NFNA Profile: Clothilde Ntahomvukiye, 63 and Michele Mpambazi, 64 are married and farm together in the New Farms for New Americans project. They were both born in Bujumburi, Burundi. They have been farmers since they were children.
”Some kids did not go to school in our country; instead they went with their parents to learn the trade of farming. Even if you are a student in rural Burundi, when you leave school, you go straight to the farm field to help your parents and see how they are doing. You bring them water, food and help them. When you have a day off from school, you spend it in the field, farming with your parents.
I (Michele) went to school and worked eight years as an elementary school teacher. However, I still farmed with my wife, Clothilde. We had land about half the size of Winooski. Some places we planted bananas, some places trees, or beans, or cassava, or coffee, or corn, or sweet potatoes. I (Michele) sold a lot of food at an open air market, and the rest of the food I brought home for my family to eat. We were well off!”
In 1972 there were problems starting between ethnic groups in Burundi. Michele and Clothilde had two children, so to keep the family safe they walked to refugee in the Congo. They lived in the Congo one month, and then went to Rwanda where there was U.N. run refugee camps.
“After a while we were allowed to live as normal citizens in Rwanda (refugees are not allowed to work, own land, businesses, etc). I (Michele) worked as an elementary school teacher again, teaching Rwandan children and gained land to farm on. We lived in Rwanda for 22 years. However, in Rwanda in 1994 there was the genocide and we had to run again back to the Congo, where we were in a refugee camp again. I hated to see that war and genocide, because I had already seen it. The war in Rwanda spilled into where we were living in the Congo in 1996. Then we fled again, taking boats across Lake Tanganyika to Tanzania. In Tanzania we were refugees in the Mtabila camp for 10 years. I was teaching and also farming again in the camp there. A neighboring refugee camp was shut down, and these people had to join us. There was so much crowding! We still did not want to go back to Burundi, because we did not have land, or a life there. The U.S. government stepped in at this time to deal with the overcrowding of refugees in Tanzania. The U.S. offered resettlement to some Burundians who did not want to return to their country. We were one of those families, and moved to the U.S. 2008.
Now that we are in the U.S., even though we are old, we are not sitting at home. We are still producing and earning money for our families, and maintaining our agricultural heritage. We are very proud of that!”
