Finding Refuge: Part 1 of 3

Outside the terminal were seven beacons of hope. Clinging firmly and steadfastly to the light blue blankets they had received on the airplane, the Agbossoumonde family cowered in the frigid February temperatures of Syracuse.

Minutes earlier, the youngest boy, Gale, couldn’t withstand the cold. He turned and climbed back up the stairs of the plane, trying to get back onboard. A flight attendant stopped him. The 8-year-old turned to his mother and told her they must be in the wrong place.

But in their flip-flops, shorts and T-shirts, the seven weary travelers had reached their destination. Owning nothing but the clothes they had on and a few small bags that comprised the entirety of the family’s possessions, they were about to begin a new life.

‘I’ll never forget picking them up at the airport,’ said Guy Hart, the family’s sponsor. ‘And they’re standing there with sandals on and just very light clothing. … That’s it. That’s all they had on.’

Adjo LeMou and six of her children completed a journey that covered 5,344 miles from the African country of Benin to Central New York.

But to those people they met here in the United States, everything the Agbossoumonde family encountered before arriving on Feb. 24, 2000, was unimaginable.

Mawuena, the third youngest child and currently a sophomore on the Syracuse men’s soccer team, was 10 years old. He remembers only ‘clicks’ of what his family’s life was like in Africa and relies on his siblings and mother to fill in the blanks.

He barely recalls when his family fled its home in Atakpame, Togo, following a military upheaval. He has a vague recollection of crossing the border into Benin, where he spent the next seven years of his life.

As the years went by, images from spending the better part of a decade in refugee camps became more vivid.

Still, he questions the reality of those events. The dichotomy troubles him. He finds himself pondering the fissure in his life as he now attends Syracuse and plays Division I soccer.

‘It seemed like it was fake,’ Mawuena said. ‘Did I really live that life, you know. Was it really like that?’

***

Seated on her couch, Adjo falls over onto her side, smiling as she recalls meeting her husband, Koku Agbossoumonde. With a hint of embarrassment, she says they met at a bar in Togo in the late 1970s.

Several months passed, and the two became a couple. Shortly thereafter, Adjo was pregnant with Yaovi, the first of their eight children.

The family of 10 lived in a two-bedroom house in Atakpame, a city in the southern half of Togo. Adjo cared for the children while Koku ascended to the rank of commander in the military, said his daughter Dovenin.

But on March 25, 1993, a group of armed Togolese dissidents based out of Ghana staged an attempt to kill the nation’s president, Gnassingbe Eyadema. The attack spurred distrust throughout the military. Soldiers thought to be involved with the attackers were hunted.

In the months that followed, Koku received a brief leave from duty in another part of the country. He became a target.

‘The government said that because he left, they told me that he was a terrorist in Ghana,’ said Adjo, as translated by Dovenin. ‘So they sent other soldiers to come and arrest me and my oldest son.’

Upon release, Adjo called her husband and told him not to return home. He went to Benin.

Three months later, he sent his best friend to gather his family and transport them via boat across the Mono River into Togo’s eastern neighbor.

‘As soon as we were on the other side of the river, he was there,’ Adjo said. ‘I was very happy and happy to be safe.’

Two months passed living in the house of one of Koku’s friends. It was then the family entered a refugee camp in hopes of one day making it out of Africa.

***

For a full year, the 10 Agbossoumondes lived in tents. Their first of two stops at refugee camps put them in an unofficial community of displaced persons.

After that, they upgraded to a single room the size of a Syracuse dorm room. It would be home for the next six years. The family made its way to Porto-Novo, the capital of Benin, and entered an officially recognized refugee camp.

More than 1,000 people lived in the circular village. Walls enclosed the camp and ensured security for the camp’s inhabitants.

‘The majority of the people that lived there were people from the military that are trying to get away from the government,’ Mawuena said.

The family hoped for a chance to be relocated. But it would take years.

Each day, Mawuena and his siblings left the camp and walked to the nearby grammar and middle schools.

After classes ended, the hours from 6 p.m. on were reserved for soccer.

‘(The boys) would come home, and instead of doing their homework, they would play soccer with all the other kids,’ Dovenin, his youngest sister, said. ‘And our dad didn’t like that.’

Koku had been an aspiring soccer player prior to being drafted. The army selected anyone who appeared fit or strong. He didn’t want his boys harboring similar dreams, only to have them shattered as his were.

But the boys played anyway.

Mawuena recalls playing during the lunch break and almost every night of the week until it was too dark to see the ball. The ball that changed form almost daily.

Without a true soccer ball to use, the kids constructed their own out of socks, paper or tennis balls. Sometimes, they purchased hard plastic balls from the nearby market. If they were lucky, they might be able to borrow a real ball from one of the more wealthy adults.

The field was packed-down dirt that turned to mud in the rain. The goals were sticks jammed into the ground. The game remained the same.

‘Koku preferred for them to come home, work in the garden,’ Adjo said. ‘After finishing their work in the garden, take a shower, do their homework and go to sleep.

‘But all they wanted to do was play soccer.’

When he wasn’t playing soccer, Mawuena worked on weekends at the port on the coast of Benin. He traveled to and from the refugee camp and worked a full day for less than an American dollar. His job: watch over a stockpile of gasoline and be sure it wasn’t stolen.

The gas was used to fuel new cars coming off the ships. Mawuena was 8 years old.

‘There weren’t a lot of kids that did that. It was very rare,’ he said. ‘I just did it for some money, you know. … I just felt like that was my life.’

***

The interview process was terrifying. The representatives from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) took each individual family member aside and questioned him or her.

‘They would divide you up to see if there was the same story of how you got to the refugee camp,’ Dovenin said. ‘And if there was a difference … they would fail you.’

Failure meant an inability to leave the camp. It meant waiting for another cycle of relocation.

But prior to the interview sessions, the family was ripped apart by the death of Koku. He battled cancer for two years but was unable to receive treatment. His involvement in the Togolese military prevented him from going to France and getting an operation from Doctors Without Borders, said Hart, the sponsor.

‘He saved his life by getting out of Togo and getting into Benin,’ Hart said. ‘But the politics followed him.’

And as a result, the family was nearly left out of the relocation process. Only military families were being considered to be moved, and with Koku’s death, the Agbossoumondes weren’t qualified.

Luckily, a friend of Koku’s talked the people from the USCIS into granting them interviews.

Everyone passed — except Djordina, Mawuena’s sister, who had interviewed separately with her husband. So for the second time in less than a year, the Agbossoumonde family was torn. Adjo made the horrifying decision to leave her daughter behind.

‘I was going crazy,’ she said. ‘I was very sad. She’s still living over there today.’

But the rest of the family was leaving. They knew they were headed to Syracuse, but that name was as foreign as the country they were about to enter.

Between 300 to 500 people, all from the refugee camp, shared a plane from Benin to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City. There, each family went its separate way.

Unsure of what would come next, Mawuena and his mother and siblings transferred onto a flight to Syracuse. All they knew was that the city was in the United States.

So as they stepped off the plane and into the cold that midmorning in February, they weren’t even expecting the change in climate.

‘We didn’t know it was going to be cold here,’ Mawuena said. ‘It was snowing when we got off the plane. So we were all freezing. It was the first time we’d ever seen snow.’

mjcohe02@syr.edu

Find Part 2 of Mawuena Agbossoumonde’s story in tomorrow’s edition of The Daily Orange. 

Published on April 10, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Michael: mjcohe02@syr.edu | @Michael_Cohen13