by Heidi Shin, July 21, 2016.

Jefferson Krua fled Liberia as a refugee at age 5, and eventually settled in Boston, MA. Recently, he’s moved back to Liberia to help with re-building the country’s infrastructure. Credit: Heidi Shin

Mercy Krua and her son Jefferson are having a disagreement. It’s about whether he should move back home.

We’re sitting on her living room couch in Boston, where she’s eager
to show off his childhood photos. This one’s from graduation, another
one’s from the refugee camps in Ghana. She’s reminded of what life was
like before they fled Liberia, in the midst of its bloody civil wars.

Jefferson was just a small child then, and when he was hungry or
tired, she couldn’t offer something as simple as a snack. Tears would
follow, and she would panic, for fear of being discovered: “So you need
to make sure the kids don’t cry, to bring like, to raise awareness that
people or civilians are in the area. Cause they didn’t really care, they
were killing everybody. So it was difficult, terrible.”




But Jefferson remembers it differently. He was just 5 years old when
they left, and it all felt like an adventure. Hiding in the back of a UN
food truck to gain safe passage out of Liberia, escaping through the
jungles of Côte d’Ivoire, before landing in the refugee camps of Ghana,
where they spent seven years.


Jefferson says when they eventually arrived in the US, that’s when he
remembers that life got hard. It was the 1990s, and he was about to
start middle school.

He takes me back to the housing projects in Boston where he spent
most of his teen years. He reminds me to lock the car door, and points
to the street corner where he was jumped and his cousin was mugged, all
while the school crossing guard looked on. We hear the sounds of
squeaking swings, and kids shouting in Cape Verdean and Creole, so they
can be heard over the blaring of the police sirens and ambulances
driving by.


When Jefferson was a kid here, he tells me, he was allowed to go from
home to school to church, and that was it. He kept his head in the
books, and made it to college — to Cornell University, where he met
other Africans, who weren’t refugees, but wealthy international
students. Here it was cool to be African. The university housed a rare
collection of journals, where he learned about Liberia from scholars.

He admits the irony of having come to America, to a remote place like
Ithaca, New York, to learn about his family’s roots. He learned to
speak the language again, studied civil engineering, and set his sights
on going back to Liberia. He’d heard of other young Africans– who went
to school abroad—and were returning to the Continent.


So Jefferson moved back to Liberia last summer, just after the Ebola
crisis had ended. He remembers what it was like, when first arriving.
“Man, I wanted to kiss the ground.  I was so excited,” he says. “It’s
like everybody talks like how you talk in your home, and it’s just a
nice feeling to not be the other.”

Jefferson launched a digital news outlet in Liberia called the Bush Chicken. Here is a photo he took while on assignment, covering a student protest against proposed tuition hikes at the University of Liberia. Credit: Photo courtesy of Jefferson Krua

He launched a digital news outlet called the Bush Chicken, which
trains journalists to report with accuracy. He’s also working on a
start-up to bring a bike share program to Monrovia, where it can take
hours for kids to get to school.

But his mother worries for Jefferson’s safety, and says all she can
do is pray. They no longer have family to look out for Jefferson in
Liberia, and the fruit trees, where they ate mangos and avocados from
daily — all of these were gone as well. The land isn’t theirs anymore,
and so for her, home has vanished, too.

For his mother Mercy, America is the place that’s provided
opportunities. In the refugee camps, there were no jobs to be had. But
here she worked long hours as a nanny, caring for someone else’s kids,
so she would have enough to care for her own. She saved enough to finish
nursing school, and now works as a registered nurse.


“Honestly, I’m from Liberia,” she says. “But wherever I am right now I
consider it to be home. Wherever you are, where you see that you can
make a day-to-day living, I consider it home for me.”

Mercy Krua, and her son Jefferson Krua, on her living room couch in Boston, MA. Credit: Heidi Shin

She doesn’t want to talk about Liberia anymore — the memories make
her sad, she says. Instead, she proudly shows me a picture of US
President Barack Obama and the late civil rights activist Martin Luther
King, Jr. hanging on her living room wall of the home she now owns.

But Jefferson tells me this story about a run-in he had with the
police, just in front of his mother’s house in Boston, when visiting not
too long ago.

“They’re questioning me, but one of them is so aggressive,” Jefferson
says. The policeman shouts at him, as Jefferson searches for his
license: “Why are you taking so long?  Don’t you know it’s cold out
here?”

 Jefferson admits, “And as a black male in America, I am just scared.” He continues, “So with something like that, it’s really hard to call
America home. No matter how much money I can make in this country,
whatever, I’m always going to be a black man in America.”

But in Liberia Jefferson is the 1 percent. He shows me photos of the
resorts he frequents, the press badge he flashes that gives him access.
He can even put on an American accent whenever he needs it — something
that affords you respect in Liberia. He dreams of becoming Minister of
Transportation, and he’s chosen not to become a US citizen, so he can be
poised to enter politics there.

“All my dreams, everything, all my goals in life they’re focused on
Liberia,” says Jefferson.  He continues, “I have these nightmares where,
I wake up and I’d just be sweating, and it’s basically Liberia got into
another war again.  And that’s a fear for me, because I don’t know what
I would do.”

But for now, he’s embraced the opportunities his new home has given
him, and he’s committed to helping rebuild the country, so that he says,
“things like war aren’t so likely to happen again.”

SOURCE: PRI