Refugee Stories

My name is Tou Ger and I was born in Laos in 1973. My family left our country in 1975 when I was only two years old. I had a baby sister who was just nine days old when we fled. Like many other Hmong families, we had to silently make our escape in the middle of the night. The night that we fled Laos, there were two groups of us. We pretty much had to pay our entire life savings to these fishermen who had access to the Mekong river separating Laos from Thailand. We heard about families who...

My name is Sedrick Ntwali and I was born and raised in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Due to ongoing conflict in the country, my family and I fled to Uganda in 2007 where we lived as refugees for almost 6 years. I never thought I would have to move out of my country but the conflict forced us to do so. It was a very long trip and I remember sleeping outside for days before we found shelter in Kampala. There were a lot of challenges when we were living in Kampala as refugees. For our first year,...

I was born in July 1975 in a refugee camp.  My parents fled the war, towards the end of the Vietnam War in May 1975.  It ended on April 30th, so they escaped and arrived on a helicopter over the border into a Thai refugee camp, where I was born.  Along with my older brother, my parents came to the US in February 1976 or so, when I was six months old.  I was not able to stand yet.  The process to be a refugee in America was grueling, my parents had to submit their names as a refugee and...

My name is Lual Mayen and I am originally from South Sudan.  On November 15th, 1991, during the Second Sudanese Civil War, the Bor Massacre occurred, killing an estimate of 2000 civilians in Bor. The massacre was carried out mostly by Nuer fighters from SPLA-Nasir, a faction of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA).  They were led by Riek Machar from SPLA and a militant group known as the Nuer White Army. In the years that followed, an estimated 25,000 more died from famine as their cattle were either stolen or shot.  As a result, my parents were displaced and...

My name is Omar Munie, I was born in Somalia. I fled from the civil war at the age of 9 from Somalia. It was very difficult to leave a country where there were so much wars. When I was a little boy the circumstances in Somalia were bad. My mother decided to put my sister, my brothers and me on a plane to Europe. She wanted us to have a better future. We first fled to Tanzania by a boat and we finally ended up in the Netherlands. I didn’t speak the Dutch language, but I realized that I...