How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child

by Sandra Uwiringiyimana

Eventually I came to understand that there was a spirit of unity among my people, a deeply ingrained sense of helping those less fortunate than you because you could lose your own good fortune at any moment. My people knew that wealth could come and go. My family didn’t always have enough food for ourselves for dinner, but we would help anyone who asked. And sometimes, I would be sent to a neighbor’s house to ask for help. “What did you make for dinner?” I would ask the neighbors. And they would send me home with food. We all looked out for one another.

When it came to war, my parents could shelter us from only so much. I knew the sounds of war before I knew how to do a cartwheel. I became accustomed to those sounds. As a kid, I was never afraid of imaginary monsters at night: All the monsters I knew walked in daylight and carried big guns.

My friends called my parents “Mama Sandra” and “Papa Sandra.” We didn’t use terms like “Mr.” and “Mrs.” In my culture, that would be considered impersonal and disrespectful.

The houses on our street were all very close together, but none of our neighbors came over and introduced themselves. No one knocked on our door. Mom was surprised by how lonely and isolated America felt. The neighbors didn’t seem to know each other. People locked their doors. Everyone kept to themselves. Mom would look out the window and ask, “Where are all the people?”

As refugees in America, we were at the bottom of the heap. Your credentials from your home country don’t matter. You could come here with a college education, like Princesse did, and it wouldn’t mean anything. She had studied international relations in college in Rwanda. She had held a job in the government. But it didn’t count in America. She would have to go to college again. People in America don’t care about college degrees or careers from Africa. Princesse had worked so hard to get that education. We had been through so much to get our golden ticket to America. But we were invisible.

I was quickly learning that I was not considered African American, even though I was from Africa and I was living in America. My words came out sounding different from theirs. In fact, as I began to learn and speak more English, the African American kids started accusing me of sounding “white.” And they did not consider this to be a good thing.

Are these people so bored, so privileged, that they want to sleep outside on the ground instead of in their comfy beds?

Sometimes I would have a little fun with my answers, saying, “We wore grass skirts and bras made of leaves. We go from place to place by swinging around on vines like Tarzan. I had a pet lion and a pet elephant, and they lived together in a mud hut. My parents were so wealthy, my siblings and I each had our own individual mud huts, if you can believe it. Oh, and I had a monkey that talked!”

Yes, Africa has many problems, but there is so much beauty, so much goodness too. In America, the images of Africa make it seem as if it is a place where only bad things happen. Conversely, in Africa, the images of America make it seem like it is a land so divine, only good things happen.

Before I came to America, I was Sandra. I was a student, a daughter, a sister. I was African, Congolese. Did I ever define myself as black? No. My skin color didn’t determine who I was as a person. Everyone was black. My interests, my beliefs, defined me. My skin color was simply a fact about me, like the fact that I like candy. If you ask who I am as a person, I wouldn’t say, “I like candy.” That’s not a fundamental thing that describes me. But in America, my skin color did define me, at least in other people’s eyes. I was black. I was black first, and then I was Sandra.

Jimbere Fund is a nonprofit organization founded by myself, my sister Adele Kibasumba, and her husband, Obadias Ndaba. Our mission at Jimbere Fund is to revitalize distressed communities in rural Congo. We work with Congo’s most remote populations to design and implement individualized high-impact development interventions that expand opportunities and access to critical services, create jobs, and lift people out of poverty in a sustainable way. Our approach blends community organizing and development interventions. Communities identify their most pressing needs in education, women’s empowerment, health, and agricultural productivity, and we work with them to find solutions and co-implement them.