Finally, at peace

Claudia Sawyer sometimes startles the people she meets on the city bus. They aren’t thrown by her dark skin or the brightly colored Liberian clothing she wears. It’s her sincerity. She always wants to know their stories. She’s never satisfied with a superficial smile.

“What is beyond the smile?” she whispers forcefully. “That is what I ask myself.”

What’s behind hers is some kind of miracle and a story that makes tears flow into grins on the faces of those who listen.

Claudia’s father, Stephen Sawyer, was an aircraft engineer who in the late 1980s worked very closely with Liberia’s President Samuel Doe. His high-profile position made him an obvious target for the National Patriotic Front rebels who invaded Monrovia, the capital city, in 1990 with the aim of overthrowing Doe’s government.

On the night of Sept. 19, they came for Stephen.

Forcing her parents and grandparents to stay in the living room, soldiers pushed Claudia and her four younger sisters into a bedroom and locked the door. They were terrified.

“I jumped through a window and left them all behind,” Claudia says. “I just wanted to go far away from my house.”

Just 10 years old at the time, she never found the help she was looking for. Disoriented and traumatized, she hid for several weeks before returning to find her home in ashes and her family gone.

No one could tell Claudia what had happened to her family. She spent the next five years living with anyone who would allow her to stay for a while, often as a servant, often being badly abused.

“At times I wished I could just go on the road and be killed,” she says.

But she kept going, dodging the war and running every time fighting broke out. One day, she ran to a harbor where thousands of people were trying to crowd onto a ship they didn’t know the destination of.

Bullets pierced the dense crowd. One narrowly missed Claudia and killed the friend who ran beside her. Claudia’s vivid memory of the murder makes her cry.

“When I raised my hands, that bullet passed under my jacket and it went into her eyes,” she says.

Claudia fought her way onto the boat which eventually docked in Ghana, where the Liberians were taken to a small refugee camp.

They hadn’t been there long when Claudia heard of a Liberian independence celebration to be held at Budurum, a refugee camp of about 50,000 people five hours away.

She took a bus there and met many people she knew from her childhood, all wanting to know if she’d heard any news of their families back in Liberia. Her first happy day in years would soon become the best of her life.

“On my way home I was walking to catch the bus and I saw somebody who looked like my mom,” she says in a quivering voice. “I shouted her name, ‘Meme!’ “

When the woman didn’t respond, Claudia shouted again.

It had been six years, but when the woman finally turned around, Claudia saw her mother.

“That is the feeling I will never forget in my life,” she says.

Her mother took her to see all of her sisters, who had grown so much that Claudia had to ask who each one was.

When she asked to see her father, the look on Meme’s face told her the bad news.

Claudia lives her life in loving memory of Stephen Sawyer, who was killed, along with Claudia’s grandparents, the night she was separated from them.

Now 25, she’s a woman full of faith.

“I could never have pulled it through to be where I am without Jesus Christ in my life,” she says.

After nine more years in Budurum and being denied refugee status in Australia and Norway, Claudia and her mother, four sisters and three nieces and nephews arrived in Spokane in February.

World Relief has helped them find jobs and move into an apartment on Bowdish Avenue. With 300 refugees expected to arrive here this year alone, the resettlement agency’s resources are limited.

“There’s so much more we’d like to do,” says Linda Unseth, Northwest regional director at Spokane World Relief.

But Claudia doesn’t want much more.

“You can’t just give a refugee everything,” she says. “You have to allow them to struggle for some things. Otherwise, you make us lazy.”

Claudia is anything but that. When she’s not taking online college prep courses, she’s working fulltime at the Davenport Hotel.

Molly Popchock, ESL coordinator at the Community Colleges of Spokane Adult Education Center, says most of the refugees find jobs in housekeeping. Those with a good grasp of English are sometimes hired at local factories.

Those jobs meet the resettlement requirements and start an income flowing, but they don’t fulfill dreams.

“Do they want to do better than housekeeping?” she says. “Yes. You bet. And they should.”

World Relief requires that each of its offices have at least 75 percent of refugees employed by the time they’ve been here four-and-a-half months. The rule puts additional pressure on people who need language training, want to go to school or have children to care for, but Unseth says that if her office doesn’t meet that goal, World Relief won’t send as many refugees to Spokane and the office will lose funding.

Claudia has been surprised to find that she needs a prescription to get some medicines, her sister is allowed to chew gum in class and there are people who kiss in public.

“In my country an old lady is just going to give you a knock on the back,” she says.

It makes her a little bit homesick. But like most of the African refugees, Claudia says she wouldn’t move back to her home country.

“I miss my dad. I miss my real kind of food, my church, music, the way we dance,” Claudia says. “But I don’t have to go to bed thinking about how many bullets are flying over me. There’s some sort of peace reigning over my heart.”