Search Results for: helping devota

I am seeking to raise $10,000 to help a good and loving person, a new citizen of America, a refugee from horror,  pay back a mistaken loan that is crippling her son’s education and pressuring her own life in many ways. We have raised more than $4,000 so far, nearly half.

It’s hard for me to get it out my head when I see Devota – I met with her again yesterday afternoon at RISSE in Albany. Under the new laws proposed by our government, she would not be eligible to come to  America today.

She did not speak English when she came here after walking nearly 3,000 miles across Africa with  her daughter on her back to escape the Rwandan genocide. And she had no money or any other possessions.

She is an American citizen now, but since she had no resources or measurable skills when she finally got to a refugee camp in 1995, she would no longer qualify for admission to the United States.

Yesterday, she showed me a photograph taken of her walking barefoot out of Rwanda with tens of thousands of fellow refugees and victims. Devota said it was a death march, soldiers and militiamen lined the route of the march, gunning down thousands of innocent people in the slaughter, which took 800,000 lives.

Eight of the people she walked with were killed by poison darts fired by guards and farmers when they foraged for food on farms along their route. They hid in forests during the day, foraged for food at night.

She told me yesterday that she never understood what happiness was until she came to America. She said had never been happy a single day in  her life.

It took Devota a year to walk to safety with no spare clothes shelter, food or shoes. She carried her young daughter – then three months old – all of the way.  She got her to the camp alive, tens of thousands of children were abandoned by their parents during this time and left to die on the roads of exposure and starvation.

On her journey walking and in the camps, Devota was raped four times. She was threatened with death each time if she did not submit. The assaults resulted in four children, all of whom she chose to keep and adopt and who she brought to America and is raising by herself. She intends to get every one of them through college.

One of her children, her oldest son,  was recently accepted at Buffalo State University, Devota, confused by the loan system (it happens to refugees and many young Americans all of the time) applied for what she thought was a financial aid package but was actually a $10,000 loan.

She intends to pay back every pay.

Her payments – $125 a month – forced her  moved to a smaller apartment with her children, and her son, who is studying to be an engineer,  left school for a cheaper community college and is working to help repay his own loan.

Devota is working day and night at two jobs, seven days a week – one with disabled people at Catholic Charities, and every night, as a house cleaner at the Albany Medical Center. I asked for a photo of her at work, and she sent me the one above.

Yesterday, I asked her if she needed any of the money we had raised now – my plan is to wait and see if we could raise the entire $10,000. She smiled and said nothing, and I was reminded again that the refugees – especially those from Africa and parts of Asia – will never ask for money, they believe it is unseemly and rude.

They will sometimes accept it if is simply given to them, and if the need is great.

So I wrote her a check for $1,000 and agreed to meet her again next week in Albany, where she lives and works.

She is, I am told, a hard worker and a devoted mother. She plans to get herself through college as well, once her children finish their education. This is desperately important to her, an old refugee and immigrant story, the heart of the American experience.

So I wrote out a check for $1,000 and handed it to her. Brother Francis, the director of RISSE, (the refugee and immigrant center based in Albany) and the man who introduced me to Devota, said I could not possibly imagine the difference that $1,000 would mean to Devota and her family now.

I could see it in her face, I think. She has a beautiful smile.

In Rwanda, she said, neither she nor her children could ever have gone to school. For all of her struggles, she sees our country as a land of opportunity and hope. She never talks about her long march across Africa, and when asked, says as little as possible. When asked about the political struggles raging around immigration, she only smiles and says: “When the elephants fight, the grasses below suffer.”

She told me yesterday “I don’t want to keep anger inside of me, all that emotion will eat me up.”

If you wish to donate to help pay Devota’s loan, you can send a check to me, Jon Katz, P.O.  Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y. 12816, or donate through Paypal, [email protected].  Please note it is for “Devota.” This morning, I received $870 dollars in small donations in my post office bos, they add up and will help change a life.

I will keep updating this project as it evolves, I will see her again next week, and she has invited me to her apartment for dinner.

 

 

In my world, I celebrate that rare and difficult emotion, empathy,  as the hallmark of a noble spirit, a pillar of social justice, the pathway to my highest human potential.

People often tell me I have changed, and often ask me why I have changed and how I have changed, and I answer them this way: if I have changed at all – this is something I am too close to see –  it is in the pursuit and understanding of empathy, the practice of standing in the shoes of another.

Empathy is the foundation of our very humanity, of what it means to be human, at least for me. Empathy is at the core of the refugee experience in America. We either stand in their shoes or we can’t or won’t, that is the choice all of us face in seeking our own idea of humanity in these  days of American agony.

I am descended from refugees, that experience is near to me, I can stand in their shoes and feel their bewilderment, isolation, loneliness and fear, being a refugee is the ultimate experience in disconnection, from everything one knows, feels and is comforted by. It is imperative for the refugee to feel safe and supported in order to survive.

In America today, to be a refugee is to be a refugee twice, once when torn from their homes, another when throw into the political cauldron the issue of immigration has become in our country. They come to flee fear and danger, and come here to feel afraid and in danger. Once again, their future and fate is uncertain. I believe my very soul depends on trying to help them.

The actor Kal Penn knows this, he put up a page online seeking funds to help the Syrian refugees, and raised $600,000 in a few days. I am new to this experience of doing good for refugees, but I also sense the great feeling there is for them, the empathy that exists for the refugee experience. But I too have been surprised at the support for American refugees, on my blog I have raised tens of thousands of dollars in a few months.

Tomorrow, I’m going to Albany with Maria to meet with Devota Nyiraneza of Rwanda, she walked more than 2,400 miles across Central Africa – it took her a year – barefoot and with her three-month old daughter strapped to her back to get to a U.N. refugee camp in America. Like so many other refugees, if proposed new immigration laws are passed, she and people like her would no longer be welcome in America. She spoke no English, had no money, or any marketable skill. She is a U.S. citizen now, working hard at two jobs, sending her children to college.

She mistakenly took out a $10,000 college loan, thinking it was a financial aid package, a mistake many young people in our country have also made. This happens often to new refugees in America, they have trouble understanding complex financial offerings and agreements.

For the past several weeks, I have been raising money to pay that loan off, the donations are still coming in small and very welcome amounts, I am not a Hollywood actor, I have no magic want to raise $600,000. But I am very close to the $10,000. Tomorrow, I will turn approximately $4,000 raised by the Army of Good over to RISSE, the refugee and immigrant center in Albany in Devota’s name. They will administer the loan payoff and make sure she is not  taken advantage of again.

I will also meet the daughter she carried across Africa on her back, a journey that took her nearly a year. She made this journey without shoes, and sometimes, she was walking on bare bones, dodging bullets and rapists – she was raped four times. In America, she has the skill of working hard and seeking a better life for her children, this used to be the foundation of the American dream. I pray it will be again.

I am meeting newly arrived refugees and immigrants – it took me a long time to break into this world – and trying to support their personal and cultural needs. I am raising money for scholarships for young and adult refugees to support their personal and artistic needs, and meeting with people like Devota to help with her loan, and Mawulidi who needs carving tools to resume his life’s work, and next week, with a woman who fled Africa after her husband died, and the law decreed her father-in-law could now own her and her children.

She barely escaped with her life.

We are raising money for Jorsein Mayo, a 13-year-old Thai refugee who needs help paying tuition for  summer and after school tutoring he desperately needs. He is falling behind. I want to tell the stories of these people and show them as the vulnerable and beautiful human beings they are, the true spirit of America.

I want to be able to look back on my life and be able to say I found my humanity in this difficult time, and did not flinch or run from the challenge of it. There is so much need.

You can help in this work by supporting the refugees. You can contribute directly to refugee organizations like RISSE, of course, or you can also help me in my work by donating to my refugee fund, Jon Katz, Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, or through Paypal, I am [email protected]. Thanks for helping.

“The purpose of life is not to be happy,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson. “It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”

More than two decades ago, Devota Nyiraneza (right) carried her daughter Valentine, strapped to her back, across Central Africa for more than 2,400 miles. Devota was one of hundreds of thousands of Tutsi tribe members fleeing the Rawandan genocide, which took 800,000 lives. It took her a year to get to a U.N. Refugee camp in Cameroon.

Thanks to the support of the Army of Good, we are helping Devota to stabilize her life, and help her children continue their education in the United States.

Along the way she endured starvation, rape, murder, extreme heat and exhaustion. Tens of thousands of fleeing refugees, starving themselves, left their children in the hope that someone might come to feed them. All along the way, soldiers and militiamen fired shotguns at the refugees and slaughter many thousands more.

It took Devota a year to make that trip, at the end her skin had all peeled off and she was walking on bones. “I did not think I would ever survive,” she said,”but I never once thought of leaving my daughter behind.”

I asked her what kept her alive. “God,” she said, “I never stopped praying to God.”

Valentine, an articulate, charismatic young woman is 22 now – she spent most of her young years in a refugee camp.  She is quite special, and her mother’s grueling journey has shaped her life.

She remembers nothing of that journey, but she acknowledges that it has shaped and changed her life. She is sad to find that the political atmosphere in America involving race and immigration is also frightening and disturbing.  She is studying to be a nurse at the Albany Medical Center, but has interrupted her studies to help the family pay back some loans they took out, including one to buy a new car after an automobile accident.

“Every day is a gift,” said Valentine, “I have to make a difference at all times.” I went to Albany yesterday with Maria to give Devota another check – this one for $3,000, and also to meet Valentine. We are close to paying off the $10,000 loan Devota took out, thinking it was a financial aid grant.

We were sitting in Devota’s tiny apartment in South Albany Sunday, it was a warm and sunny afternoon.

The family made us feel especially welcome, we sat and talked and drank from bottled water.

Devota shares the space with her four children, all of them the result of rape. Rape was a constant horror to the women on the march, the soldiers and militiamen they encountered in their flight became notorious for raping the women refugees. Devota kept all of these children and is raising them still.

I gave the check to Francis Sengabo of RISSE, the refugee and immigrant support center in Albany, they will help schedule and administer loan payments taken out by mistake to help Devota’s oldest son go to college to study engineering. I hope to help Devota further.

Everyone in the family has interrupted their education to pay back loans that were necessary for them to survive. Devota is working two jobs, one helping the disabled with Catholic Charities, the other mopping floors at the Albany Medical Center.

Valentine hopes to return to Africa – she identifies as an African – in time to see her grandmother, who is old and frail. It was especially touching to meet Valentine and see the two of them together. “I thank God for making it here,” she said. “When I think of all of the things my mother endured to get us here, I know I have to make something out of my life.”

Devota remembers coming across an abandoned baby and picking it up. She carried it for nine hours until, by some miracle, she came across the child’s father, who had been searching for her. The child’s mother, who was starving, prayed for someone to find her child and feed her.

The hardest thing for her on that long journey, Devota he says, was to see the bodies of the dead children, spread across the forest floor for hundreds of miles. For most of them, there was no one to come and save them, no food to bring them. She said she could never have left her daughter behind in those forests, she would have laid down and died with her first.

I showed Valentine photos from Maria’s website, and she lit up seeing Maria’s potholders and quilts. The two clicked right away with one another and we invited Valentine to come to Bedlam Farm. Maria offered to teach her how to make potholders and quilts, and she said she very much wants to come.

I asked Valentine if she was following the ugly struggle over refugees and immigration and race in America, she said she was. Every night she worries about her older brother – where he is, who he is with, if he is all right. “We all bleed the same,” she said. She said because the children have never had a father, she seems especially responsible for their well-being. She is acutely conscious that there are people in America who hate her, for the color of her skin and for her coming to the United States.

When I hear the refugees tell the story of their suffering and horror, it hurts my heart to think that they now have to face fear hatred, and uncertainty in America, when they left so much of it behind. I keep telling them this is not the real America, the real America is fighting for it’s heart and soul. That remains

Valentine is a remarkable woman, perhaps the result in part of having a remarkable mother. She is determined to make her mark on the world, she hopes to resume here nursing training. I told her I’d love to talk with her about the possibility of applying to college.

So thanks so much for helping me to meet and know these two extraordinary women.

I am committed to staying in their lives, if they wish it, and Maria is eager to help Valentine especially. I am committed to writing about the new refugees to America, about whom so many lies have been told. I believe it’s time for such truth.

In Devota I find a person of great strength and character. She understands the value of freedom, she works hard, is devoted to her family, breaks no laws of any kind. I can’t think of a better candidate to be an American or to come to America.

Your support is helping to transform the lives of this family.

In America, I’ve often read about a cycle of poverty that draws the poor and vulnerable into a network of loans, payments and pressure that makes it almost impossible to move forward. Devota faced enormous handicaps when she came to America – she was a single mother with four children, no support of any kind from the father’s, no English skills or relevant work experience.

She has done an amazing job of putting a life together for her children, two of whom are already seeking some form of higher education. Devota’s life was upended by the loan she mistakenly took out and also by a car accident last year that demolished her car and forced her to get a new one.

RISSE is helping her navigate these financial concerns.  So are you, the Army of Good.

Against all kinds of odds, Devota has made it to America raised some beautiful children – we met three of them yesterday. And you have helped her to regain control of her life and help her children to move forward with their education.

Thanks so much for your support in this, it will make a great difference in the lives of this family. Devota is now a United States citizen, so are her children.

I am determined to meet with the refugees and immigrants who have come to America in recent years, and tell their stories. We are lucky to have people of such character and drive come to our country. If you wish to help me in this work,  you can donate to my refugee fund at my post office box, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge. N.Y., 12816 or via Paypal, [email protected].

This work now seems even more urgent than before. I will stick with it.

Blessings to all of you.

Devota Nyiraneza invited Maria and I to come to her apartment a week from Saturday in Albany. I accepted. I don’t know Devota all that well, but there are  certain things I love about her – her sweetness, grace, pride and courage and  determination. Today, I brought her a check for $3,000, the second installment of my campaign to pay off the $10,000 loan she took out thinking it was a financial aid package for her college-bound son.

Devota told me that she had just send $300 back to Rwanda so that her nice and nephew could register for school. They are orphans now, her brother died years ago. She regularly sends money to them. She lives in a small apartment with her four children, all of them the result of her being repeatedly raped by soldiers on her long walk to freedom in 1994.

She is applying for government permission to bring her brother’s children to the United States, but she knows that is a difficult path. She is hoping to hire an immigration lawyer.

For a year, Devota walked barefoot across Central Africa, pursued all the way by murderous soldiers and militias and forage food from farms. Eight of the women she started out with were slaughtered along the way. The road, she says, was littered with the bodies of children abandoned by their desperate parents.

Devota carried her three-month old baby all the way to Tanzania.

Devota is a U.S. citizen now, she passed her citizenship tests and speaks English well, if not fluently. She is no threat to our country.

She walked 2,485 miles across Central Africa to escape the Rwandan genocide, as it is known. Recently, she applied for financial aid so that her son, studying to be an engineer, could pay his tuition at Buffalo State University. It turned out this was a loan, it seems this happens to many refugees and a good number of American students.

So she started paying the loan off and moved to a smaller apartment with her four children.

I will meet them next week, and also the daughter that Devota carried so far to safety. She works two jobs now, one at Catholic Charities helping the disabled, the other cleaning floors at the Albany Medical Center.

Devota has an easy and generous smile. I’ve given her $4,000 in your donations over the past week, and more money is coming in. I hope to help her pay off the $10,000 loan, but she greatly appreciates the help she has already received. The donations for her are coming in a steady stream. Thank you.

If you wish to donate, you can send a contribution to Post Office Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. or to Paypal: [email protected] Please mark “Devota” on the check or in the Paypal message box. And thank you, we have already made a huge difference in her life.

Yesterday, we raised nearly $3,000 for the fund to help Devota Nyiraneza pay off a $10,000 loan for her son’s college studies that she mistakenly thought was a financial aid package (this, according to consumer groups, is a very common mistake  by American students as well, it is easier to do that it should be).

Devota accepts trouble with grace, she has been through much worse. She walked across Central Africa in 1994 to escape the Rwandan genocide. She walked about 2,500 miles and it took her nearly a year to get to the U.N. Refugee camp in Cameroon. She carried her 3 month old daughter on her back all the way.

She works two jobs, one helping the disabled for Catholic Charities, the other mopping floors at the Albany Medical Center.

All along the route refugees were pursued, slaughtered and  raped,  Devota was assaulted four times and gave birth to four children as a result, she kept and raised each of them in the refugee camps and  her in America. She is a U.S.Citizen working two jobs to pay off her loan and care for her children.

I’m going to count the money over the next day or two, but I believe we are past the $5,000 mark. I hope to reach $10,000 before we are done, but whatever we raise will be a great help.

There was a check for $1,000 yesterday and one for $500 today – thank you – and envelopes with $2, $5, $10 and checks for $25 and $50. The small donations matter, they are inspiring and wonderful. Thank you. People are affected by her story, and are just giving what they can give. That’s what makes the Army of Good so beautiful.

Yesterday was the biggest total of donations for Devota for any single day, if this keeps up for a few days, we’ll either hit the goal or be close. I’m going to see  Devota on Thursday, I’ll ask her if she wants to wait for the full amount or get what we have raised until then. I will keep the fund going for a week or so, we’ll see what we see.

Her story has touched many people deeply, as it touched me.

I’ll also be seeing Mawulidi Diodone Majaliwa, who is from Congo Kinshasa, on Thursday.He spent 20 years in a refugee camp. He was a wood-carver but he had to leave his tools from his grandfather back in Africa when he came to America last November. I’m bringing him  a small wood carving kit and enough money – at least $400 – to buy the larger tools that he needs. I have enough money on hand for that.

I hope to encourage him to explore putting up a blog so he can sell his beautiful carvings. He will need some help for that, but that’s a ways off.

If you wish to donate to   the refugee/Mansion fund, you can send a donation to my post office box, Jon Katz, P.O.  Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 212816 or send a donation via Paypal, ID [email protected]. And thank you.