Bridge Refugee Services

From hating school to encouraging students: a refugee educator’s story

Sunday, August 2nd, 2020

School never came easily to Olivier Muhire. Not when he was a young boy during the aftermath of a war and genocide in his native country of Rwanda. Not after he came as a refugee to the United States for high school. Not even while he earned a college degree.

But he pressed on because his mother told him to “go to school and try” so he could get the education he needed to have a better life.

“My mom worked really hard to get me here,” he said.

Today, Olivier remembers those struggles, but also his mother’s mantra, as he works to remove barriers to student learning through his role as a resource coordinator for the Knox Education Foundation. He also serves on Bridge Refugee Services’ board of directors.

Olivier works with students at Green Magnet Academy, one of the Community Schools served by the foundation, to ensure they receive the resources they need to excel in school and at home.

Through partnerships with local businesses, community groups, faith-based organizations and others, Olivier has been able to arrange for students to receive vision screenings and eyeglasses, dental care, temporary housing, food, shoes and clothing, and other services aimed at optimizing their health and well-being. He also mentors many of the students, including several Bridge clients.

“I can relate to a lot of people that are struggling,” he said. “When I see these refugee students, I see myself and how my life has turned out. It gives me more energy to get up each morning and come to work. I want these kids not to squander any opportunities they’re getting over here because I have seen the worst of the worst and I have nothing to complain about now. I still pinch myself when I drive my own car because I used to go months without stepping my foot in a vehicle, and now I own one.”

So, he acknowledges their hardships while encouraging them to be patient as they work towards a better future.

“Things just get better over here and they just have to believe that and work hard,” he said. “There’s nothing you will want (that) this country can’t give you; you just have to put in the work.”

Olivier was a toddler when civil war broke out in 1990 in Rwanda.

“Our life was just as normal as you can think,” he said. “We weren’t rich, but we had enough. We had one pair of shoes to take us to school and that would last us the whole year. We never went to bed hungry.”

He lived with his parents and three older siblings at the start of the 1994 genocide that killed nearly 1 million people.

“I was about six years old,” he said. “During the genocide, my mom was like, ‘I don’t want you guys going outside. You might not come back.’ We stayed in our house throughout the whole genocide.”

Soon after the fighting subsided and he and his siblings returned to school, people began disappearing.

“My grandfather disappeared,” he said. “My dad disappeared. Uncles and a bunch of people just kept going missing – people that I knew.”

The family later learned his father had been imprisoned. For five years, Olivier’s mother worked as a secretary to support their family and to pay for her children’s schooling.

“I hated seeing my mom work so hard to pay tuition for me and my siblings,” he said. “If the teacher asked me a question and I didn’t know the answer, I got a whooping. I used to get a lot of whoopings at school for not knowing answers to a certain question a teacher would ask, or for being a minute late to class, and that is why I hated going to school. This is why I never skipped a class in college, and I probably missed a total of five days in all my four years in high school.”

Then in 1999, after his father was released from prison, tensions escalated again and some men tried to kidnap Olivier.

“I outran them and I went to a neighbor’s house,” he said.

A few days later, his father disappeared and the family learned he had again been imprisoned. Fearing for their lives, his mother brought Olivier to a relative’s home. Then, she told him she was fleeing to America, that he would soon be reunited with his siblings, and they would all join her there later.

As promised, he was taken to Kenya, where he joined his siblings who had been attending boarding school. But it wasn’t until April 2003, when Olivier was nearly 14, that they left Kenya and were reunited with their mother in Connecticut.

“I was excited and very happy to see my mom again,” he said. “It had been three years.”

But he wasn’t happy the next morning, when his mom woke him up and told him he had to go to school.

“I remember, after my first day of school, I didn’t want to go back,” he said. “I was overwhelmed. I didn’t feel like I had friends. I didn’t understand what the teacher said, but I was expected to do the same work.”

He begged his mom not to make him return.

“My mom told me that, ‘I brought you here for a reason. I want you to have a good life. Don’t make excuses. … Go to school and try. Don’t get in any trouble. I just want you to go to school and try.’”

So he did, but he struggled. In August, news came that his father had gotten sick and died back in the Rwandan prison.

“I was very depressed,” he said. “I didn’t want to tell my mom I didn’t want to go (to school).”

It wasn’t until his junior year that his grades began to improve, thanks to a teacher, Roma Kachanis, who stayed after school to tutor him and a soccer coach, Ben Trowbridge, who advocated for him.

While an injury derailed his plans to play college soccer, he attended East Tennessee State University to be closer to his mother, who had moved to Kingsport. By then, he had come to appreciate the value of getting an education, even though he still didn’t speak English very well and had no idea what he wanted to study.

“I knew going to school would change my life,” he said. “It took me awhile to graduate. I worked a night shift, 40 hours, 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. and then I would leave work and go to a class at 8:15 a.m. and get home at 2 in the afternoon, then take a nap and go back to work.”

After earning a degree in physical education in 2012, he moved to Knoxville, where he found a job at Beaumont Magnet School and began mentoring students.

“I always dress up when I go to work because I know many young kids look up to me,” he said. “They already don’t see a lot of black men in school, and I try to be that one example they can have in their life.”

He realized he was making a difference in the lives of the students when one he was mentoring showed up to school wearing a dress shirt and tie because he wanted to look like Olivier.

“The more time I spent with kids, I just wanted to help them,” he said.

That job led to his current job as Green Magnet’s site resource coordinator, where he stands ready to continue offering critical services to students and their families as schools prepare to reopen amid a global pandemic.

By coaching soccer at Emerald Youth Foundation, serving as a Big Brothers Big Sisters of East Tennessee volunteer and volunteering on several community committees and task forces, Olivier also hopes to show by example that refugees are hard-working people who seek a safe and secure place to make a living, raise their families and better their communities.

“I’ve had so many people who helped me,” he said. “I’m grateful for them and this is my way of giving back.”