This is your typical ‘formulaic’ story about a new refugee arriving in small town America. I’m posting it here just to remind you that we are expected to take 50,000 refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo over the next few years.
Why? I don’t know, some fuzzy notion that Belgium and the West messed up West/Central Africa and now we are obligated to take in their people displaced by warring factions.
From Lancaster Online (emphasis is mine):
Terry K. Mulumba decided to leave behind his haunting past.
“Thinking about it would be wrong and would take me down,” he said.
Mulumba, a 22-year-old studying for the math and science portions of the GED test, is one of the first refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to have been resettled in Lancaster County.
Lutheran Refugee Services and Church World Service each expect to resettle 50 more Congolese here in the coming year. To put that into perspective, Lutheran Refugee Services settles an average of 200 refugees of varying nationalities in Lancaster County each year.
Like Mulumba, who came here in 2012, many Congolese are escaping the eastern and southeastern regions of the country because of political and ethnic tensions that were fostered through years of Belgian colonial rule and a Western-backed dictatorship.
Just for your information, Lancaster (the city) at the heart of Amish country, has had refugee overload for some time and so the resettlement agencies are now spreading refugees to surrounding small towns in the county, like this one (Akron, PA) in this story.
For new readers, Lutheran Refugee Services (subcontractor of LIRS) and Church World Service are two of nine US State Department contractors resettling refugees with your tax dollars in the US. Also, for new readers one of our top (most-clicked on) items here at RRW is our fact sheet, here.
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