I worry that my reporting recently from Africa about President Trump’s aid cuts may leave a misimpression that villagers and refugees are helpless flotsam, simply the fragile victims of crises instigated in Washington.
Not true! People in the poorest countries are often, of necessity, masters of strength, adaptability and resilience. They weep as any of us would as their children die because of reckless decisions in Washington, but we in the rich world could learn so much from their fortitude in fighting against impossible odds.
Which brings me to Chantale Zuzi.
Zuzi, who is inspiration personified, was born with albinism about 23 years ago (she’s not sure of her exact birth date) in a hut in a village in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was an inauspicious beginning: Her maternal grandmother wanted to kill her, thinking that her pale skin was a curse. Fortunately, her parents protected her.
The fifth of 10 children, Zuzi was an excellent student, but school in the village was terrifying. The teacher beat students who gave wrong answers, few girls attended, and in any case children had no textbooks. Other students refused to touch Zuzi because of her skin color, fearing that albinism was contagious.
Then in June 2014, catastrophe: A rival ethnic group attacked her village, burned her home and murdered her parents.
Her oldest brother led the other nine children to safety in Uganda, where they arrived with nothing but the clothes they were wearing. At 13, Zuzi was now an orphan and an elementary school dropout, living in a refugee settlement and spending her days looking after her younger siblings.
But life was dangerous for people with albinism, for in parts of Africa they are sometimes killed so that their body parts can be used for witchcraft. So at 16, feeling unsafe, Zuzi fled by herself to Nairobi, Kenya.
“I didn’t understand that there is a border, and you have to have a visa,” Zuzi recalled. Lacking even a passport, she boldly walked across the border and no one stopped her.
In Nairobi, she sought out the U.N. refugee agency, which gave her housing with other orphans. Recognizing the danger faced by those with albinism, it listed her as a candidate for resettlement in the United States.
“Being born with albinism was bad luck, but now it was an opportunity for me to leave the country,” she said. So in 2018, at around 17 years old, Zuzi flew to Massachusetts. A lesbian couple was waiting for her at the airport — puzzling Zuzi, who was barely aware of homosexuality.
“I was like, wow, these two sisters love each other so much they even sleep in one bedroom,” she recalled. “But then they were like, ‘Well, actually, we’re married.’”
Zuzi reasoned that since she had been victimized by discrimination because of what she looked like, she wouldn’t discriminate against others because of who they loved.
She had been out of any regular school for about five years, but now she joined the ninth grade in Worcester, Mass. Zuzi threw herself into her classes and rapidly learned English. She graduated in three years with an A average after taking college-level classes, and then attended Wellesley College.
While at Wellesley, Zuzi became a refugee activist mentored by Hillary Clinton and Angelina Jolie, working with the United Nations, speaking at conferences and giving a TED Talk. Because her life had been transformed by education, she founded a nonprofit, Refugee Can Be, to educate and lift up girls in the Rwamwanja refugee settlement in Uganda where she had once lived. She also became a U.S. citizen and helped eight of her nine siblings move to the United States as well.
After graduating from Wellesley this year, Zuzi is now working full time to try to expand her nonprofit. Recently I spent a day with her in Uganda, where she was greeted as a returning hero.
One refugee, Claude Ruzindana, wept as he told me how he lost his wife this summer to a disease — he wasn’t sure just what it was — after the hospital told him it had run out of medicine because of U.S. aid cuts. He is now focused on his daughter Esther, a sixth grader, who is close to becoming the first girl in the family to finish primary school.
“Because you gave support, I’ve been able to keep her in school,” he told Zuzi. He added proudly, “She loves school!”
I don’t know how effective Zuzi’s nonprofit will be, for it’s relatively new and untested. But I share Zuzi’s story for three reasons.
First, the world is now awash with refugees, mostly unwanted and often despised. Zuzi is a reminder of how they often embody talent, strength, ambition, entrepreneurship and resilience that enrich societies. I admired that pragmatism when I saw in Uganda a line of village women who had walked miles to bring their babies to a clinic for vaccinations — at the same time that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was casting doubt on vaccines in America. These women in Uganda had witnessed children dying for lack of vaccinations, so they were determined to do everything they could to keep their children alive.
Second, while the Trump administration has slashed humanitarian aid and displays a pugnacious indifference to the children dying as a result (“No one has died because the United States has cut aid,” Marco Rubio declared), Zuzi offers an alternative moral vision. Washington can be the apotheosis of fecklessness, but many ordinary people around the world — aid workers, nuns, volunteers, bleeding hearts of all faiths and political leanings — lack power or means but persevere to uphold their values. And so it is that a new American from Congo whose grandmother wanted to kill her at birth and who was an elementary school dropout may be a better role model than our secretary of state.
Third, the greatest untapped resource in the developing world is not oil, gold or rare earth minerals; it is village girls who often are held back from school, married as children and expected to spend their lives fetching water and caring for others. The cruel paradox is that it is only because of a horrific massacre in a remote Congolese village that an orphan named Chantale Zuzi found a path to cultivate herself.
Talent is universal, even if opportunity is not. Sprinkle some education on village girls, and the world can be transformed.
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Nicholas Kristof became a columnist for The Times Opinion desk in 2001 and has won two Pulitzer Prizes. His new memoir is “Chasing Hope: A Reporter’s Life.” @NickKristof
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