Omar Valdimarsson in Ruyigi, Burundi
For Jean-Berchman Ntahomvukiye it was not exactly the homecoming he had planned and hoped for. As he began to seriously think about returning after 13 years in the Kanembwa refugee camp near the town of Kibondo on the
Tanzanian side of the border, he was arrested and thrown in jail. While there, his home in the camp was ransacked and money he had been saving for his return stolen – nearly half a million Tanzanian shillings, or some 400 dollars. He was in the cell for three months and says he still doesn’t know why.
It was a tough time for his young and pregnant wife, Rosette Niyonkuru, and their two year -old son. She had fled to Tanzania with her mother and three siblings during the outbreak of the latest civil war in Burundi in 1993 when she was only eight years old.
Her mother died in exile earlier this year, her father had been killed in Burundi when the fighting started. “It was a bad life,” she said of her time in the camp.
And now she was coming home to her new family with her young son and the two-month old daughter – to a place she’d never seen before, to a family she didn’t know: Jean-Berchman’s mother, brother and sister and her husband.
It all happened a little faster than they had anticipated. She says they registered for repatriation on Monday and now, two days later, they have arrived in the transit centre in Nyabitare in Ruyigi province.
While she’s obviously a little nervous, she said she was happy about coming home to Burundi. ““This is my country,” she said. “I will have a better life here. I want my children to go to school. I hope I can give them enough food and clothes and to have regular assistance because I’m not sure I can do for them all that is needed.”
Jean-Berchman’s mother, Jacqueline Mwajuna, was not expecting to see her son that day – in fact, she had only recently heard that he’d had a run-in with the law in Tanzania. But she was happy to see him even if she thought he “looked skinny.”
Jean-Berchman, his young wife and their two children were driven to his mother’s house off the main road near Ruyigi town by the government arm that works with UN’s refugee agency in the resettlement operation.
Burundi Red Cross volunteers followed them from the transit centre in Nyabitare and helped them unload the truck. The neighbours gathered and watched and soon there were smiles all around as the older women came to greet the returnees and, not least, the babies.
Jacqueline’s daughter and her husband had built a new house behind her old house and their belongings, meagre as they are, were carried there.
But the happy homecoming had an underlying anxiety. Jacqueline greeted her new daughter-in-law and her grandchildren warmly but it was clear that she wondered what the future would hold for them all: four new mouths to feed.
“I’m glad to be home but I feel I have no right to be here,” said Jean-Berchman. “I have no money, no land – I have nothing except my wife and children. My family here is already very poor.”
He had converted to Islam in Tanzania and in the twilight you could see him mouthing his prayers and fingering his prayer beads. And suddenly his prayers were answered: out of the blue, that same evening, a total stranger came by and asked them: What would you say about owning a cow? Would that help you get settled again?
You could almost sense the faster heartbeat. A cow would change everything! A cow would produce milk for the babies, manure for their fields, increase their crop – and the crop of their neighbours. A cow would take them from destitution to riches! Jacqueline and her family had never owned a cow. They’d had a couple of goats a long time ago but with the war, everything was destroyed.
At dawn the next morning Jean-Berchman and his brother-in-law took off to see a rich neighbour a few kilometres down the road. He had good cows – cows of the right age, young cows that had given birth to one calf. If the stranger kept his promise, he would be willing to sell them a cow for the right price, about 250 dollars. To the returnees it was a fortune – but still less than the money stolen from Jean-Berchman, scraped together during 13 years in the refugee camp.
So Mama Jaqueline, young Rosette and the babies, the brother-in-law and Jean-Berchman all got into a Red Cross vehicle and went back to the rich farmer who was willing to sell them a cow. “If you agree on the price, you can pick any one of them,” he said of the three cows and a bull he had brought into an enclosure behind his house.
They were all quick to agree on their preference: a beautiful young cow called ‘Bizima’ – Kirondo for ‘healthy’ – and Rosette handed over the money the stranger had given her. In line with tradition, the farmer handed a thousand Burundian francs back to Jean-Berchman to buy beer, and accepted that the custom would have to be one-sided this time.
While the cow was walked back to their village along the highway, the women and children were driven back, silently contemplating their stroke of good fortune. With a cow they were no longer desperately poor. The cow would give them a future they had never dreamed of.
The cow from heaven would change everything.