Lushi at her home in Baltimore.
Photo: Tommy Lucas/IRC
Lushi has come a long way in the nine years since she fled the Democratic Republic of Congo with her husband and children. Thanks to the IRC, they are now safely living in Northeast Baltimore, but she has gone through a harrowing ordeal to get here.
One fateful day, after working with Doctors Without Borders as a nurse for four years, soldiers approached her clinic in eastern Congo. “I thought they were coming to get treatment,” Lushi, 39, says. “But they came in and told all the nurses to pack up and come with them—to treat [their] wounded. I didn’t want to go, I didn’t know these men, but we didn’t have a choice.”
When they got to where the soldiers were taking them, there were wounded and dead all around. “We got out the bandages and equipment, but when we tried to treat them the soldiers said ‘No! No! Leave them alone.’ And that’s when they grabbed one of the nurses.”
Eastern Congo has one of the highest rates of sexual violence against women in the world. On that terrible night, Lushi became an unfortunate victim. She was only able to escape with a few of the others, that same night, because the soldiers left to investigate shots heard nearby. Lushi gathered up all the courage within her and crawled across the camp to the other women, begging them to run. That was the moment her journey began, first to a refugee camp in Namibia, and then – after nine long years -- to the United States.
That night was only the beginning. When the Lushi and her family finally escaped Congo, she and her younger child were very sick with pneumonia. They had no food, nowhere to sleep, and they could not speak the language. “Nobody could understand us, and they didn’t want to,” says Lushi. “I pretended not to be sick. I tried to tell them ‘My baby is sick, we need food!’ but the people were afraid of strangers. They ignored us and pushed us away.”
Eventually she met a pair of Swahili-speaking businessmen that took them to the Red Cross where they received medicine, clothing, and food. They were told that Lushi and her sick baby must be separated from the rest of the family and go with all the other sick people. “I didn’t like being in that room at all. We were sick from the rain. Coughing all the time, rash on the skin. I didn’t want my baby to be infected by these people. But I couldn’t make the doctors understand. The only French speaking doctor was on leave.”
After a long, fearful wait, and a bit of screaming, Lushi and her child received the necessary care. Their health improved. Once out of the hospital, the Red Cross sent them to a Namibia refugee camp. At the camp, they discovered a serious problem: there was not a place for the family to live. “We were told to sleep by the police station. It was outside on the ground, and my baby caught malaria. We were given mosquito nets but you could still feel them biting throughout the day.” The child survived only two more weeks in the camp’s medical clinic before succumbing to the horrible illness.
Utterly devastated by the loss, Lushi’s health wavered. Despite many tests, she did not trust the doctors and was terrified she had contracted AIDS or another serious disease. It was not until she arrived in the United States that she could sleep soundly at night, “American doctors didn’t ask for my story. They just took my blood and did the tests. It wasn’t until then that I knew I was going to be okay.”
In the meantime, despite hardly sleeping at night, the camp gave Lushi a nursing job in the clinic. Three years slowly passed.
One day, while the men were handing out food, calling names of families from all over Africa, something miraculous happened. “I was waiting in this huge line of people, you couldn’t see the front from where we were standing, but you could hear the names being called. They called a woman’s name and for a moment, I was confused. It was my mother’s name.”
She promptly left to find the woman whose name was called. “I found my mother in the camp that day. We hugged and laughed and we were so happy to be together again.” On that day, they had not seen each other since Lushi and her family fled Congo years before.
Two more years would pass before Lushi received word, in 2011, that the resettlement process had begun, and it would be another four years before the IRC could bring her to the United States in April of 2015 with her husband, mother, and four surviving children. She has since obtained her nursing assistant certification from Baltimore City Community College, and is working to put together a resume and find a job. The oldest of her children is a senior at Digital Harbor High School in the Federal Hill neighborhood of south Baltimore.
When asked if she would ever return to Congo, Lushi looks very solemn and says, “I don’t know if I ever will. But I know that I couldn’t be a nurse again, I would have to reinvent myself entirely. I would always be afraid. I’d need security guards outside of the hospital and outside of the rooms. I just couldn’t do it. And as a nurse, you run into so many people you took care of, but you can never remember them. They say ‘Oh, you cured my boy!” And I don’t remember their face. I can’t remember faces, only stories.”
Lushi has been through the unimaginable, but these days she is no longer afraid and sleeps soundly at night. She is ready to work, and start studying to become a registered nurse in a hopeful future where she does not have to fear sexual violence, worry about malaria, or wait in long lines for food.