Moving Forward Through the Dark: a Self-Made Refugee Entrepreneur

by Scarlet Salas

"Sometimes when you're in a dark place you think you've been buried, but you've actually been planted." — Christine Caine

Trying to maintain your balance and move forward in a world that doesn’t do favors for anyone isn’t easy. The world is unfair, and it’s not guaranteed that you’ll succeed or prosper in any way. You’ll have to bear your own burdens, live with your own pain, deal with your own suffering, and become independent in a sense that you’ll just have to keep trying until something works. Refugees already go through a dark path with their experiences beforehand, but to try and rebuild their lives for something better is even darker.

You’ll have to adjust to new environments, try everything you can to survive, thrive in a world that wasn’t made to appease anyone, and that means all you can do is try. When things get dark and it seems like you can’t find your way through it, you have to trust and rely on yourself to keep moving even if it seems scary. It’s not easy, nothing is, but it’s one of the many hopes you can have where you can simply trust your actions and your fate. The path is rough, full of ups and downs, twists and turns, but it’s important you navigate through it by any means necessary. Just because something is hard doesn’t mean you should give up right then and there. You have to go through a lot of suffering to get to where you wanna be, an environment that was worth the struggle.

Self-made entrepreneur and refugee Annick Iriwacu was one of the many unfortunate refugees that had to bear witness and face exposure to conflict and violence. Coming from her home in Burundi, she fled with her husband and children to find a better place somewhere else, the place with most potential being Kigali, Rwanda. Back in Burundi, Annick fled with nothing but herself, her kids, and her husband. She didn’t have anything to start out in Kigali, she was just hoping and relying on her own skills to live and hopefully thrive under her already inauspicious circumstances. Luckily, Annick had her own experiences with being self-sufficient and providing for her family. So, inspired by Kigali’s good reputation with business and work ethic, she decided to start selling LPG, specifically propane with the help of her cousin referring her to Inkomoko’s Refugee Program, a pan-African business accelerator that also works with the UNHCR, It was here where she officially started a business with her younger brother to start sellingpropane to individual households in gas cylinders. With the help of Inkomoko and UNHCR, she now runs a small shop selling clean energy gas cylinders and providing for her family like she intended. “They gave me strength and hope to continue, because I was giving up.” she notes, now living her life as a successful entrepreneur. Now fueled by their support and resilience to keep pushing, she still lives a stable life to this day.

Sources : kiva.org, unrefugees.org, media.un.org, & unhcr.ca