The fortress-like building notorious for violence was shut down by the state in 2007 after years of poor academic achievement. Munezero is sympathetic to problems of poverty and social dysfunction that disadvantage so many Baltimore youth, but admits she is "biased" about the plight of America's inner cities. "I have a very different definition of being poor," she said. "We have food and a place to sleep. We can eat and have clothes. So I don't think we're poor."
A hard life
Munezero was born in a former Rwandan refugee camp in 1986, the sixth of eight children to ethnic Hutu parents who in 1972 fled the genocide in Burundi that has claimed an estimated 200,000 lives. The decades of violence between the Hutus and Tutsis eventually engulfed adjacent Rwanda in the 1990s, which forced the family to flee again.
Along with thousands of Burundian refugees, Munezero's family embarked on a months-long trek by foot from Rwanda to the current Democratic Republic of Congo in 1994. They walked all day and slept by the road, with nothing to eat but the rice they could carry on their backs, said Dieudonne Bamboneyeho, Munezero's 27-year-old brother, who now works as a parking garage attendant near the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall.
"People got sick" on the journey, Bamboneyeho said. "Some people died. Sometimes there were barricades on the street ... and sometimes there was violence."
War followed the family to the Congolese encampment, and so two years later they fled again to Tanzania, which was until recently home to nearly 50,000 Burundian refugees, according to the U.S. government. Munezero is reluctant to detail her childhood trials in Africa or the dangers of the Mtabila camp, where women were sometimes raped when they foraged for wood and where children were recruited as soldiers for regional armies and militias. She says because her family largely escaped harm that she does not want to "sound dramatic" or benefit from any unearned sympathy.
But Munezero is less reticent when it comes to discussing her and her family's difficult integration into Baltimore society. In her first fall semester at Southwestern, fellow students threw water bottles at her and another recent immigrant from Morocco. A female student tried to chop off Munezero's older sister's finger with a paper cutter, she said.
