St. Mary's City — St. Mary's City -- Nezia Munezero and her 10-member family spent years running from one East African refugee camp to another, staying one step ahead of death in a world torn by ethnic warfare and genocide. In 2002, they were resettled in Baltimore.
At age 16 and with no knowledge of English, she enrolled at the now-shuttered Southwestern High School and lived in a grim neighborhood beset by urban crime. It was a stepping-stone to a better life, but also another place to flee.
"Students at Southwestern weren't friendly toward immigrants," said Munezero, 22, a slight woman with a lilting accent. "I've always lived in small, tiny places where people had nothing, but still had each other. Southwestern wasn't a community."
Today, Munezero graduates from St. Mary's College of Maryland, a tiny, public liberal arts college best known for its championship sailing team. But it was as a student on this sylvan campus on the St. Mary's River that Munezero was able to reconnect with fellow Burundian refugees and take the first of what she says she hopes will be many steps to pay back the international humanitarian community for sparing her family from the uncertain future that still awaits her childhood friends in Africa.
For her senior project, Munezero returned for the first time to the Mtabila refugee camp in Western Tanzania where she lived for six years, accompanied by a St. Mary's professor, to film a documentary about the community she left behind. The most common refrain throughout the 34-minute movie, The Faces of Hope, which was culled from about 15 hours of footage, is a desire for education beyond the high school offered in the camp.
"We finish secondary school and might be smart enough to continue, but there is no way to move up," says Fidele Ndayisenga, a teacher in the camp who would like to become a sociologist. "I think about where I am, where I'm going to end up." He glances away from the camera and out onto the flat, brown grasses. "It is just problematic."
In Baltimore, Munezero was surprised to find students who appeared uninterested in opportunities that would have been the envy of Mtabila's children. "The teachers at Southwestern were great, but they had to limit how much they taught because the students were not willing to take the challenge," she said.
