Under the heat, he worked the land for more than 60 years. When authorities walked him into what they called a plane, he prepared to ascend to heaven.

Heaven was not a metaphor. Africa fell away. Soon clouds did, too, just a far-below floor of white. Yohane Nkesebashira and his son, Joshua Nduwayo, born in Burundi in the heart of Africa, said they readied themselves and thought: Maybe the top of the plane would open. If so, they could touch the place where good people go.

Instead, they stepped out in Portland.

“Back to the ground,” the father says.

“But it’s very good ground!” he hurries to add, all of it through an interpreter, and everyone collapses into laughter, a small bright stitch of comedy through veils of tragedy for their nation and their family.

Through Lutheran Community Services Northwest, they arrived in May as refugees, a federal status provided to those who face persecution in the countries of their birth. The planet holds more than 8 million refugees from conflicts, and today draws the spotlight as World Refugee Day.

Only a moment before, backlit by the filmy blinds of a second-floor room in Portland, they remembered grief. For father and son respectively, a wife and mother had been killed; along the way, a son and brother was lost. As for this father and son, they escaped killings on long and separate paths that converged, after five years and only by chance, on the final long stretch that led to this couch on North Farragut Street.

Source: The Oregonian