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By Roger Kitsvi
I lost a family because of conflict. But I discovered that peace can also be built through the families and communities we choose to create. Losing a family to conflict taught me that peace can be built through the families and communities we choose to create.
I grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, in North Kivu. Like many children, I knew my family as the place where I belonged. My father was a businessman who bought and sold coltan and other types of minerals. He worked with various community members, including those connected to armed groups (He used to call them clients). I never imagined that his work would one day change the life of our entire family. In 2017, my father was given 47 kilograms of coltan to sell. It was part of his business, and at the time, nothing about that day made me think our lives were about to change. But when he returned home that evening, he was not the same person who had left that morning. He had no money and no coltan. He was crying. We asked him what had happened. He explained that the coltan had been stolen from him during his journey. The People who had given it to him were waiting for money from home, and he did not have any when he returned. The people who owned the coltan wanted money or the coltan back. When none of us knew what had happened and could not explain where the money or coltan was, they decided to take us. My father and members of our family were beaten and tortured as they expected us to explain something we did not know, and we realized they were armed. After the torture, we were taken to a forest where the armed group was staying. Upon reaching there, they separated us as a family. They took us in different directions, to different locations. That was one of the hardest things I have ever lived through. I did not know where the rest of my family had been taken. I did not know what was happening to them. I only knew that I was alone. For about a week, I was tied up with almost nothing to eat. Every day brought the same torture and uncertainty. I did not know when it would end, or whether I would see my family again. Then fighting broke out between the armed group that had captured us and another armed group, including Maji Maji fighters and the FDLR (Force Démocratique de Libération du Rwanda), in Kurumba Village. In the middle of the fighting, we had to relocate from a mountain we were kept on to another. Throughout that time, we found a chance to escape together with my elder brother. While running, holding my hand, he was shot from behind, and I kept going into the forest. I ran. I had no plan. I just knew I had to find a way out. I was following my intuition until I met a driver who used to work with my father, and he was driving a truck we used to call ‘Fusso’, fleeing from Kurumba to Bunagana. When we arrived in Kiwanja, the truck broke down; I couldn’t stay and wait, but I had to continue walking from Kiwanja to Bunagana, walking for about six and a half hours. Late in the evening, I eventually reached Bunagana, where I reached a transit centre. I stayed there for about two weeks before UNHCR transferred me to Nakivale Refugee Settlement in Uganda. However, crossing the border gave me safety. It did not give me a sense of home. I had survived, but I was carrying questions, memories, and a loss I did not know how to explain.
Things still became bad for me, who did not have a friend, a brother, or even know any of the people I found in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement. I really wished to continue with my education, but I could not find where and how to begin since I lived a life of fear and hopelessness. Nakivale became a new chapter in my life. It was a place where people from different countries, cultures, languages, and backgrounds tried to rebuild their lives, and I found myself there alone. I asked myself questions I couldn’t answer. I began to understand that displacement is not only about losing a physical home. Sometimes you lose the people who made that home feel like home and the feeling that someone is waiting for you. I lived on the streets for several months, not knowing what the next day would look like. At the end of the year, I reflect on something my mom used to tell me about education: “Masomo ndio kimileo lako,” translated from Swahili as “education is your only escape”. The same words kept running in my head for days, and every day until I realized that I needed to overcome the fear of stepping outside for self-education and make my mom proud. I decided to start English classes in a refugee settlement and join youth activities, at first fearing the rebel group would find me in Nakivale. I began to understand that rebuilding a life is not something we always do alone. Sometimes, we rebuild through other people. I learned the basics of English, financial literacy, and conflict resolution the hard way with the help of a local organization called the Finnish Refugee Council.
Somewhere along that journey, in six months’ time, I met Muhindo Mutundi. We met at community radio stations, where the refugee community comes every evening to listen to local and sometimes international news in the refugee camp. Muhindo fled his home country in 2014, at the age of fourteen. He shared this: “Before becoming a refugee, I had a home, a family, and happiness. I never dreamed of becoming a refugee. I never imagined that one day I would have to leave everything behind and run away from my lovely family and the place I loved the most. My journey to the refugee settlement was not easy. I went through many difficult experiences. At one point, I even slept outside on the road in Kampala (the capital city of Uganda) and became a street child. Life was very hard, and I started wondering what my future would look like. I decided to request relocation from the UNHCR office to the Nakivale refugee settlement after 4 years of living on the street in Kampala.”
We started a conversation that led us to share our stories; we shared our stories and realized that we had gone through similar experiences. That meeting gave me new hope. We came from different backgrounds and spoke different mother tongues, but we connected through telling stories and being open to each other. Muhindo Mutundi struck up a conversation with me about the challenges of living in Nakivale as a youth. He shared his vision for a better life. He said, “We cannot change our past, but we can focus on the present and work together to build a better future.” Two days later, together, we started sharing this message with other youth in our community. We can try. I had seen youth in Nakivale, boys and girls who just spent their days taking drugs. I said, “What if we just get together and share stories and just let go of the things that are in our hearts and minds from the past.” We both understood what it meant to be displaced. We both cared about youth, children, and youth in particular, and we both believed our experiences should not only become memories of what we had lost. That became the reason we helped others. We had both seen so many of our friends suffering from long-term stress, trauma, hunger and disease and even pass away from it. I supported the idea of sharing life stories and harsh experiences. We went to visit some of our friends who had turned to drugs to just tell them that there is a future beyond a refugee camp. We started gathering regularly and sharing stories about our own hardships, learning from each other, slowly letting go of the pain we held from our pasts. “We began somehow to live again,” as we all used to say. Our friendship grew into something I had not expected. Muhindo Mutundi became my brother not because we shared the same blood, but because we learned to show up for each other. We supported one another, worked together, and began thinking about what we could do for the youth around us. This friendship changed how I understood the word family. I began to realize that family can be created through trust, responsibility, love, and presence.
From sharing stories informally to establishing a community-based center. Many of us grew up facing the same challenges that the children we serve face today. Our work has focused on helping vulnerable children and youth develop in Nakivale through education, sport, art, storytelling, and social skills. Our center has been home to more than 210 children accessing free education and 180 preschool kids. Many of these children have lives full of potential, but opportunities to learn are limited by circumstances beyond their control. Some are orphans without parents who can support their education; some have dropped out of school. Others are newly arrived refugee children trying to find their place in a new community. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic in 2019, we continued our weekly youth group sharing work and began cultivating maize together to share or sell the harvest each season; this was a way we could fight hunger and gain some money from it. Every day on the way to the maize fields, we would see children playing on the streets, not in school; many of them could speak only their local language, not English, and some were orphans with no one to care for them. Our work eventually grew into a youth refugee group. We wanted to create opportunities for these vulnerable children and youth using our own skills. Most of the children grew up in difficult circumstances: poverty, hunger, no access to education, exclusion, and language barriers. Education became central to our work alongside sport, art, storytelling, and life skills. We started engaging with the children and youth, sharing stories and encouraging them to join us. We invited the children to come meet us at home. There, we started to teach English language lessons to these children in a single room where we used to have our weekly gathering with the youth, and that is where Mundi and I slept. One year later, in 2020, we secured the support of a local leader who gave us space to teach the children outside, with no trees, just in the heat of the sunshine, using a borrowed, propped-up blackboard to break the language barrier that could hold these children back from inclusion and to provide them with the basic English skills they need to participate in school. New Talent for the Best Future’s mission grew into supporting children and youth talent by giving them access to education, art, sport, storytelling and social skills, believing that they carry talents beyond their circumstances, background or living style, with the aim of ‘building a strong generation where every child and youth uses their talents to change lives’. Today, programs at New Talent for the Best Future include a wide variety of community-based teaching and coaching as well as time for creativity, play and sharing stories. We currently serve over 210 children and youth in a place we all call home away from home, and so far, more than 120 children have joined a normal government school. Looking at what we do at New Talent for the Best Future, and thinking about what we were trying to build, I don’t think it was only a program. We try to create a place where children feel that they belong. A place where a child could be seen. A place where a young person could ask questions. A place where someone could say, “I believe in you.” Because we have known what it felt like to be separated from the people we loved, we understood the importance of making sure other children and youth in Nakivale did not feel completely alone.
Working with children and youth changed me as much as I hoped to change them. I started seeing children not only as people who needed support, but as people with ideas, talents, gifts, dreams and potential. Some needed education, some needed encouragement, some needed someone to listen, and some needed a safe place to belong, a place to call home away from their home. This is why education became so important to the children and to me: through our educational activities, art, storytelling and sport, it was not me coaching them; however, they could teach me a lot that I could never imagine I could teach them. Our programs are not only about reading, writing, or passing examinations; they are structured to give our children a reason to believe in tomorrow. For example, Sport for Change builds teamwork, discipline, confidence, communication, and leadership. Our community-based art gives children opportunities to express themselves, explore their identity and creativity, build friendships, and bring the community together. Storytelling helps children develop communication, imagination, listening, and confidence. Social skills help children learn how to cooperate, respect others, resolve conflicts, and participate positively in their communities. All these activities shaped how I could perceive coaching and learning for a passionate refugee child and youth.
My understanding of peace has changed. When I was a teenager, I might have thought of peace as the absence of war or violence. Today, I see it differently, building on my experience in a refugee camp and my work with the children and youth at New Talent for the Best Future. To me, peace is also about belonging. It is about whether a child feels safe enough to learn. It is about whether young people from different backgrounds can sit together, play together, and learn from each other. It is about whether someone who has lost almost everything can still find people who will believe and stand beside them, and most importantly, whether they are capable of using their talents to contribute to the change they wish to see in their local communities and the world. In the end, peace will not always be found on the battlefield frontlines. Sometimes it begins with a conversation between two unknown people. Sometimes it begins when we choose not to divide ourselves by tribe, religion, nationality, or language. It also begins when people choose to build a trustworthy community and believe in what they can achieve together as one. I learned this through my friendship with Mutundin, who and I came from different backgrounds, but we chose to build something together that has contributed to the change we both want to see. That choice became bigger than our friendship and grew into a community.
Roger Kivatsi is a second-year student in the Humanities and Refugee Studies at York University. He arrived in Toronto a year ago from the Navikale Refugee Camp in Uganda.