For 22 years, Fabiola Niyinkiza rose at dawn and went to bed at night in a refugee camp in Africa.
This week, she gave presentations at a special YWCA event aimed at helping Prince Albert residents understand the refugee experience.
The Prince Albert YWCA put together an interactive display called Voices of Resilience to help enlighten the community about the presence of refugees and what they go through. The event began at the Gateway Mall on Tuesday and wrapped up on Thursday.
“I just wish they could understand what immigrating looks like or how people who live in refugee camps live in all these bad situations,” said Niyinkiza, who was born in Tanzania after her family fled neighbouring Burundi. “It’s not funny. It’s not even exciting…. I just hope people can understand.”
Burundi is a geographically small country of roughly 14.5 million people located just south of Rwanda in Central Africa. The country was plagued by a 12-year civil war that finally ended in 2005.
Niyinkiza and her family originally escaped to Tanzania, a country of more than 70 million people on the eastern side of the continent. However, the violence followed them. Niyinkiza said there were certain groups that didn’t want her family to return to their land, so they fled again to another refugee camp in Malawi.
She said life in the camp was very difficult and unpredictable. People were desperate to get out, she said, but people who left the refugee camp on their own were often beaten—sometimes by local police.
“Every single day we were (asking) our parents, ‘when are we going to end this life?’ We saw people born in there and then dying in there. It’s a really hard life,” Niyinkiza remembered.
“My dad is a pastor. He (would say) ‘you know what? We are just praying that one day God will answer us.’ Once you are in a refugee camp, don’t expect to go anywhere.”
She said there were millions in the camp, all waiting to receive refugee status from countries like the Canada, the United States, or Australia so they could move away.
Her family found out they were headed to Canada in September 2019.
“It was a Monday,” she remembered. “My dad was like, ‘wake up, we are going.’ I was like, ‘where are we going?’ (He said,) ‘oh, just put any dress-anything you find there—just wear it and we’ll go. They brought a 15 passenger van. There was 11 people. They brought our luggage and then they took us in town so we can catch an airplane.
“I was so excited for the moment. Also, I was crying. The crying was, like, I remembered all my friends and all my neighbours. I left them there in a bad situation. I was really sad.”
They travelled from Malawi to Saskatoon, and were picked up at the Saskatoon airport by the YWCA. After two weeks, they moved to Prince Albert.
While in the refugee camp, Niyinkiza’s father told none they were headed to Canada—not even his own children.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen because some people, if they know that you are going to Canada, Australia, or U.S., right, they are going to kill you,” Niyinkiza explained. “They can kill your dad. They can kill your siblings. Absolutely, yes, because they know that you have left them there in a bad, hard life, and you are going to get a good life. That’s why your parents have to keep it a secret.”
Having settled into Prince Albert, Niyinkiza works with the YWCA Settlement Services, where she helps refugees adapt to life in their new country. However, she also hopes to help longtime PA residents understand what the newcomers have been through.
So far, she said, events like Voices of Resilience have been well-received.
“Some people who take the tour here, I meet with them, they are so excited to learn…. I put in my shows the way I was living in a refugee camp. They think, ‘oh, that’s tough. I can’t do this. I can’t even take water on my head for two hours—like on my head for two hours, 20 litres—I can’t do that. But, we were doing that for all our lives.”
This isn’t the first time the YWCA has hosted an event likes Voices of Resilience. Carolyn Hobden, the Prince Albert YWCA’s Manager of Settlement Services, said it’s important for the public to understand why some people flee their countries to come to Canada.
“There are assumptions that people are coming just to get jobs, that’s not the case with our clients” Hobden said. “A lot of our clients who have come as refugees are coming to start life over because they live in a camp where they have been sleeping in tents, where they live off rations, where water isn’t safe to drink, where their children are unable to go to school.”
Hopden said the YWCA offers services that helps the refugee get settled, provide temporary accommodation, register their children in school, sign them up for language classes, find employment, and otherwise settle down.
“Most of them would have loved to go back to their country but they can’t because of war and devastation that has happened there,” Hobden said. “They are not able to return so they apply for resettlement here in Canada. Very few are accepted but when some are … they come to Prince Albert where we are able to welcome them and help them start their life again.”
Hobden said the Prince Albert YWCA take in about 100 refugees a year. She hopes Voices of Resilience will help residents understand that some people have suffered because of war and situations that were no fault of their own, and are forced to leave.
“People have come to this country not because they want to come to take your jobs (and) not because they want to come to take your house,” she said. “They are coming here to start a new life because of what they have gone through previously.”
Voices of Resilience is a simulation refugee camp that gives visitors a glimpse into the hardships of daily life. Residents can visit a school room, a tent home for a family of four, and see what provisions are available to families and individuals as they endure life in a refugee camp.
The organization made the invitation to the whole Prince Albert community to participate in an experience that will help people better understand the challenges faced by refugees before arriving in Canada.
Participants will engage in experiences and exercises and have a chance to listen firsthand to the stories of refugees now living in Prince Albert.
