Escape from Congo
My name is Hanna. I am 18 years old and I am from the Democratic Republic of Congo. I will try as much as possible to mention the important details I can remember with the help of my mother (1974). My parents married in 2004.
I am here in Egypt as a refugee with my family which consists of my mother and my five younger sisters. My family has been living here in Cairo since October 2010. It has been this way for as long as I can remember, and without our father.
Our refugee story starts with a demonstration against the Congolese government on March 10, 2006. This was organized by the Congolese opposition party called “Union pour la Démocratie et le Progrès Social” (UDPS). My father was one of the presidents of the party. This is the name given to people who organize marches, demonstrations and other activities. They also arrange government documents for the party and provide other support to the party. My father was one of the organizers of this march which became very messy and went violent with people being killed. This was never intended. The government was hunting for the ‘presidents’ of the party that they held responsible for the violence during the march. The government believed that they made people hardheaded to the government. Many of the leaders got arrested and several were killed and some disappeared.
Policemen came to our house and arrested my father. My mother was eight months pregnant at the time. After they took him away, they came back and asked my mother where my father was and since he was not there they used this as an excuse to take my mother as well. My mother’s uncle, the brother of my grandmother spoke with the officers and told them that my father was in prison. The officer let my mother go without authorization but what he did was illegal. He told my mother that if you want to live you have to get out of the country. My mother’s uncle advised my mother to go with my younger sister (2005) to the UK and apply for asylum. My other younger sister (2003) and I with my two older sisters (born on November 30, 1994 and born on November 5, 1992) remained in Congo with our aunt. I don’t really remember a time when we ever lived peacefully. We were always hiding from authorities.
We never had a pleasant childhood like other kids seemed to have. We were always running from one place to another to avoid authorities.
My mother continues the story:
I had no idea why my uncle advised asylum in the UK and not another country. I had never left my country and I was French speaking. My uncle arranged a man that to travel with and who arranged everything upon arrival at the London airport. I do not know which airport this was, but it was connected to the city with a train line. It was arranged that upon arrival this man would claim to be my husband and would claim to be the father of Julia. We had no problems in getting through passport control with this story. He then brought me to the train, told me that I should go the Home Office, and left. I had no idea how to get there. I spoke no English and so I asked people in the street for the home office. I was glad that I found a young man who took me to the Home Office. He took me inside to an officer and told me that he had found me. From this point that officer took over. They gave me a card to go to a hotel and the next day the interviews started. They asked me about how I got here and why I had fled Congo. I explained about my husband’s activities. I was also active in the UDPS but only in small things. The British officers were very kind. I was sent to a guesthouse with some 200-300 people in Margate. Through the government I got a government paid lawyer to help me with the asylum application procedure. This lawyer was good and wanted to help. He spoke no French and had a translator. I was sharing a room in Margate with another lady but this could not be continued when my daughter was born. My daughter got a UK birth certificate but it had my date of birth wrong. I told them this but the British refused to correct this. The date of birth they used came from the ID on which I had traveled.
When I came out of prison in Congo I had no legal documents, no passport and no birth certificate. In order to get me out of the country people had given me a different ID that was issued in Zaire as Congo was called before. The birth certificate of Jessie contained my supposed date of birth that came from this Congolese document.
After I had given birth to my daughter, an Agency working with Immigration authorities sent me to an accommodation address at Stockton- on Tees, because I could not stay with a newly born baby in Margate. Stockton was six hours away by bus. Here I got a new lawyer since Stockton was too far away from Margate for my first lawyer to help me. The new lawyer did not do any work and I was able to find another lawyer near Stockton. That did not work either and I got another lawyer in London. These lawyers were all paid by the government and were not taking my case seriously. The second lawyer from Middlesborough was expecting a payment on top of his government fee and so he ignored my case.
While I was in the UK I was participating in demonstrations against the government in Congo. Sometimes these demonstrations were outside the Congolese Embassy and sometimes outside the Home Office. I later learned that the Congolese had made photos of these demonstrations and had a photo of mine in one of these demonstrations.
My uncle in Congo had sent messages that Congolese authorities were looking for me.
Only after I arrived in Egypt, I learned that I had been rejected asylum after an interview in Liverpool since I had been answering two different questions with the same answer. While I was in the UK I did not know why I was rejected. I do not remember the names of the three or four lawyers I had.
Expulsion from the UK:
Hanna is angry about this part of the story and says: “The whole process was inhuman she was hand cuffed and my younger sisters were no older than five and had to witness their mother being retained by some men that had no care that they were hurting a woman who was sick at the time. She was suffering from pain in the legs which gave her a hard time walking. My mother resisted so much and was yelling and kicking the police officers to the point where the loin cloth she had tied around her waist had fallen off but they didn’t care at all. There were five people involved in kicking her out. There were two women who were taking care of my sisters and two men restraining my mother. When my mother told me all this I broke down in tears. I couldn’t understand why anyone would mistreat a person in such a way as if to state that you aren’t considered a human at all. After all that they still had her arrested and was expelled to Congo.”
Mother calls this experience horrible. In April 2009 the police came at 5.00 am to my house in Stockton. They told me not to take too many things with me because I would only be gone for a short time. They took me from Stockton to a detention center in Dover.
Only then did I hear that my asylum request had been rejected. I had not expected this and I found this unacceptable and I told them that if I would be returned I would be sentenced to death but they did not care. I knew that many people who had been sent back have disappeared. I was feeling pain in my legs. There was a doctor who gave me some medicine. After this they took me by force to the airport. I was shouting and the pilot of Kenya Airwaysrefused to take me. I was brought back to the center. Three or four days later I was put by force into a wheelchair. I was handcuffed and brought to the plane with five people. I went to Kenya and from Kenya the connecting flight went to Kinshasa, Congo. An airline steward handed me with US$ 100 for transportation from the airport. The police officers started questioning me immediately and took the 100$ away.
I was scared to death that they had found a photo of me in a demonstration in the UK. I was able to call a friend at the airport who picked me up. There was black jeep that followed us. Myfriend tried to lose the following car but realized we could no longer go to his house and so he brought me to someone else’s house.
Congolese officers found out where I was and went to that house. I was fortunately in church at that moment. These officers asked the owner of the house where I stayed if I live here and the wife of the owner denied. Another day they found this out and that I had stayed there and so they arrested the owner a few days later in the street. He discovered that these were the same officers that had earlier come to his home. He stayed for one week in a cell and forced him to pay $500. They told the owner that I had come from the UK and that I had been participating in marches and so they told him that they suspected me to be a spy. People participating in marches were called “the enemies of the president.”
I was hiding from the authorities and was going from friend to friend. I stayed with three different friends. Only in the last house I was living with all my children. This is where the Congolese officers found me. That was a few months after I had arrived. I was arrested and put in prison. My children were taken to my sister Yolande. I was interrogated in a very rough way. They were threatening me with a gun pointing at my head. They accused me of being a spy. They called my husband a rebel and said he was causing problems. They also knew that I was being searched for.
I was first kept in an office, sleeping on the floor. Later I was brought into the cell for women. Men were in another cell. Congolese policemen were beating us and raping a number of women to put pressure on us. A man saw I was mistreated and he asked me why I was here and why I was arrested. Families can visit you and bring things. My sister Yolande visited me and brought me food and letters. The man who inquired about my mistreatment said that his family knew the officers that were there. He asked for my sisters’ telephone number to help her me out. The officers asked for $25.000 to help me escape. My sister said she did not have this money and asked if she could give them all her money, around $6-8000 to help me escape. It was an escape plan and was to pay officers to turn a blind eye. There was a pick-up truck that was bringing things in and out of this place and they had been hiding me in that truck, so this is how I got out. They took me immediately to the river that separates Congo from Brazzaville. They were able to cross the river at night with a small boat. My children were still staying with Yolande and I asked her to bring my children to Brazzaville but she could not find anyone to help us with this,since the people in Congo were scared because the officers might notice this. Since nobody wanted to take my children to Brazzaville, I came to Congo in disguise and took my children and my sister back to Brazzaville. The crossings were always at night with small boats. Everyone was scared. There was a man called John in Brazzaville who knew Yolande. He helped us to come to Egypt. This was for him the easiest country to get us to. We went on a flight to Egypt in 2010.
Hanna continues the story: my father was arrested on the 10th March 2006 but he managed to escape. We haven’t seen him very much. For security reasons he was always running from place to place. A long time ago he would come and visit us but he never stayed in our house. We arrived in Egypt, myself my younger siblings and my mother. My older siblings had stayed in Congo because we could not afford the cost of travel. We haven’t seen them since then. They are both making a living from small odd jobs. The separation didn’t give me any hope. I was imagining the worst things that could happen to them or to us. I honestly gave up on being optimistic. For an eight year old I was really disturbed emotionally.
When we got here in Cairo, life wasn’t so great either. We couldn’t go to school as long as our refugee registration was in process. There was a lot of going around, here and there and having to wake up in the cold mornings and standing outside waiting in line for interviews, and everything in between. We got home schooling in French from a friend of my mother. He taught us to read and spell. We weren’t really eating well and we constantly had to go to the UNHCR to ask for help. At least they were actually helping us a bit to which I am very thankful for to this day. Myself and my siblings slowly started to feel a little freer. However we somehow needed to start going to school.
Only in 2012 we started going to Africa Hope refugee school but the education was very poor and the students weren’t so respectful to the teachers, and they were aggressive, and teachers were not really teaching well, so my mother decided to keep us at home until we could find another school, but the problem was that the UNHCR would only help us with the fees if we were at that school, so we stayed home and built up some knowledge from what we had learned by ourselves. This was in either 2012 or 2013. We had to move to another house in this period because the house of my mother’s friend was much too small for all of us to live in together. In 2018 I went to Little Steps. The first year at Little Steps was ok. Teachers, however, were forcing us to use Arabic but we did not know any Arabic. We told them before going to Little Steps that we did not know any Arabic but they accepted us. At Little Steps students have no voice. You simply have to do what they want.
We received our education between 2018 September until the covid 19 lockdown in March 2020, so we had to stay home for quite a while. It wasn’t easy knowing that others got to get an education while we couldn’t as we were still kids.
We never really spoke about it to my mother, because we knew there wasn’t a lot that she could do. So we just suffered together. My sisters would often cry asking me when would our lives be normal like the happy kids we saw on our TV screens. I never knew what to respond to them and that alone took a toll on my mental state at the time. I was quite depressed at a young age. The thought that my siblings had been going through the same thing really saddens me. We heard about C.A.W.U. Learning Centre in September 2020 from a friend of ours, although he didn’t attend the Learning Centre. He heard really good feedback from my schoolmate about the place. So we contacted Khadija and asked her how we could come and register. Unfortunately we couldn’t all be accepted into the Learning Center due to lack of space so my other sisters had to find other places to study. Two of my other sisters are now at St. Josephine in Mohandesseen, Cairo. Another sister is taking classes at home.
My experience at the Learning Centre has been great so far. The place just really motivates me to put effort in my studying. And unlike the other refugees schools I’ve been to, the Learning Center student’s opinions are just as valued or important as the adults. I feel like I have a voice and what I say matters which somehow gives me a sense of responsibility in my actions. We can talk about various topics and argue whether it is among students or with our teachers not just to make sure that everyone knows your argument is right or wrong, but to understand each other’s point of view and understand our differences without it becoming a division wall between us. The learning center has really helped me grow more as a student and an artist.
We have been waiting on the UNHCR for 10 years now. We had been called once for an interview in 2016. The person who interviewed us told us that they would send us to the U.S. This is now over 4 years ago and I have almost lost hope.
Our UNHCR cards have been expired and we cannot get any support from the UNHCR for that reason. My father visited Egypt in 2013 and 2017 and my mother became pregnant of Anais who was born in 2018. When my father visited us he did not stay in our house out of fear of the Congolese agents. He never stays in one place. After 2017 we lost contact with him. Anais is not registered with the UNHCR. My mother initially could not do this because she was too weak at the time of birth.
I always enjoyed singing with my siblings, at some point it was the only form of entertainment we could get since we didn’t always have a TV so we would have little concerts of our own with mom as the audience. Like any other kid who is gifted in singing I started at a young age. All children sing as soon as they start speaking. Some stop singing as they grow older and some continue and eventually learn how to control their vocal chords. My siblings and I continued to sing and since my mother used to sing in a choir as well she thought us what she knew about singing and our passion for it carried us from there. So in my family we sing a lot.
As I grew older I started to grow fond of writing. I would write short stories and read them to my sisters and I would write songs and poems for myself. I never really finished any of the songs I wrote. I always felt like they were way too sad. But I still write lyrics till now. I still throw them away afterwards but it became some sort of a therapeutic thing. I would compose a sad song about something I’m going through and throw it away and it would feel like a weight has been taken off of me. I don’t think it’s a healthy habit to hide all my problems in the closet of my mind, because no closet has an infinite amount of storage. Eventually everything will be too much to hold and it will all spill out without warning and it does happen to me sometime in a form of an emotional breakdown.
Some people sing for fun or for showing how much control over their vocal chords they have, but for me writing and singing songs is like a happy pill that makes me momentarily forget why I was upset, sad or angry because I don’t really open up to people, as I feel like that wouldn’t lead anywhere. Also the fact that I’m more of an introvert doesn’t help me much with opening up to people when I write. I just spill everything out just like I’m doing right here with no second thought to it. That’s why singing and writing songs is so special to me. Even if I don’t turn it into a profession I’ll be happy to just be able to compose songs of my own that could comfort others like some songs do for me when I needed it the most from experience that really becomes the only form of comfort you really need or can get.
So when the opportunity came for the Learning Center’s choir, although I hadn’t sang in front of an audience in a while it felt right for me.
We cannot return to Congo because the country is not stable. President Kabila sill has influence.
We used to go to Caritas and they would help us with food. Since the issue surrounding the UNHCR card we cannot get UNHCR support. I am doing some small jobs such as babysitting. I cannot work at a call center since that this is 8 hours per day. I need to be with my children.
​
​