Vol 38 • No. 3
Immigrant’s new home, life ‘so fantastic’
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By Debbi Elmore Jolie Uwizeye steeled her resolve. She knew she had to flee her native Congo to save her 6-year-old son, Isaac, and 4-year-old daughter, Debbie. Once a happy, educated village girl, she watched as the civil conflict grew. The government could no longer pay the soldiers, so they set up roadblocks to exact payment from farmers trying to bring their produce to market. In 2005 it had became so grim that villagers couldn’t even get access to food. When the schools shut down her husband, who was a schoolteacher, opened a small business. One day he left to purchase supplies, and he never returned. No one knew what had happened to him. The Congo was getting increasing dangerous because unpaid soldiers and
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February 2017
Refugee resettlement group marks 5th year
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Jolie Uwizeye treasures her new country.
refugees from Rwanda were everywhere robbing people and searching for food. Most men in her village had been taken away to serve in the Army. Those left couldn’t protect all the women and children. Jolie knew she had to take her children and leave. For two days, they crawled through the jungle to neighboring Uganda. They were taken to a refugee camp and given a small plot of ground to pitch their tent, dig a latrine and grow some food Jolie knew she had to find work to feed her children. “While in the camp, a life-changing door was opened to us, though life didn’t change in one day,” she said. “A Good Samaritan took me and my children to her home in Kampala, the capital city, where I helped with housekeeping and taking care of her children while she was at work. “One morning she crashed in a car accident, and we lost her. It was daytime, but the world turned dark to me, because the last option was to go back to the camp. See Jolie, page 23
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By Debra Lee Imagine. You are lying in bed thinking about how things had gone with your day. In the night’s stillness you hear the soft music the insects are making outside of your window. As you reflect on your busy day, you think of how happy the grandkids were to see you when you picked them up from school, and how you comforted your littlest soccer player from the embarrassment of a missed goal shot at the game that evening. You roll over and go off to sleep. Suddenly you are jarred awake with a loud explosion. Everything is dark; your ears are numb and ringing. It’s hard to breath, and you realize that you are under a bunch of rubble. You’re dazed, not sure where you are, and as your eyes begin to focus, you see that you are covered with grey soot and trickles of blood from your wounds. You call out for your spouse but
hear no response. As you pull yourself out of the rubble, you realize you are outside of what was once your home. When you can stand, you see that your neighborhood is gone. Only because of the dancing flames scattered across the landscape are you able to see the wreckage. When your hearing eventually returns, you hear sounds of gunfire and loud explosions in the distance. Slowly you realize that this was an attack. Where is your spouse, your family? How will you find them? Where will you get help? Where will you find refuge? Life, as you once knew it, is now gone. This, my friends, can happen to anyone, to any country. The world has reached its worst refugee crisis since World War II. Across the globe there are more than 60 million refugees, asylum seekers and internally displaced people. More
By Tom Emery There’s plenty to see and do in Wichita, but professional football is not on the list. Yet, on five occasions in decades past, there were some professional football games here. In the earliest days of the National Football League, Wichita was the site of several exhibition games, including two with the legendary Aero Commandos squad in wartime. The Kansas City Chiefs made two appearances in the 1960s during their days in the American Football League. Unlike today’s NFL, the league
in its earliest days was a primitive affair. Salaries were low, attendance was middling and there was no television. Most trips were by train, and players routinely had day jobs. “Pro football was definitely low-profile,” said Chris Willis, head of the research library at NFL Films. “Fans paid more attention to boxing, golf, college football, baseball and even tennis.” NFL teams frequently scheduled non-league games during and after the season to increase revenue. It wasn’t See Football, page 21
See Refugee, page 22
Wichita has hosted 5 pro-football games
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