For the first time, Beautiful Day has a mother-daughter team in our programs. Ten days after Russia invaded Ukraine, Svitlana, Violetta and their cat fled to the Czech Republic, then Portugal, and finally, in August 2022, to Providence. Originally from Kramatorsk, Violetta, who had just completed high school, remembers shopping, the theater, and concerts with friends—some of whom lost their lives in the attack on Kiev. Svitlana had experience making jewelry and working as a nanny. Neither knew any English or had connections with local Ukrainian or Russian speakers. We’ve loved being their first stepping stone in building a new...
Majanga and Etindo are brothers, born just a year apart during a time of unrest. Majanga was born in DR Congo, and Etindo many miles away in the famous Nyargusu refugee camp (Tanzania). This is where the boys lived for 23 years before they arrived in Rhode Island in December 2022. Life in Nyargusu involved friends, soccer, siblings, and gardening to cope with food shortages. They attended classes through middle school. As they got older Majanaga found work helping build houses while Etindo learned to drive a motorcycle and worked for a friend with a taxi service. Both were members...
Victory’s family fled unrest in DRC when he was three and he grew up many miles away in Zimbabwe along with other refugees from DRC, Burundi, and Somalia. Camp life wasn’t easy. He recalls food shortages and sometimes only eating once a day. He enjoyed sports and loved dancing in a troop with friends. Fortunately he was able to attend school and learned to love math. But camp life was especially difficult during the pandemic, as social distancing meant school every other day and waiting in long lines for water. Victory and his family came to Rhode Island to join...
Teke was born in 1959 in Uvira, DRC at the northern tip of the longest freshwater lake in the world, Lake Tanganyika. He has fond childhood memories of his homeland: mountains, lush forests, swimming, hiking, and of course, football (soccer). He completed 6 years of school and then worked for many years as a fisherman, even owning his own boat at one time. By 1999, the violence that started in DRC in 1996 nearly reached Uvira, so Teke fled along with many others. He traveled for miles by lake in an overcrowded, unstable boat. When he reached the Nyarugusa Refugee...
Some of you may recall meeting Selemani as a trainee. Selemani graduated in 2021 only to discover that first jobs don’t easily accommodate the schedule of a single parent of four children, two with special needs. He did take part-time work cleaning a church. Meanwhile, we started calling on him for help when short-staffed. Selemani is a terrific worker and a terrific person: reliable, trustworthy, thorough, considerate, multi-lingual and a gifted trainer with our youth. Eventually, we invited him to enter our market training to work on customer service and to help with fulfillment. His daughter even joined our youth...
