Trainees

On August 26, 2021, the Kabul airport was overwhelmed with refugees seeking to save their lives. Nomanullah can tell you about it first-hand. He, with a brother and uncle, had the papers to pass through the famous airport gate. A half hour later that gate was bombed. Their plane took them to Germany where they slept in bunk beds filling a football-sized field. Forty-some days later they were in Virginia. In December he arrived in Rhode Island. Nomanullah is one of six children, the son of a surgeon, who grew up in the lush, temperate, and diverse city of Kunduz....

Lidwige speaks bittersweetly about Haiti. Born in Port au Prince, she grew up with 9 siblings, 7 boys and 2 girls.  She liked school and went to college for accounting before taking a job as a school secretary. She also lived through the terrible 2010 earthquake that destroyed so many homes and lives and devastated the Haitian economy. She stayed for the recovery, but with so much violence engulfing her country, she finally fled. Lidwige has temporary protected status (TPS) and came to Rhode Island this past June to live with her mother, aunt, and cousins. She immediately enrolled in...

Afuwa was born in a village in Congo called Baraka. Her parents were teachers and she was the youngest of three children. She left Congo when she was 5 to end up in a refugee camp in Burundi.  This was a terrible period for her family. She was at the camp for 17 years and came to RI in 2022 with her children, ages 16, 14, 10 and 2. She was very nervous about leaving and what life would be like in the USA. She giggles a bit when she says that she was surprised when they landed in the...

Zainab was born in Aleppo, Syria and has fond memories of school, friends, and neighbors until the war came and “ruined everything.” She was 12, and the eldest of 6. At first, war was in the distance, but then it arrived with all its terror, and life changed. No school. No electricity. Limited water. Missile strikes. A neighbor’s house hit. She felt sick all the time. She recalls a candle falling while they were filling oil lamps and then the room was on fire. She saved her younger brother, and her father and the neighbors put the fire out. After...

Evon, her parents, and 5 siblings fled Iraq for Jordan in 2003. They arrived in the US in 2008. She laughs remembering what her sister Vivian (who also worked at Beautiful Day) said when she could not find Rhode Island on a map. “There must not be many people there, so they need our big family!” Evon has been with Beautiful Day since the beginning. On a recent warm day sitting outside on our patio, she spoke of meeting Keith at an International Institute event in 2008. She had prepared the food and he really enjoyed it. He asked what...

We love having a cross-generational team in our kitchen. It’s especially fun when young people join us and quickly land on their feet. Nyota is a delightful young woman who grew up in Tanzania after her parents fled the DR Congo. Nyota recalls life in the Nyarugusu refugee camp as difficult. She attended school, but as the eldest of 6 siblings, her enduring memories are of not enough food and walking long distances to carry water. Despite all the unknowns and the new language, she was happy to leave the camp and was optimistic about her new life in Rhode...