Escape from hell

It was his final, liberating flight from death, chanced to him like a feather plucked from a barren sky.

Nine years in a Kenyan refugee camp. One of 70,000 people trapped by a suffocating squalor and hopelessness, starving though somehow still alive.

And then there was the lingering terror of raids by bandits. Refugees had money, or so thought those outside the camp’s perimeter. Opportunistic thugs would enter the camp’s plastic tents in the dark, nonchalantly shooting people dead if they could not find something, anything, of value.

Yves Nkoranyi always had hope. It wasn’t yanked away by his parents’ assassination when he was 14, nor by witnessing the rape and murder of his sister. It was a kernel of truth deep inside him, like a small, smooth stone he could reach in and grasp and from which he could somehow draw life. He had faith he would pull himself free of the quagmire of barbarity.

And he had a resolute faith in God that he would be spared, despite living in a world choking on raging contradictions over the sanctity of life.

The horror that struck – six of Yves’ family of 11 were killed - was spat out by politics and tribalism in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In area alone it is Africa’s fourth-largest country, rich in natural resources, but wracked by a civil war of two decades that has extinguished the lives of millions. Up to nine nations have become entwined in its indecipherable web.

The teenage Yves fled. “I started running.” Through the forest, day and night, no shoes and no idea of where he was heading. Fear drove him on, the relentlessness of it all causing his legs to hideously swell. Piles of putrefying bodies, sometimes 20 or 30 at a time, would come into sight on the road ahead as they tried to reach the relative safety of a police compound.

“You say, ‘OK, rest in peace’,” Yves says, crossing himself. “There is flies, it’s smelling. You can’t do anything. We have to cover the kids’ faces at the time. And we didn’t know where we are heading to.”

It should have been a 300 kilometre journey. Avoiding “the guns, the bombs” meant it stretched for an eternity more, the flight of a crow devoid of its anatomical compass.

But because he had lost contact with his brother’s family, he then moved on to the enormous Kakuma refugee camp in north-west Kenya. The thought was his brother might re-appear. Yves is now 31. For the past six years he has lived in Wodonga, working as a disability support worker with Albury’s Kalianna Enterprises. 

He has also become a man of learning, recently meeting Charles Sturt University’s requirements for a bachelor’s degree in social science. It’s one of several qualifications he has racked up, despite his ongoing struggle with English.

His now-life quest stemmed from the time in 1999 when war was raging in Uganda. People were turning up with terrible injuries and because there was no nurse, he and others helped clean their wounds.

“When I got here (to Wodonga) I thought, ‘OK, let’s make it my career to help people’. And since I’ve been here I’ve just been studying.”

Yves is married to Edwidge – she too was in Kakuma, though romance bloomed much later – and they have had three children, aged 2, 4 and 6. Yves also has an older boy, now 16. The terrible, all-pervading fear has gone. He is a relaxed, cheerful man. But that fear had gripped him so tightly, for so long, it once made him reluctant to share his story.

“Sometimes it’s very hard. I feel myself not comfortable, it’s very emotional,” he says.

It returns him though to the moment that set off that seemingly impossible desire to dodge an anonymous death in the camp. He raises his left hand, drawing his thumb and forefinger to about two inches apart.

With a quick twist he outlines a dirty, messy scrap of paper that by some miraculous opportunity he sighted. That brightly coloured feather floating in the drab mass of numbed misery.

Someone was sharing a contact from Australia. It was what Yves had never given up on finding. An age passed before he saw it again. “It was a long process for that person to give me that address.”

But he did. And so Yves wrote, telling his story to a person “I don’t know”. Six more hungry months passed, then he got a reply from the Sanctuary Australia Foundation. The Coffs Harbour-based organisation helps re-settle government-approved humanitarian entrant refugees. And that includes people such as Yves from war zones around the world .

“When I went for the interview (with the Immigration Department) official, I feel like I’m leaving the camp,” he says. “I’m going to Australia. I’m starting a new life. I’m just now going to get a better life.”

HE was killed in the never-relenting bloodshed. A husband lost, making for an albeit-remote opportunity lost forever.

It left her to raise several children alone, an impenetrable mess should she stay in the Congo. Her first home. But Apolina Kakonga does not want to dwell on that, unable or perhaps just unwilling to sort through scant fond memories from before the madness struck.

“Sometimes I tried to forget, but it’s hard to forget something that has happened to you in your life,” she says. Apolina wants to tell a different story anyway. How she survived six years as a widowed mother in a Ugandan refugee camp.

Like Yves, she is multilingual. He speaks seven languages and is quick, with a laugh, to say his English “is No.8”.  It’s not so bad though that it hampers his translating for Apolina, who has set learning her new tongue near the top of her must-do list.

As a child, Apolina wanted to be a nun. Getting married took that away, then the war and her husband’s death gave her no choice but to flee the Congo for Uganda. She was 29 when she and her children entered the refugee camp. “Life wasn’t easy. I struggled. When I started running (from the war) I was with other members of my family,” she says.

In a tale that runs true with so many, they became separated. All hope of support from her family was gone. They lost sight of each other at the border. Apolina, now 36, has never heard of them again. The struggle in the camp was in finding food and again, when darkness fell, the fear of armed marauding thieves rose.

“They may come in the night. My little girl was worried when we went fetching water,” she says. “Life was hard. There was no schooling for my kids.” What she knew most was she could never go back to the Congo, because of what it had already done to her life. “My life was in danger. I was just looking to where I would feel safe.”

Those times were over quickly for her kids, coming to an end six years ago. The oldest, Leo, puts his hand out waist high to show just how much smaller he was back then in Uganda. He smiles, yet again. They all do.

But they carry one stark memory of a not so distant reality, Mum says quietly. “The sound of the gun.”

Her boys  Leo, 13,  and Steven, 12, love soccer, while the girls –  Honorina, 10, and Eliza, 8 – are into basketball. Smart, healthy kids, a bit bored by this serious stuff their mum’s talking about, but listening closely and picking up on everything said.

Mum holds her younger daughter close, smiling and kissing her gently as she strokes her hair. Eliza drifts off to sleep where she sits, her head resting on the table. Apolina is grateful and no longer feels “like I’m that person I was in the Congo”.

When Yves pushes through and talks about the horrors, Apolina sinks back in her chair and bows her head. Briefly she has lost the openness and warm, engaging smile that constantly outpoints her limited English.

But talk about her new community, the life ahead, and that past floats away.

“I can see the change in the life for my children. There is no hungry. There is no sleeping without eating, nothing. No fear.”

FOOD is now an easy, no-thought-required detour.

It’s kids hurtling headlong to the fridge, grabbing whatever they fancy then back out the door.

Always something to eat where once there was nothing. Six years in a Ugandan refugee camp made for a monotonous struggle to get anything into the bellies of her young children.

Shrunken lives, teetering on the precipice of abject nothingness. Trying to find water could end it all, any day, in a way too shockingly violent to imagine. It is what makes Apolina Kakonga so enamoured by her new life in Wodonga. Free of war, free of the famine endured by someone willing to go anywhere to belong somewhere.

To be with her even briefly makes clear there was something far bigger than her own courage. That’s Leopold ("no, Leo,” he says with a smile and a squirm), Steven, Honorina and Eliza. Though they don’t really remember. A flicker of strange darkness and light long gone. When they’re now more worried about getting in a kick of soccer after school, or a young girl half-heartedly wrestling with a regret that, maybe, “I was mean to my friend today, Mum”.

Apolina always remembers. She pictures the wearying search for food at a camp in Uganda, sharing her fate with countless other emaciated souls. All to find a way out in the absence of death.

“I thank God I have found a life,” she says. "I have no fears of life.”

Apolina wants to better her English so she can study childcare, so she can work. She talks of being embraced by the community. It’s her life now and she’s hanging onto it tight, with a buoyant determination.

That’s because it’s her choice, unlike not so long ago after fleeing from the Congo and the smothering realisation her family would be swallowed up by war. It was suffering on a scale beyond comprehension.

“Running as a refugee, you don’t know where you’re heading to,” she says.

“I didn’t know I was going to spend all those years in a refugee camp and I didn’t know what would be the next step.

“I didn’t know where the life was heading to.”

But she had her plastic tent. It was the first sign of something remotely possible, having signed on at the camp’s United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office.

The interviews began though it easily could have been considered a futile process, one that might yet leave her with nothing except the bitter taste of dust and despair.

But like Yves Nkoranyi, she held fast to a conviction her faith would “get me a better place". One thought alone stuck when she eventually heard Australia was their future. Safety. They now had to travel far away, she shared with her children, to “where there is no suffering. You will study, with no guns or bombing.”

Apolina talks also of courage, though not for what she endured. It’s what she says she gets from people she has met through Wodonga’s Sacred Heart Catholic Church.

She was sensitive enough to the potential struggle ahead to know she had to make connections. Without that she would become isolated and mired in the terrors of her past. “The people I met gave me courage to integrate in the community. Some of the people are helping show me with shopping, or saying ‘this is the office you can ask for different things’.”

People such as Molly, a young Border university student who in high school decided to do something to help the plight of refugees. She now supports the Kakongas through the St Vincent de Paul Society.

Apolina and the children are her second, “beautiful” family. Molly delivers them to the church office to be with their mum, then a while later senses their restlessness. That limb-rattling boredom is winning out. “Will I take the kids?” is followed by the warmest of hugs with Apolina. “My angel, my angel,” Apolina sings delightedly to Molly, in a flurry of soft, lilting English.

THE stories are ever-present, yet he is always amazed by what he hears.

Parish priest Dennis Crameri has become part of the lives of many refugees, a vantage point that reveals to him one simple, bare truth.

“Even when they separate from family, which has happened to a few of them, they never give up,” he says.

One man he knows, Innocent Baleke, was joined not so long ago by his wife, after years of not knowing if they would see each other again. But in all that, Father Crameri says with joyous admiration, they never lose hope. That it will work out. “Somehow.”

He uses Yves Nkoranyi’s journey from the murder of half his family in the Congo, to his nine years in a Kenyan refugee camp and beyond to shine the light. “Yves had to keep learning languages in all those places he went, all the dialects. He just had to survive.”

These stories humble him. Each tale has a tinge of surrealism, given Father Crameri’s comparatively sleepy travels through country postings over four decades. But the horrors in the inherent reality make him shake his head. It turns his mind to beyond the notion of lives saved, then metamorphosed through acceptance and friendship.

“What these people are doing is bringing their culture to us. If we’re open to that, then we are the richer for that,” he says. “The more we accept them and encourage them and allow them to do what they want to do, the better off we will be. It’s not just all about them. I think it’s a lot about us and how it can inspire us.”

It’s about Apolina, someone who “has given a great deal” rather than sitting back and expecting something to happen. “She hasn’t just waited for help.”

And it is about Yves, who emboldened by his wish to help others in the Congo helped establish ODASOV – the Organisation for Development and Assistance for the Vulnerable.

The Wodonga group exists, it says, “to give the desperate some hope” in the South Kivu territory of Walungu, in education, health, learning trades and trying to improve the well-being of women and children. Yves, who is involved in eucharistic ministry at Sacred Heart, recently also had the great thrill of his oldest boy, 16, finally joining him from a refugee camp.

IT began with the fright of wild yelling. Men burst into his home in the gloom, killed his parents, set fire to their house.

The devastation was so complete it was hard to find their bodies in the ashes for burial. That came after his sister’s rape, then torture. And then she too was shot dead. Yves Nkoranyi, born in a village in the east, took off, a boy of 14 propelled on a journey that did not end until a flight to Australia a decade on.

That was when it became real. It wasn’t when the immigration officials told him he had been accepted, not even when on the way to the airport. It came when he was served “fast food” on the plane. For food, when you fled, became anything you could find on the road, keeping ahead of the men with guns who wanted you dead. It was mothers forced to have one child urinate into a jar, to be passed onto another child to drink.

Yves wanted to find his brother, but that only brought more terror. His sibling was leader of the Congo’s young Catholic students’ movement, branding him an opponent of the government. For that the soldiers came again in the night, pushing the brothers to the floor and attacking them as they lay with arms tied behind their backs. In their second coming, they fired their guns first before seven of them raped his brother’s wife in front of him.

“I couldn’t do anything because it was shocking,” an ashen Yves says. Eventually, Yves had to be smuggled out dressed in a nun’s habit, the family squeezed into airless shipping containers on the back of trucks.

One day, some years later, Yves was walking in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya when he saw someone “who look like me. I say ‘people just look the same’ and I walk away. The second day we meet again.” That was when Yves told the man he was his brother. The wife was ashamed to be seen by Yves, for knowing her secret.

Yves could not allow her to feel that way every time she saw him, he told his brother. He tried to make him understand. “And so I have to move to a different tent.” The desperation to get out never left him. It strangled everyone’s world. It meant every European or Brit or Australian who appeared in the camp was looked on as their salvation.

“You see 100 people running behind a white person, even if it’s tourists. You run for your life.”

It was four years after being accepted by Australia, back in 2005, before Yves finally got out of the hell that was Kakuma. But on his first night in Wodonga, staying with a family, he was slung back into the world from which he had finally escaped.

This was his culture shock. They all finished eating and so Yves went to put the leftovers in the fridge. “But they said ‘no, we put that food in the bin’. That was on my first day in Australia. When I dropped it in the bin I felt bad, because I still have that memory. What I remember is the life when I lived on garbage food, when I can eat anything.”

Now Yves Nkoranyi is ready for it all. For his family of wife Edwidge and four children, for the people he helps at Kalianna.

He won’t ever forget what he lost.

“I still have all those memories in my mind. Even if I go home and look at some of their pictures, I seen what happened.”