Trainees

Flora was born and lived the first chapter of her life in a village called Bunagana, in a beautiful but unstable part of DR Congo near the border of Rwanda and Uganda. She was 27, a farmer with 2 children, growing corn and beans and raising goats, when she saw people getting killed by men with guns. She and her family walked 3 days through the mountains to Uganda. They eventually got on a bus that took them to the refugee camp where her growing family lived for 22 years. We asked Flora about her new life in the US....

Many of you once read about Zaid in the RI Monthly–how he fled Iraq for Syria in 2006 and journeyed, apart from family, for a failed asylum bid in Sweden. His family was resettled in Providence in 2010 and he started working for Beautiful Day. This was back when BD was an experiment. Zaid did every job we had: baking, receiving, shipping, deliveries, deposits, markets. If you’ve received a package from Beautiful Day, you can bet it passed through Zaid’s hands. Zaid recalls coming to the US with nothing. He thanks God that his father taught him to work hard...

Antoine was born in Burundi, where he finished high school with high hopes for more education. Then civil war broke out, forcing him to flee to Cote D’Ivoire. Determined to continue his studies, he eventually received his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Human Rights Law. He also started a successful printing business. But he was moved by the suffering he had seen in the war and was determined to help. He joined the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) where he worked on a nutrition project to combat hunger and researched the plight of kidnapped children being turned into child soldiers in...

Elizabeth grew up in the area of Harper, a coastal city that was once part of The Republic of Maryland (US Colony) but now belongs to Liberia. Elizabeth is work-smart. She’s motivated and jumps into tasks. She attentively welcomes everyone to our kitchen and it’s obvious that our team of trainees and staff respect her presence and work ethic. She told us that she grew up understanding the value of work. As one of the oldest of 7 siblings being raised by an elderly grandmother, she was tasked with doing pretty much “everything”: cooking, laundry, taking her grandmother by canoe...

We’ve felt lucky to be working with Selemani through the disruption of our recent move. He’s adept at maneuvering large freezers and ovens on and off Uhauls and into tight spaces. He arrived in the US in 2017. As a widower and single parent of 4, he faces some unique challenges: one son is deaf (now attending RI School for the Deaf), one daughter is being treated for sickle cell anemia. The age gaps between his children require multiple schools and multiple trips to the bus stop. Finding the right employment has proved challenging. Selemani lost both his parents back in...

Like several of the youth in our current job training cohort, Daniel is ethnically Kunama. Originally his family is from Eritrea, although he was born in Ethiopia. He’s very chill with a sly sense of humor that the whole cohort appreciates. That time of leaving Ethiopia is a bit of a blur—he was around 7 or 8 and remembered being confused about where they were going. He arrived in Providence with his mom and younger brother and started school with his cousin Hayle (also in this cohort). Daniel did not feel like he was treated differently because he was from...