Ndizeye can remember the day nearly two decades ago when he was forced to flee his home in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
The soldiers. The guns. The shouting. The crying.
“We knew what was about to happen if we stayed,” he says.
He walked alongside others from his village for three days through the unforgiving terrain of eastern DRC to Gihembe refugee camp in Rwanda, where he lived for 16 years before he and his wife, Uwimana, were resettled in the U.S. in 2019.
With America today accepting a historically low number of refugees, Ndizeye’s humbly-told story illustrates how refugees who have been welcomed in as strangers are contributing to our communities.