Staff Spotlight | Anitha Kavuna

Anitha Kavuna is the CRIS Pre-Arrival Specialist.

“My husband and I won the visa lottery in Rwanda to move to the United States. After months of preparation and paperwork, we arrived in Dayton, Ohio, with our newborn daughter, three suitcases, $3,000 in cash, and the contact information for one of my sister’s friends who was living here. 

We rented our first apartment two weeks after we arrived, but we had few resources left to furnish it. We got the first jobs we could find. For the first several months, I drove each night to work at SugarCreek Packing Plant. My husband went back to school to earn a U.S. degree in software engineering. He would come back from a full day of school, leave the car running, and I would leave for my job. He now works as a software engineer at J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., and I have been a part of the CRIS team for almost two years as the Pre-Arrival Specialist.

The concept of home has always been an abstract one for me. Growing up as a young Tutsi girl in the Democratic Republic of Congo, people often made comments about my family heritage as if it were foreign. Moving to Rwanda as a teenager, I felt equally out of place, with attention drawn to me coming from DRC. Even after living in the U.S. for years, I am still often asked, ‘Where are you from?’ because of my accent. Throughout these chapters of my life, I seem to ask myself a similar question, ‘Where is home?’ 

I am sure there is a connection between my lived experience of never feeling quite at home and the work I now do at CRIS. I help newly arrived refugees move into safe, permanent homes furnished and stocked with the basic necessities every single day. I hope that my small part in their journey propels them closer to their own sense of home.”