Pulitzer Center Untold Stories

Saying goodbye to Neema's brothers

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Dear Bill and Igey,

When we first met, I wondered if you would grow up to read these stories.  Your teachers were worried about you learning to read, and neither of you had really seen the Internet, so it seemed like it would be a long time before that happened.

But this year, you surprised everyone. Suddenly, your parents weren’t the only ones who realized how smart and funny you are. Your teachers could see it. Your friends could see it. People following these stories saw it and cared about you from across the world. And you boys not only started reading – you started going online, then on friends’ Facebook pages. I know now that you will see all of this much sooner than I imagined.

So as this project ends today, I want to tell you...  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Hear an audio interview concluding the Little Bill Clinton project, and an update on Neema's legal situation>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

A hope-filled farewell to Neema

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Neema's son Briton "Toni" Joseph, on our final day together

I spent my last day in Tanzania with Neema and Briton.  When Toni spotted me walking down the path to their house, he ran up and gave me one of his somber leg-hugs.  So began the strangest and most wonderful day I spent with them.  It ended with tears, and the hope of a journey.  But it started with a shock.  Continue reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

The friends Bill Clinton left behind in Africa

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Emma (r.) plays in the grass with his friend Jean in Kanembwa camp in April.  His family is now in the final rounds of resettlement interviews with US immigration.  They have asked to be sent to Atlanta, so they can be with Bill's family.

Until they were 6, Bill and his friends Emmanuel and Jean-Jacques lived together in Mkugwa, a camp of 2,000 Central African refugees in Northwest Tanzania.  Their parents were close friends, and the boys grew up sharing meals, soccer games, wheelbarrow rides.  Then, in October 2006, everything changed.

First, Bill’s family won the “resettlement lottery”and were granted visas to the United States.  Then Mkugwa closed, and Emma’s and Jean-Jacques’s families were sent on to different  camps, different probable futures.  Gulfs started to yawn among the three boys’ experiences.  Today, the onetime soccer buddies are nearly 10.  For a glimpse of their lives now, click below.

See the original post in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

Mkugwa’s mark on Little Bill Clinton

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Bill Clinton Hadam at age 5 or 6 in Mkugwa camp (courtesy of the family; photographer unknown)

All this year, I’ve been wondering about the first six years of Bill’s life, in Mkugwa refugee camp.

I’ve asked him about the place countless times, and he remembers a few things about it: making his own soccer balls, a time he fell in scalding water.  His brother Igey remembers a few more details:  the perils of pit toilets, the ubiquitous chickens.  Their sister Neema, of course, has the most searing memories of the camp’s dangers.  Their parents don’t like talking about all the illness and unhappiness that marked their camp life, but a few funny stories about life there are starting to emerge.

I hoped to leave Tanzania with more insight about the former life of the little boy I’ve gotten to know across an ocean.  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

Changing gender roles in Tanzania’s refugee camps

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

The men sat around in a circle of chairs and benches, smoking, chatting, and playing board games.  Their wives spent hours cooking, cleaning, tending kids, and hauling five-gallon water buckets from the pump on their heads.  Men had first, last, and nicknames.  Women were known by their kids:  Mama Grace, Mama Elisa, Mama Billy.  The gender roles in Kanembwa refugee camp, in northwestern Tanzania, seemed plenty strict to me.

But when six of Hassan’s male friends joined me and translator Pablo Joseph for a discussion one afternoon in Kanembwa, the men were upset.  Camp life had turned the traditional Congolese social order on its head, they said, and women were getting uppity.

“Her rights, she knows,” said former human rights activist Dieudonné Mukucha, “her responsibilities, she forgets.”  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

Brave or foolish: Friends weigh in on Neema’s choice to run away

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Neema's friend from Mkugwa camp, 16-year-old Sarra Sango, says it makes sense to her.

Why did Neema do it?  In Tanzania, I spent a lot of time trying to understand more – emotionally and culturally – about the decision Bill Clinton’s sister made as a young teen to run away and leave her family.

Neema says she regrets the choice to flee the camp after her rape by two older boys – as do her parents.  In Mtabila camp, old friends Jean-Paul Rukundo and his wife were sympathetic, but as parents of eight children, they said they couldn’t support her decision.  Friends Eva Sango and her husband, whom I met in Kanembwa camp awaiting their resettlement overseas, saw the whole thing as a tragedy.  But no, the parents of five agreed, Neema shouldn’t have run away.

Not until near the end of my visit to Kanembwa, when I stole a cool moment on the floor of Eva’s mud-brick house, did I hear another story.  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>  

Learn more about this reporting project>>

Little Bill Clinton’s celebrity dad

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Two. That’s how many friends Hassan and Dawami told me they had in refugee camps in Tanzania as I prepared to go there. Thanks to the generous help of the United Nations refugee agency, I planned a week of travel around these five words: “Jean-Paul Rukundo, Mtabila” and “Eva, Kanembwa.”  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

The Ambassador's visit

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

Acting US Ambassador Larry Andre (center) addressed refugees in Mtabila about their prospects after they leave the camp.

It was an awkward assignment.  When acting US Ambassador to Tanzania Larry Andre pulled into Mtabila refugee camp in April, in a convoy of mud-darkened Land Cruisers that disgorged a crowd of United Nations and government officials and embassy personnel, he looked uncomfortable.

Before he stepped into the thick orange mud, I had never actually seen my country being represented overseas, person-to-person.  Larry, a veteran Africa hand, had arrived at this camp of 40,000 Burundians in northwest Tanzania to deliver an uncomfortable message:  Uncle Sam does not want you.  What I saw that afternoon made me both proud and embarrassed to be an American.  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

They got her goat at 'The Sheraton'

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

After a week and a half in Tanzania, I fancied myself something of a connoisseur of goat-on-a-stick. Neema and I had lunched at a series of what seemed to me such marginal establishments– and I’d not only survived, but enjoyed, the plates of dubious meat and sodden fries – that I was starting to get a little cocky. Then, I visited The Sheraton.  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>

When a refugee camp closes – where do refugees go?

Mary Wiltenburg, for the Pulitzer Center

It wasn’t just the rain that beat down on the morning I visited Mtabila refugee camp, turning the roads to muck and leaving chickens shivering in little huddles under the eaves of the mud-brick houses. Even in the blazing heat of the afternoon before, the camp was a depressing place.

The reason – besides the desperation and need in this camp of 40,000 Burundian refugees near Kasulu, Tanzania – is an exodus now underway. The Tanzanian government, in recent decades one of the most generous hosts of refugee populations in Africa, is nearing the end of a two-year effort to shut down its camps. All Burundian refugees – some who fled ethnic violence in their homeland in 1972, others when it erupted again in 1993 – are scheduled to be sent home by July 1, by force if necessary.

Among them are some close friends of Bill’s family from their former camp: father Jean-Paul Rukundo, mother Marcellina Hatungimana, and their eight kids – including Bill’s old soccer buddy Jean-Jacques, and two teenage girls who were friends with his sister Neema.  Keep reading in The Christian Science Monitor>>

Learn more about this reporting project>>