8 NOVEMBER 2-8, 2023 westword.com WESTWORD | MUSIC | CAFE | CULTURE | NIGHT+DAY | NEWS | LETTERS | CONTENTS | to capitalize on that. Twenty percent of our overall population was born outside the United States.” Aurora has a foreign-born population of roughly 87,000 people out of more than 390,000 residents; 160 languages are spoken in the city’s schools, according to Coffman. “The beauty about this city is that we have some areas of the city with high concen- trations of immigrants and refugees,” says Ricardo Gambetta, head of the Aurora Offi ce of International and Immigrant Affairs. “But also, we noticed that we have immigrants and refugees working all over across the city, raising their families all over across the city.” About 1,600 residents of the city are refu- gees who have resettled in Aurora. The “world refugee population” com- prises anyone leaving their country, seek- ing asylum or being resettled in a different country “as a result of persecution, confl ict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order,” according to the United Nations. One of President Jimmy Carter’s last political acts was signing a bill to standard- ize the system for bringing refugees into the U.S. Until then, refugee resettlement was typically done through charities, private organizations and community groups set up by local institutions such as churches and universities. The 1980 Refugee Resettlement Act standardized the process and funneled resources to offi cial resettlement agencies. Since then, the U.S. has allowed more than 3.1 million refugees from across the world to stay in this country; nearly 64,000 settled in Colorado. According to Gambetta, almost 80 per- cent of the refugees who come to Colorado live in Aurora at some point. In the begin- ning, it was relatively cheap to live in the city, “and that was the case for many, many years,” he says. While that may no longer be true, Aurora has other draws. The city recognizes that if it provides information and guidance to newcomers, then “you encourage civic par- ticipation,” Gambetta says. “We want to provide tools, the resources and the information so refugees and im- migrants can understand how to navigate the city,” Gambetta adds. “You need legal assistance, you need housing, you need infor- mation on how to enroll your kids in school, how to open a checking account, how to ride the bus, how to call the police. We empower them with this information.” While people fl eeing Vietnam and Cam- bodia comprised the majority of refugees forty years ago, now many of those arriving in Aurora are from Africa. More than 10,000 African refugees have come to the state since 1980; almost 1,700 were from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, leaving a homeland rocked by confl ict for thirty years. The Swahili translator at the candidate forum was one of the Congolese refugees now liv- ing in Aurora. When she was six years old, Clementine Gasimba’s family fl ed from their native coun- try, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was 1996, and they were escaping fi ghting that would lead to the Second Congo War, one of the bloodiest confl icts in Africa and one that created hundreds of thousands of refugees. Gasimba and her family landed at the Gihembe refugee camp, one of the oldest refugee camps in Rwanda, just east of the Congo border; about 15,000 refugees were there at the time. “It was not easy. Many of us died from hunger, others died of disease, others killed themselves thinking there is nothing going to happen, no future,” Gasimba remembers. “Imagine sitting down all day, you’re doing nothing as a father or mother, the children are doing nothing, they don’t see any ex- ample. ... We don’t have clothes, we have like one clothes that you wear all the whole year. Life in a refugee camp is not good at all.” Gasimba “grew up there,” she says, and got her entire education in the camp. It was located on “one big mountain,” and she and her family lived in a tent hardly wider than a sidewalk. “Sometimes you sleep the head inside, the legs outside,” she says, and laughs. “Sometimes, the parents chose to stay up all night so the children can sleep on the mud, on the fl oor, no mattress, no nothing.” As the years went on, some of her rela- tives and other people she knew at the camp chose to go back to Congo, “and they were all killed,” Gasimba says. She and her fam- ily stayed in the same tent in the camp for eighteen years while waiting for a country to give them refugee status and take them out of Gihembe. In 2014, Gasimba was kidnapped from her family and taken to another part of the camp, where she was raped. That year, her family’s refugee status was fi nally approved by the United States. Eight family members were selected to come to the U.S., including her father, mother and siblings. Gasimba followed two weeks later, 24 and pregnant as a result of the rape. They all landed in Colorado. “They just bring you,” Gasimba remem- bers. “You don’t even know where you are going. They just put you in the fl ight, and when you reach where you are going, they are like: It’s here.” Gasimba and her family were resettled through Lutheran Family Services, a local nonprofi t that is one of three refugee re- settlement agencies in Aurora, along with the African Community Center and the International Rescue Committee, the oldest resettlement agency in the U.S., created by Albert Einstein in the 1940s. “They showed me where I’m going to live, where I can buy food, things like that,” she recalls. “They are very helpful. They work closely with you for the fi rst three months that you are here.” Before Gasimba arrived in Colorado, Lu- theran Family Services had located housing for her parents and siblings in Aurora. The agency found her a unit in Wheat Ridge, but with a daughter on the way, she set her sights on moving closer to her parents. In the meantime, she started busing to the Emily Griffi th Technical College in Denver for English classes. She spent two years tak- ing classes, even though she already knew some English, along with a handful of other languages she’d picked up in the camp. “I don’t have a fi rst language,” she laughs. “I speak six languages. The most I use is Swahili and Kinyarwanda and English.” The other three are French, Kirundi and Lingala. As she lists them, she remembers: “I also speak Orunyankore a little bit and a little bit of Spanish.” Lutheran Family Services, like other re- settlement agencies, only assisted with her integration for three months. Then “you’re on your own,” she says. “You start going to work, go to school, just to help yourself.” In 2018, she and her daughter were fi - nally able to rent an apartment in north Aurora, near Colfax and Yosemite Street, much closer to her parents. Wheat Ridge “didn’t have what they have here in Aurora,” she recalls. She noticed that her new home “had a lot of people like me, refugees from Africa. When we came to the U.S., we said goodbye to our families like we would never see them again. It was a very big surprise to see people from my country, from refugee countries, in Aurora.” And Aurora “had my food,” she adds, like fufu, which she describes as “a kind of corn- meal,” and manihot, also known as cassava or yuca. She started shopping at two grocery stores: the Global Grocery Mart, which is Somalian, and the IWACU African Grocery, which is Rwandan. “Everything, it seems normal,” she says. “When we come here, we think we are com- ing to another country.” Gasimba feels that “everybody is wel- come” in the U.S. and particularly Aurora, and she tries to be the same way. “I’m very friendly, so anybody who wants to stay with me, we will stay together and we will be friends,” she says. “I don’t select people. I have so many Mexican friends. When I go to work, I make friends. Anything in com- mon, I make friends. I have a lot of friends.” She now works with the Village Institute, a nonprofi t that opened in May 2020 — in the middle of the COVID pandemic — to offer child care and early education to refugees and immigrants. “It was diffi cult for me to leave my children and go to work, get them child care,” Gasimba recalls. “When I go, I go with him,” she says, pointing to her son, who was born in 2021, shortly after she took the job. She credits the Village Institute with “making me meet so many people, different kinds of people. ... We go and teach people about COVID vaccines, about health issues, fi nding food. We’re doing so many things. That organization also connected me to so many people.” Among them were people involved with the East Colfax Community Collective, also known as EC3, an Aurora advocacy group that focuses on housing and tenants’ rights. In March 2022, members of EC3 asked if she’d be interested in volunteering as an interpreter. She was. While interpreting for EC3, she heard stories from African refugees about their housing falling apart and negligent landlords. People complained that their banisters were loose, their heating and cooling systems weren’t working, their ceilings were leaking and their homes were moldy. “For many people, the worms start com- ing in the house. The house is very stinky, it’s no longer livable,” she says. “You call the landlord, you start doing whatever you can, but no one’s answering. And then when they answer, they say, ‘We’re coming, we’re coming,’ for two, three weeks.” Gasimba had dealt with similar issues; the air conditioning and heating don’t work in her apartment, and it gets so hot that her little boy can’t stand wearing clothes in summer months. “Imagine him spending all day naked because he’s too hot and he can’t handle the heat. That is not something good,” she says. And Coming to America continued from page 7 continued on page 10 At the Aurora candidates’ forum, eight interpreters helped translate remarks by the mayoral contenders. BENNITO L. KELT Y “We have immigrants and refugees working all over across the city, raising their families all over across the city.”
