Asylum Access

A Refugee's Testimony: Brigitte Kitenge

"If it were not for projects like this one, my family and I would be dead today," said Brigitte Kitenge quietly. "Now that we have been saved, we must do all we can to help."

Brigitte Kitenge met her husband, Leon, when he left the Congo to teach at a Rwandan university. "As soon as she was no longer my student, I married her!" he recalled fondly. But the early 1990s was the wrong time to be in love with a young Rwandan woman who was half Hutu and half Tutsi.

When the genocide began, most of Brigitte's extended family was massacred. The couple's two daughters had to be told that their mother was dead so that they could not inadvertently reveal her whereabouts as she hid from the roving death squads.

Brigitte Kitenge has come a long way from the terror in Rwanda. Here, she and Representative Loretta Sanchez pose at Asylum Access"s Friendraiser, October 12, 2006 in San Francisco.

Brigitte was pregnant with their third child when they escaped to the Congo, where Leon's family demanded that he put his wife and children aside and marry a Congolese woman. When he refused, they turned the couple away.

The Kitenges remained in Congo for a few years while Brigitte had her baby, obtained her masters in business administration and landed a job with a U.S. nonprofit organization. But soon Brigitte was in danger again. Congo was backing the Rwandan government's genocidal war, and Brigitte's contact with Americans made her a particular target.

Accused of being a U.S. spy, Brigitte was arrested and tortured by Congolese authorities. She was allowed just a few minutes each evening to breastfeed her third daughter at the prison. Eventually, Brigitte was released. Pregnant now with her fourth child, she fled to Uganda, crossing the border by pretending to be in labor while the driver told border authorities, "The hospital back there is closed! We have to get this woman to the hospital on your side!"

Brigitte made it to Uganda with nothing but the clothes on her back. Leon and her daughters joined her a short time later. In Uganda, Asylum Access Board President Barbara Harrell-Bond and Board member Mauro DeLorenzo helped Brigitte and her family get the legal assistance and advocacy they needed to obtain legal status as refugees, avoid deportation, and eventually resettle in the U.S. Brigitte just received her Ph.D and runs Future Hope for Women, her own nonprofit providing income generating projects to African women.

For more information, please visit www.futurehopeforwomen.org.