A decade after moving to Tucson from an Ivory Coast refugee camp, Tarwo Jallayu strode across the stage at Catalina Magnet High School and took the oath of U.S. citizenship.
The 18-year-old Catalina graduate was sworn in alongside three of his siblings and 16 other young refugees from Iraq, Jordan, Kenya, Nepal and Senegal during a ceremony Tuesday morning to commemorate World Refugee Day.
“I want to take advantage of what I have here,” Jallayu said after the ceremony, which was attended by more than 150 people and featured dancers from several Asian or African countries. “I want to fight to better my future.”
He is contemplating a career in the Navy or working in the movie industry, a passion born out of watching action movies starring Jackie Chan and Jean-Claude Van Damme in the Ivory Coast refugee camp, where his parents took up residence in the late 1990s after fleeing the civil war in Liberia.
“I’m going to get a better job and show them they can do better,” Jallayu said of his former neighbors in the refugee camp.
About 200 refugees arrived at Tucson Unified School District schools in the last year, bringing the total number in the district to more than 800, said Tsuru Bailey-Jones, refugee services director for TUSD.
The two emcees of Tuesday’s ceremony, Rincon High School’s Mohamed Hussein, 20, and his sister Ruweda Hussein, 18, hope to become U.S. citizens later this year.
After their mother left Mogadishu, Somalia, in search of medical help for their younger brother, Mohamed and Ruweda fled the violence in the streets of Mogadishu and ended up in a refugee camp in Kenya, where they stayed from 2008 to 2013.
“Somalia was not safe. The camp was better than Somalia and here is better than Kenya,” Ruweda said, with Mohamed adding: “Even the camps are not safe sometimes.”
Tucson is home to about one-fourth of Arizona’s 70,000 refugees, said Charles Shipman, Arizona state refugee coordinator.
Violence, persecution, natural disasters, disease and famine displace people all over the world, with the current refugee population standing at 16 million people, he told the audience during the ceremony.
About 80 percent of the world’s refugees are women and children, Shipman said. Less than 1 percent of the world’s refugees will find safe haven in a country such as the United States.
“All of us are greatly proud of our refugee community in Tucson,” said Bishop Gerald F. Kicanas of the Tucson Roman Catholic Diocese, adding he appreciates the “new gifts and new talents” refugees bring with them.
Imam Khaled Alazhari of the Islamic Center of Tucson praised the local community for taking in refugees, saying: “The most righteous person in the eyes of God is the person who helps others.”
