SALT LAKE CITY— On a sunny Friday night with balloons, music and barbecued food, nine refugee students from across the world celebrated an achievement they had only dreamed of just years before — graduating high school.
One student, 19-year-old Eric Mugisha spent 16 years living in a 100-yard-long refugee camp in Rwanda with about 13,000 others, who slept in tents or outside on the ground, scrambling to eat every few days. He doesn't remember his parents — his mother died of disease when he was young and his father disappeared shortly after his mother died, which meant Mugisha was responsible for caring for his two sisters.
He has stark memories of education in Rwanda.
"If you don’t do your assignments, they just beat you up,” he said. “You can’t go to school on an empty stomach, it just doesn’t work. And when you don’t do your stuff, you get beat up.”
All of the graduating students at the Jordan Park celebration were a part of the Catholic Community Services Refugee Foster Care program, a nearly 30-year-old program that pairs refugee minors with foster parents across the country.
Julianna Potter, the director of the program, said "most of the time their parents are deceased or they've been separated due to war." She is grateful to the Utah parents who are willing to raise refugee foster children.
When Mugisha arrived in the U.S., he had only completed a sixth-grade education. However, he was able to skip the seventh and eighth grades and begin high school, which he loved, because in Rwanda, those who could not afford high school could not go.
Mugisha also prefers American schools because "everybody is so nice."
He now works at an auto body shop in Saratoga Springs, but he hopes to pursue either business, medicine or engineering someday.
“Here you can go anywhere you want, you can do whatever you want,” he said.
That wasn't always the case.
Leaving the refugee camp wasn't easy because "the outside is super dangerous," but Mugisha often ventured out to earn money for his family, by working to set up electricity throughout the area.
"I had to do it because I had to earn money outside," he said. But every time Mugisha left, he knew there was a chance he would never see his sisters again.
"Some people go and can never come back," he said.
Other students at Friday night's gathering shared their hopes for the future, as well as the struggles in their past.
Jolly Karungi, who lived in the Democratic Republic of Congo until she was 8, just graduated from Cottonwood High School. She now has a scholarship to the University of Utah, where she plans to study business and then go to law school.
Karungi hopes to become a judge so she can help kids like her, who grew up with virtually nothing.
“People who had money used to get everything,” she said. After she receives her law degree, she hopes to help other refugee children go to school, which is her favorite part of living in the U.S.
"I love to learn and go to school," she said.
Similarly, Elisha Musingzi loves school, and said he wishes other kids his age would appreciate it like he does.
“I didn’t go to school in my home country, so that’s why I like school here,” he said.
Musingzi was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but lived in Uganda until he was 13, where he spent his life in an overcrowded refugee camp.
"Life was so hard there," he said. "It was so bad."
Although Musingzi has not graduated high school in the U.S. yet, he hopes to attend college and become a pilot when he does.
Although some students were not able to attend school in their home countries, others were.
Reza Hussaini's father was a political leader in Afghanistan, which meant he was able to go to school. However, Hussaini had to leave the country due to a political dispute between his father and the leader of another area.
Hussaini said school was "so different there," and feels it is much better in the U.S.
"Everything was so different there," he said.
Hussaini plans to attend Salt Lake City College in the fall and study business management.