10 NOVEMBER 2-8, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | when it’s cold, “I have to put over me like three blankets.” Making matters worse, the ceiling drips water from the upstairs neighbor’s pipes. “It’s so hard here in Aurora,” she says. “If your toilet is working, the shower is not working. If the shower is working, the fan is not working, the heat.” After listening to immigrant after im- migrant with the same issues, she says she realized that “I could advocate for these people. I feel what tenants feel and what the disaster is they go through. Particularly in Aurora, the houses are very old, and the landlords are not doing anything.” But for many of those who spent much of their life in the stagnant world of a refugee camp, it can be hard to fi nd the motivation to do something. “When they get here, they don’t want to go to work,” Gasimba says. “Some of them are going to the drugs. They don’t think about having a life, having a future. I think there’s a consequence to staying longer in the refugee camps, because if you don’t see somebody working, how will you know how to work? How will you think of the future?” After all, her native country “is still on fi re. They’re still fi ghting,” Gasimba says. She has aunts and uncles living in the refugee camp in Rwanda; her parents are trying to bring them to Colorado. Gasimba stays in touch with her relatives in Africa on WhatsApp, usually sending messages in Kinyarwanda and sometimes in Swahili. In her free time, she likes to cook, dance and watch fi lms with her two kids inside their home. She also likes to take them to visit different parks around Aurora; their favorite spot is the garden outside the Martin Luther King Jr. Library. When she sees homeless individuals on the streets of Aurora and Denver, she thinks of her life in the refugee camp, remembering how she used to sleep on the cold, hard mud. “It was like that,” she says. “And I think about that, and I pray for them.” Despite the challenges, she enjoys liv- ing here. “I like the country,” she says. “It’s beautiful. If I don’t become lazy, I can make money. I can take my children to school. I’m not going to die of hunger. I have food, clean water, things like that. So I’m grateful for being here.” Many refugees now living in Aurora fl ed another African country, Sudan. More than 1,200 Sudanese have resettled in Colorado; many left their homeland after 1989, when an Islamic regime led by Omar al-Bashir, a former military offi cer, ousted the demo- cratically elected government that had been voted in only a few years earlier. While al-Bashir was fi ghting to hold on as president, Ibrahim Onosa left Port Sudan, the coastal city where he was born and raised, to study science and technology at the Univer- sity of Gezira. When he graduated in 1992, he moved to the capital city of Khartoum with his wife, Ala, but “life was very diffi cult to stay there,” he recalls. That’s because Onosa had been “active against the government” as al-Bashir came to power, protesting on campus and joining the Democratic Unionist Party, one of Sudan’s oldest political parties. “They start kicking out everyone who is not supporting them,” Onosa says. “The gov- ernment we had from ’89 to a couple years ago, if you don’t belong to the government, they cannot survive in Sudan.” The government was cracking down on activists, unions, professors and non-Mus- lims. “When we graduated, there were no jobs,” he says. “And it was not peaceful. There was war everywhere except the capital.” Although Onosa and his wife found safety in Khartoum, “I was spending most of my time sitting, looking around,” he says. The realization sank in that “I don’t have any money, and I don’t have any future, and there is no way for me to make my own future.” He fi nally decided he had to leave the country, but “it wasn’t easy,” he recalls. “You have to fi nd your way. Almost all of us had to fi nd a sneaky way to leave the country.” His family gave him money to take a bus to the border, where he bribed Sudanese of- fi cials so that he could continue on to Cairo, the capital of neighboring Egypt, where he lived for a couple of years. “I stayed there, and I applied as a refugee,” he says. “And they gave me a chance to go to Canada or the United States or Australia during that time.” He was told that his chances were better if he picked the U.S., but he had to stay in Cairo while his application was reviewed. In 2000, the U.S. fi nally approved Onosa for refugee status. He came by himself, with the intention of working and saving money to bring his wife. He landed in Dallas. “I felt like it wasn’t very welcoming at that time,” he says. “For me to adjust as a new refugee, it wasn’t easy in Texas.” Another refugee from Sudan, a friend who was living in Aurora, told him to “come to Colorado and see how it looks like. Maybe if you don’t like it, you can go to another state,” he recalls. He asked the resettlement agency that had brought him to Texas to help him move to Colorado, and a month later, he arrived in Aurora. “So I came, and actually, I love it,” Onasa says, grinning wide. “I feel like I’m welcome to stay here. People are welcoming me. I feel like I get a lot of support. I get a lot of sup- port at that time to establish my fi rst step in the USA.” He wanted to graduate from an American college so that he could get a high-paying job. “The degree I had from Sudan, I knew it was not enough,” he says, and in 2004, at the age of 34, he enrolled at the Colorado School of Mines to study petroleum engineering, a curriculum that wasn’t available in Sudan. “It wasn’t easy,” Onosa says of getting into the School of Mines. “The big issue was for us, almost all the people who come from Sudan, the language.” Although Arabic is the primary language of Sudan, the British colonized the land in the early twentieth century, and most of the population spoke English. “But the problem was it was British English,” Onosa says. “It was hard to fi gure out what the people are saying here. ... It took me time to adjust; it wasn’t easy.” A friend in the Mines admissions offi ce helped him learn the dialect. He also wrote an affi davit of support, telling immigration offi cials that he’d support Onosa’s family fi nancially if they came to the U.S. “They want to make sure you can support your family if they are here, or if not, they want to make sure someone with a good income will support your family to come,” Onosa says. “And he got that for me.” Finally, he was able to bring his wife to the U.S. By then, he could also apply for citizenship because he had been in the United States for fi ve years. Onosa worked as a petroleum engineer for several years, but because he and his wife soon had a son and a daughter, he decided to take a job driving a limo. “I needed to provide for my wife and children,” he says. While driving his limo in 2013, a car T- boned Onosa, sending him to the hospital. While there, he earned an online MBA, and “I thought and thought to myself about starting my own business,” he recalls. By the time he left the hospital after a long stay, he’d decided to start a medical supplies delivery business. He went from friend to friend in Aurora, talking about the business idea. Eventually, fourteen signed on for the plan. They decided to start a “sanduk,” a Suda- nese tradition in which members of a group put a portion of their earnings in a box each month until they reach a goal. “At the end of the month, I have to participate $200, like a bill,” Onosa explains. “One day we fi gure out we have close to $40,000 after two years. But we had a commitment: Nobody touch it.” One of Onosa’s fi rst steps as a business owner had been signing up for free consult- ing with the Aurora-South Metro Small Business Development Center, a state and federal partnership with offi ces in the Aurora Municipal Center. “That was also with a lot of help from the city,” Onosa says. “For example, there were advisors, you go and fi gure out. They don’t help you directly, but you go and lis- ten: ‘What’s the best business? I want to do medical transport, is that a good business?’ ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah.’” “We are also business-friendly; we have programs helping immigrants and refugees to open businesses,” notes Gambetta, head of the city’s immigration aid group. In Aurora, 13 percent of the refugee population has started a business, Coming to America continued from page 8 continued on page 12 Ibrahim Onosa fl ed Sudan and landed in Aurora, where he’s started both a business and a soccer league. EVAN SEMÓN EVAN SEMÓN “They just put you in the flight, and when you reach where you are going, they are like: It’s here.”
