” I just wish I could share this beautiful apartment with my children and grandchildren.”
Vasita Hakizimana recently peeled potatoes as she prepared dinner using an electric stove — an everyday task that to her seems like a luxury.
Until recently, cooking dinner meant gathering wood and building a fire.
“It’s so much easier this way, I’m glad I don’t have to use wood anymore,” Ms. Hakizimana said through an interpreter. “It just makes everything faster.”
Ms. Hakizimana and her husband James Girukwayo are two of 19 refugees from Burundi who since July have arrived in Chattanooga from a refugee camp in Tanzania. The African refugees have had to learn how to use things most of them never had seen before such as a television, a stove and a refrigerator.
“We’re still learning how to use a lot of things,” Mr. Girukwayo said as he looked at an old photo album of the family they left behind.
As many as 10,000 refugees from a Hutu camp in Tanzania, known as the “1972 Burundians,” are being resettled in the United States this year, and about 60 of them are expected to relocate to Chattanooga by September, according to resettlement officials.