When Gloria Hikima heard armed men were on their way to her village in southern Burundi, she had no choice but to flee to neighboring Tanzania or risk being killed. Amid the chaos, she was separated from her four young children.
Hannah Brown, a Princeton in Africa Fellow with the International Rescue Committee, writes from the Nyarugusu refugee camp in Tanzania where she met Gloria Hikima, a Burundian refugee who fled from political unrest in her country.
Last May, when Gloria Hikima, 41, fled her southern Burundi home, she felt a grim sense of déjà vu. She had been on this path before, running from the country’s twelve-year civil war marked by waves of ethnic violence. At the time, she and her family sought safety at the Mtabila refugee camp in Tanzania.