Meet Our Neighbors - Eugenie

Why Do We Tell Stories? For some time, we have been sharing direct stories from our neighbors. These stories are raw, real and true. They are stories of pain and struggle - but more than that - they are stories of resilience and hope. When we listen to our neighbor's stories, we find out that each of us - those who have much and those who have little - are needed. We need one another in order to fully experience the love that Christ has for all of us. I hope you are challenged by this story. I know I was. 

“Do you think you’ve forgiven your father?” I ask.

“I did,” she says. “It took me years and years. It took me years. I forgave my father before he died. When he was on his deathbed.” 

Eugenie and I sit in an open room in the Portland Root Cellar, nearly two hours deep in conversation. She has come to tell a story. She says it’s part of her God-given mission to loudly speak the truth—no matter how vile the truth may be. 

Foreigners

At every step of the way, Ugandan society felt obliged to remind the young Eugenie and her twelve siblings that they weren’t Ugandan—even if they were born there. As children, their accents betrayed them and invited anti-immigrant harassment from classmates and teachers alike. 

Eugenie’s parents had fled Rwanda during the 1959 revolution, in which a successful bid for independence also brought bloody conflict between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. After years in a refugee camp, her Tutsi parents settled in a rural part of Uganda and started a family. Eugenie was the seventh of their thirteen children. Feeding and educating the children became her parents’ primary focus.

150 miles away, the country’s bustling capital city of Kampala represented an opportunity. Eugenie’s father moved there to become a cab driver, sending money home to support the family. When Eugenie and her siblings reached a certain age, they would move into the one-bedroom residence with their father to attend high school nearby.

Bruises

Every day, Eugenie’s father would beat his children. With his fists. A belt. Whatever objects he could find. He would often tie them up beforehand. Eugenie says, “When you reach the point where you would prefer to lose your parent, then you know there is something wrong.” 

One day, his temper flared and he pummeled her older sister. She lay motionless on the floor and wouldn’t wake up. At the hospital, Eugenie’s distraught mother told her husband she was going to report him.

But in time, Eugenie’s sister awoke from her coma. Her mother never reported her husband. The perverse truth of the matter was that her husband was at once a tyrant who beat her children and the vital source of income keeping them alive.

The Escape

Eugenie’s purpled eye still swelled and throbbed as she boarded the bus that would take her home, to the village where her mom lived. That was the last time she would ever be beaten; she never returned to that one-bedroom residence in Kampala.

Soon after, she moved to Rwanda to complete her final three years of high school. There, she stayed with a couple of older siblings who had previously moved there to fight in the Rwandan civil war. As the years passed, Eugenie would be joined by her younger siblings. Her father lived alone in Kampala, still working that same driving job.

A Disease

Since Eugenie was little, rumors had swirled around the neighborhood of her secret half-siblings, the offspring of her father’s affairs with women. Eugenie ignored the rumors. Years later, medical records would show that in her father’s philandering, he had contracted HIV and began taking medicine to slow its progression. He neglected to tell his wife any of this. 

In 2003, Eugenie’s mother traveled to Rwanda to spend her final months with her children. Her husband had given her AIDS and she was dying. She turned gaunt, itchy lesions surfaced on her skin, and tuberculosis wracked her lungs. She died and five years later, AIDS took her father, too.

Moving Forward

In her suffering, Eugenie found purpose. She wanted to protect children, to be the protector she had so desperately needed growing up in an abusive household.

She married her boyfriend and adopted multiple at-risk orphans. She also wanted to know about rights and understand how the law could protect victims of abuse. She saved up, attended law school, and graduated in 2013. However, her commitment to speaking the truth became dangerous to maintain. She says the Rwandan government represses controversial or inconvenient information as it is deemed a threat to the state. “Free speech. That is the main thing I was fighting for...You can’t speak up. They want you to see, but not speak,” Eugenie says. 

Criticism of the state and her family’s ties to certain politicians put her in danger. Some of her relatives have been arrested and tortured. She feared she could be put in prison for life, so she fled.

America

Eugenie hasn’t seen her husband or four children in several years. In addition, Rwandan state surveillance means contacting her family can put them in danger. She tells me she hopes to see them again one day.

Now, sitting across from me, Eugenie seems surprisingly at peace. She says she spent years hating her father and hating the fact that she had him for a father. Faith changed that. “In all the difficulties of my life, I saw I had God beside me. Not everybody survives the life I lived. It was a bad life. Many people would become drug abusers, prostitutes.”

She also credits The Root Cellar in helping her transition to life in America. “Peggy, she is a welcoming person. She has helped a lot of African refugees.” Through the Root Cellar, Eugenie took an online course and obtained a direct support professional (DSP) certificate. The field of disabled and elderly care in America spoke to her.

Eugenie has no family in this country, but she has friends, a community, and immense gratitude for having made it to a country that protects her right to speak the truth.

“This is the life I wanted,” she says. “Through all my hardships, I would ask God why he can’t give me freedom? Freedom is to be free from harm, free to speak...Now I’m free. I’m happy. It’s good to be happy even if you have nothing. I don’t have a house. I don’t have whatever. But I’m happy.”