communicate with anyone. So, they call Kinity.

On Friday, she said, she got a call from a refugee who was feeling ill and didn’t know what to do. When Kinity showed up at her house, she was throwing up and had pain in her chest. Kinity rushed her to the hospital, fearing it was a heart attack.

She also got a call recently when Maniriho’s eldest daughter, Jaismine, tried to take a Connecticut Transit bus to pick up her brother from school. Jaismine didn’t know that in order to get the bus to stop, you have to pull the yellow cord, and that the driver does not say when the bus has arrived at a certain stop. She ended up riding the bus for hours.

IRIS has a phone number that refugees can call when they need help, but Kinity explained that some refugees are afraid to call it because they worry that they won’t be able to make themselves understood.

A Third Arm

Kinity’s son, Laban Kinity, spent much of the picnic picking up families and bringing them to Town Center Park, then driving them home.

Laban, like Maniriho’s children, spent a few years of his childhood in a refugee camp in Uganda. He said he started working when he was 8 or 10 years old to earn money for the family. He would cart bananas in a wheelbarrow from the shopping center to people’s houses.

He now works at the Yale Medical School Café. He was quick to praise the United States for giving him a new life.

“I never mind to give back to America,” he said. He holds IRIS and its workers and volunteers in particularly high esteem.

Services that exist now for refugees, he added, are not enough. He said he thinks there should be a single place where refugees can get a more formal education on life in America. English, he said, is not the only significant challenge for new arrivals. He said he knows refugees who have gotten in legal trouble for breaking a law they didn’t know existed. If you help people figure out how to adjust early on, he said, ​“you can figure out people’s problems before they escalate.”

Without such centralized resources, the burden of helping refugees adjust to life in the U.S. falls on organizations like IRIS and individuals like Kinity.

“She stretches her arms all the way,” Laban Kinity said of his mother. ​“Even if she doesn’t have a third one, she makes one.”

People are willing to volunteer for refugees, said Jane Kinity, but she and others who provide services need more help.

At around 4 p.m., Geoffrey Kinity’s phone died, and with it the music. Before walking back over to the parking lot to huddle into Laban Kinity’s car, Gameel and Maniriho stood shoulder to shoulder, bracing themselves against the wind. They met through IRIS, and are now friends, said Gameel, though they can only communicate in very broken English, as Gameel doesn’t speak Swahili and Maniriho doesn’t speak Arabic.

Gameel stood at ease, her additional year of experience with American life evident in the smile that was glued to her face. ​“We will never leave from America,” she said. ​“All my children stay here.”