Out of Rwanda

An African man learns how bighearted Americans can be after a Colorado friend helps his family immigrate

Colorado Springs- The young man from Rwanda was sitting on a bench in New York's Chinatown, sharing an orange with his old friend from Colorado, when he broke the news.

"I'm not going back," Peter Kajaneli said.

His companion, Dwight Nelson, a contractor who thought of Peter almost as a second son, hadn't foreseen this turn of events. But he wasn't surprised.

"This was his opportunity to make a new life," he recalls. "And he did it with his family's blessing."

Kajaneli, who had worked under Nelson at the gorilla research camp founded by the late Dian Fossey, knew staying in the United States might mean he would never again see his wife and three children, or any other relatives.

But remaining in his homeland might mean they would never see him again. In the wake of the ethnic warfare that tore apart the central African republic in 1994, Kajaneli had been jailed, two younger brothers had been seized and later found dead, and his wife's father had been abducted and strangled.

"We had talked and talked about it," Kajaneli says. "We said, 'Who's next? What should we do?' My wife encouraged me. She said, 'You go. Save yourself, and maybe you can go to school.' It was hard to leave my family. But we decided it would be better to be separated by distance than to be separated by death or disappearance."

That was two years ago. Since then, thanks largely to Nelson's support and an outpouring of generosity from his adopted hometown of La Veta, the 33-year-old African has won political asylum and been reunited with his wife and children, who arrived in this country Christmas Day with little more than a duffel bag of spare clothes.

"It hasn't been easy at all," Kajaneli says. "But thanks to God and the people who helped us, now we are happy."

Nelson first met Kajaneli in 1991, after volunteering for a three-month stint supervising repairs on the jungle cabin where the author of "Gorillas in the Mist" had been slain six years earlier.

At 19, Peter was fluent in four languages - English, French, Swahili and his native Kinyarwanda - so Nelson, then 58, hired him as a translator to communicate with the work crew.

The young man, who hiked 2 miles up a mountain trail to reach the site each day, so impressed Nelson that he pledged to underwrite Kajaneli's high school education. Their relationship deepened when the Coloradan returned for a second assignment the next year. But in 1994, when Rwanda plunged into chaos, the two lost touch.

"I had no way of knowing what had happened to Peter, and I feared the worst," says Nelson. Even as a member of the Hutu majority, his friend wasn't immune from the war.

Eventually, the American received a handwritten note - carried out of a refugee camp by a BBC journalist - from Kajaneli. "He was afraid and hungry, and people around him were dying," Nelson says.

There was nothing Nelson could do. The next year, after the fighting diminished, he returned to Rwanda to try to find his friend. Amazingly, in a country one-tenth the size of Colorado but with twice the population, he succeeded.

As an English speaker in a French-speaking country, Kajaneli had found a job with the United Nations. Local staffers got them back together.

"Here we were, dancing around in a hotel lobby," Nelson remembers. "We had a great reunion. His situation was stable, so that put my mind at rest. But I told him, 'Whatever you do, get a passport.' I was thinking, some way or other, we were going to get him out of there."

Five years passed, and Nelson returned to Rwanda on another contracting job. By this time, Kajaneli was married and living in Kijali, the capital.

"We spent a lot of time together," Nelson says, "but we made no definite plans to get him out; it was very difficult to get a visa."

Within a couple of years, Kajaneli applied to Fordham University in New York to take a one-month course in humanitarian studies, and Nelson agreed to pay the $2,000 tuition fee, which was key to obtaining a student visa. But when his wife gave birth prematurely, Kajaneli had to cancel the trip.

Nelson and his wife, Madi, encouraged Kajaneli to "stay strong," and assured him that if he could use the visa to come to this country as a tourist, they would pay all his expenses.

A photo taken in the early 1990s of Peter Kajaneli, right, and La Veta resident Dwight Nelson in Rwanda. Nelson befriended Kajaneli and employed him as a translator 15 years ago while supervising a remodeling project at the gorilla research camp founded by the late Dian Fossey. (Post / Glenn Asakawa)

That led to his trip to New York. "Peter had traveled some for the U.N., but he had never been on an airliner, never seen the ocean, never seen a train, never seen a tall building, never seen trees that lost their leaves," Nelson says.

Once Kajaneli divulged his decision to "defect," the Coloradan invited him to return home with him to La Veta.

Madi met them at the Colorado Springs airport in a spring snowstorm, giving the African his first taste of snow, and almost immediately he began gathering information on how to gain political asylum.

A friend from Boulder, Dr. Gerry Hickman, who had met Kajaneli on a trip to Rwanda in 1992, put him in touch with a Denver lawyer he knew, Michael McCarthy. His firm, Faegre & Benson, agreed to represent Peter pro bono.

Meanwhile, Nelson introduced Kajaneli to the townspeople of La Veta. "Peter was an instant hit in La Veta. ... Everybody loved him," Nelson says.

Some gave him phone cards to help him stay in touch with his family. Others offered odd jobs, since he couldn't seek regular employment without a green card. Ultimately, he was able to move from the Nelsons' home into an apartment, which was subsidized by a different family each month.

About nine months after filing his request for asylum, he received a thumbs-up from the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

"Once he was granted asylum, we got started on the immigration process for his family, with help from the same law firm. We thought it would be a slam-dunk, but it wasn't."

The first obstacle was financial. It would cost several thousand dollars to fly Kajaneli's wife and kids to America. But folks in La Veta came to the rescue, donating more than $10,000 at a fundraiser last spring - quite a showing for a town of 900.

"The place was just jam-packed," says Ralph Harding, a retired Air Force colonel who had hired Kajaneli to do odd jobs. "The thing about La Veta is, when people find a good cause, their generosity comes to the forefront."

The second challenge was political. "Especially since 9/11, it's gotten a lot tougher (to immigrate to the United States). We were looking at a two- to three-year waiting period," Nelson says.

That's when Harding stepped in. He organized a letter-writing campaign soliciting the aid of U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar and his brother, U.S. Rep. John Salazar.

"I realized working in the Pentagon that if you really wanted to get something done, the thing to do was write your congressman," Harding says. "That just took it from being in the inbox to being on top of the stack."

Within weeks, the waiting period dropped to three months, and by last fall the necessary papers were approved for Kajaneli's wife, Assouma, 28, their daughters Jasmine, 8, and Nabila, 6, and son Khadel,3.

Two months later, acting as tourists, they slipped across the border into neighboring Uganda, boarded a plane to Ethiopia and then Washington, D.C.

Today, the family is living in a modest two-bedroom apartment in Colorado Springs, furnished with goods donated by people in La Veta and by Dr. Hickman and his wife, Doree.

Peter is working as a server in the catering operation at the Broadmoor Hotel, and the girls are attending classes at Skyway Elementary. Ossouma, who would have graduated from college this spring, is staying home with their preschooler and working on her English skills.

"The people here have been open and very supportive, and I was very surprised at this, because I was not expecting such friendship," Kajaneli says. "Watching Hollywood movies and CNN and all the tragedies like Columbine, one of the pictures we had of America was that we would not feel safe. But so many people came up with help in different ways, it gave me hope and gave me strength."

Ultimately, he says, both he and his wife would like to continue their education - she in social sciences, he in some aspect of medicine, perhaps to become a paramedic.

"But for the time being, there are a lot of things to adjust to," Kajaneli says. "What we are trying to do is settle down a little bit."