Trainees

Rodrigo knows he’s good at adapting. Though he was born in the US, he spent his entire life in Guatemala, where he had to move frequently. When his family had to flee the violence last year, he joined an uncle in Rhode Island and the rest of his family followed. Starting at a new high school in a new language as a junior isn’t easy, but Rodrigo also knows it’s full of opportunities. “I could be sad that I don’t know anyone,” he told us. Instead he’s worked on learning and making friends. On the first day of school, his friends took him to meet the football coach, and...

Venance is the third sibling in his family to attend our program. Originally from DR Congo, he grew up in Bangkok where he attended an international school and has memories of good teachers, good friends, and fun going downtown, including to huge malls. It took years after his move to the US at 7 for him to realize he was never going “home.” But Venance doesn’t identify as a resettled refugee. He is now comfortably home in the US. As a sophomore at La Salle Academy he’s a defensive back on the football team, does track, and is a point...

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...