Here is a long and convoluted story about a Burundian woman in Boise, ID resettled there in 2006 by World Relief (one of nine federal refugee contractors) and now wishing she had never come to America.
This is how the story in the Boise Weekly begins:
Sitting on a couch in her sparsely decorated Meridian apartment, Christiana Niyonzima clutches a Christmas photo of her six kids and a drawing her youngest daughter sent her through an Idaho Department of Health and Welfare caseworker.
The drawing depicts a stick figure of a girl flying in the clouds with the inscription, written by an adult: “[Girl’s name] pretending to fly. Mommy watching.”
“I think … I am not sure if they are safe or not,” Niyonzima said through an interpreter. “But I know they think of me sometimes.”
Niyonzima, who came to Boise in late 2006 with five children and pregnant with her sixth, had already led a difficult life, growing up in refugee camps in Tanzania. Originally from Burundi, Niyonzima, 32, said that her family was killed in the fighting there, forcing her to flee to Tanzania at a young age.
She later fled an abusive partner in one refugee camp, landing with her children in another camp. She did not have electric lights or flushing toilets and only had very basic schooling.
But no matter the difficulty of life in the refugee camps, Niyonzima says now she never would have left if she had known what would happen to her children in the United States.
About a year after arriving in Boise, the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare took Niyonzima’s children away from her and placed them in foster care. And in July 2009, a judge terminated her parental rights, placing her six kids into adoption proceedings. She has not seen them since then.
“I’m very sad,” Niyonzima said in English. “I’m not dead, and I’m not crazy,” she continued in Kirundi, the national language of Burundi and the only language in which she is fluent. “I don’t know why they did that.”
This is apparently a complicated case with far-reaching implications regarding such issues as legal requirements for proper interpreters. Read the whole article.
Note that the Idaho office of World Relief was criticised here just recently by a young woman claiming there was a religious litmus test for those wishing to volunteer and work with refugees.
Update: I see that Friends of Refugees has additional comments on this story, here.