The University of Arizona Alumnus / Fall 2007
Pauline Mujawamariya
A refugee’s journey to the UA from the
green hills of East Africa
by Steve Cox
Jacob Chinn photo
“In Rwanda we learned a song,”
says Pauline Mujawamariya:
We don’t have gold,
We don’t have diamonds,
We have peace.
To picture her homeland of Rwanda, “Imagine Tucson with trees, all green,” Pauline says. “They call Rwanda the land of ten thousand hills.” The new UA grad holds her hand up before her face to demonstrate. “There’s always a hill in front of you.”
A dot in a vast landscape, Rwanda lies in the Great Lakes area of East Africa. Not far away are the wildlife-rich Serengeti Plains and Mount Kilimanjaro.
Back in the 19th century, finding neither gold nor diamonds, German and Belgian colonists established tea and coffee plantations on the green hills of Rwanda. But the colonial powers also planted the seeds of resentment. During the harrowing months when Pauline escaped as a refugee, the old resentments put an end to peace in Rwanda.
Pauline wears a delicate gold cross at her neck. Her surname, Mujawamariya, means “Servant of Mary.” She had graduated from a high school administered by a Roman Catholic order, and had begun studying law at the national university, when her homeland erupted into bloodshed in 1994.
“The truth is, I didn’t understand what happened,” Pauline says. “In Rwanda we didn’t travel much. We grew so comfortable. As a simple citizen I didn’t know … then, when the president’s plane was shot down, the killing started.”
The president, Major General Juvenal Habyarimana, died flying into Rwanda’s only airport on the night of April 6, 1994. Riding a wave of conflict between the Hutus and Tutsis, he had come to power as a Hutu.
“The Belgians had promoted a caste of corporate and colonial leaders, an upper class who became known as the Tutsi,” explains Tim Finan, director of UA’s Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology. “The peasant caste, the subsistence farmers of the countryside, were called Hutu.”
“Everybody had an I.D. card” Pauline remembers, “identifying them as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa. But physically there was no way to tell a Hutu from a Tutsi. Some people thought if you had a flat nose you were one or the other, but it was not so.”
Within a few weeks’ time, Rwandans killed 800,000 fellow Rwandans, 10 percent of a population of eight million. “It was genocide based on social and cultural differences,” says Finan, but immediately the killing became indiscriminate.
“If they think you’re an enemy, you’re gone,” Pauline says. “Anybody who found themselves in the wrong place … Any Rwandan who was there did witness the horror. Anybody who was there at the time was wounded. How did the genocide in Rwanda happen? I learned one lesson from those who did the killing: humans can change in a strange way you can never explain.”
Masses of people, Tutsi, Hutu, and Twa, tried to escape on foot. One observer, standing inside a walled compound at night, heard the soft tinkling of a cowbell. As his eyes became accustomed to the dark, he realized that a throng of people were walking silently past, “like a parade of ghosts,” twelve thousand Tutsis of every age escaping into exile. “Not even a baby cried as they went by.”
During the genocide, an army led by Tutsis marched out of the refugee camps of Uganda, and recaptured the government of Rwanda.
“They found the country almost empty,” Pauline says. “Everybody who could walk left.”
Pauline was among those who escaped. “We were trying to get where the bombs cannot reach,” she says. She first fled to Zaire, now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“We thought it would be temporary,” Pauline remembers, but she remained in refugee camps in Zaire for two years.
At first Pauline responded as many refugees do. “When you don’t have much to lose, when you don’t have many choices, you just want to have a break. You just sleep. You just enjoy seeing the stars at night,” she says. “But, you get tired of having no choices — people who like to sit don’t want to be forced to sit.”
Pauline volunteered with a UNICEF program to extend a hand to refugee children. “The only help we could offer,” she remembers, “was a cup of water.”
As a refugee, she found that “people help you even though they don’t know you. Today I call these strangers friends.”
From Zaire, Pauline moved on to Kenya, and then to Senegal, continuing to help other refugees. In May 2000, she came to the United States as a documented refugee.
She was told she would be going to Tucson, a place she never heard of.
“Taksan?” she asked. “Where is that? In Australia?”
Fred Klein of the Episcopal Social Services Committee, her sponsor, met her at the plane.
“He brought me flowers,” she recalls. “There’s a Rwandan saying, ‘When the deal is too good, you think twice.’ I asked, ‘Those are mine? How much do I have to pay?’ ‘Nothing,’ he said.
“Americans are generous,” Pauline adds. “I just experience the kindness of Americans. It’s sad to see that image dying.”
Soon after Pauline arrived in Tucson, Wendy Ascher of Jewish Family and Children’s Service recruited her to work with the first group of Lost Boys of the Sudan.
“Pauline arrived with a sense of independence,” Ascher says, “a young, single woman with no family in Tucson (in Africa, family is how you identify yourself). She was competent and incredibly hard-working. She worked full-time as a case manager, and at the same time she was going to school full time at Pima Community College.”
Pauline says, “I thought my experience was worse. But when I met them — OK, no complaints. However, the Lost Boys did not think about what had happened to them. They thought, ‘What about the future?”
Pauline worked with refugees from the former Soviet Union, Turks, Russian Jews, Bosnians, and numerous African groups. “Refugees are traumatized by discrimination. They need to feel safe. And they need to be treated like any other human being.”
With an associate’s degree from Pima in hand, Pauline came to UA to complete her bachelor’s degree in international studies, which she did with plenty of accolades. Pauline Mujawamariya’s contribution to the community, and the enormous challenges she had overcome to achieve a college education, were recognized at Winter Commencement 2006, when she was the one undergraduate woman to receive the annual Centennial Achievement Award.
Pauline graduated from the UA in May 2007, then embarked on a new journey. She won a Fulbright Fellowship to study at the University of Sussex in England, where she will concentrate in international studies.
Pauline expects to apply everything she has learned in Africa. “I want to work on the issue of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa,” she says. “I want to influence those sitting in Washington, D.C., in Geneva, designing policies that affect Africa. I want to empower people so that they will influence governments.” Pauline especially wants to help women.
“Poverty affects women more than men,” she observes. “They can use another hand. If you are educated — she emphasizes the word forcefully — then you can resist.”
Back to Fall 2007 contents page