Fatuma Rukundo Alimasi gestured toward two garden beds on the tiny farm she and her husband run in suburban Westbury.

“My nursery,” she said.

She looked at the seedlings tenderly: bok choi, lettuce, red cabbage, all awaiting their move to the furrows where they’ll reach full size.

Fatuma knows what it’s like to be transplanted.

She and her family fled the Democratic Republic of Congo, and from a refugee camp in Uganda were resettled to Houston. They landed with no English, few American job skills and a ticking clock. They didn’t know basic things about the United States, like how to catch a bus. But the federal funds that help pay rent and bills run dry after only a few months, and after that, they’re expected to support themselves.

The Alimasis are clearly a success story in a city that for decades has been a hub for refugee resettlement. The hardworking couple show just how well refugees can do in Houston, even when they arrive with little to no English and no highly marketable skills. But their story also shows how daunting the odds are against people like them. They got lucky twice: once to be resettled from a refugee camp and again when a nonprofit helped them to start their farm.

‘If you can, run away’

In Uvira, a mountain city in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Fatuma’s husband, Toto Alimasi — everyone called him Alimasi — taught high school French and was the minister of a 3,000-member Pentecostal church. Fatuma took care of their nine children and sang in the choir.

In Uvira, everyone knew Alimasi, in part because of his church and in part because he was president of a civil-liberties group that taught people about their legal rights. When those rights were violated, people turned to him to report those abuses to the government.

One night, Alimasi’s secretary was shot to death. The killer was never found.

A few months later, a gunman killed the Pentecostal pastor in a neighboring city.

Then the police came to Alimasi. “Alimasi,” he says they asked, “what are you doing with your life?”

He spent that night, 12 years ago, in jail. The city’s mayor came to get him out, he said. “The mayor told me, ‘Alimasi, if you can, run away.’”

So they fled: Alimasi and Fatuma, their children and a handful of nieces and nephews — 17 people in all.

They left behind their house, their cows, their church, their country. They left the choir. They left the garden. And they left Uvira, the city where everyone knew Alimasi’s name.

The survival garden

They ended up in Uganda, in the enormous Nakivale refugee settlement. They slept on the ground. Each person was allotted one bottle of oil, 1 pound of corn, 1 pound of beans per month. Those allotments weren’t enough to survive on. But they were allowed to grow vegetables. Their garden kept them alive.

Alimasi started a new church, and it grew to 1,000 people. The refugees, hungry, prayed for help.

At any given moment, there are far more refugees than slots for resettlement. According to the United Nations agency that handles refugees, in 2019 there were roughly 26 million people who’d been forced to flee their countries because of war, persecution or violence. Of those, the U.N. offered resettlement to fewer than 100,000.

Alimasi and Fatuma were among the lucky ones. After they’d been in the camp three years, an official from the United Nations Refugee Agency interviewed Alimasi and identified the family as some of the most vulnerable, and therefore eligible for resettlement.

Alimasi was amazed: In a place where everything had a price, the official had not asked him to pay one dollar. After they passed strict security checks, the whole family was assigned to be resettled in the United States.

Specifically, they were assigned to Houston, which at the time resettled more refugees than any other city in the world. Between 2010 and 2014, the United States accepted more than 70 percent of the refugees resettled by the U.N., and Houston — with its job-spinning economy and strong refugee-resettling nonprofits — was the city that accepted the most. Friday, Gov. Greg Abbott announced that Texas will no longer allow refugee resettlement, becoming the first state to do so.

Kale, beets, bananas

The family’s plane landed here Sept. 20, 2011.

Alimasi knows the date by heart: the beginning of their new life in America.

Catholic Charities picked the family up at the airport and drove them to an apartment on Harwin. The U.S. government contracts with nine nonprofit organizations to handle refugee resettlement. For the first few months, those resettlement agencies pay the newcomers’ rent, make sure they have food and clothing and assign them social workers. The caseworkers help with life skills — how do you catch a bus? How do supermarkets work? How do you get car insurance?

The agencies also help the refugees learn English. Alimasi, who was fluent in Swahili, French and Igbo, worked to expand the little English he knew. Fatuma, who spoke only Swahili, started from scratch.

The clock was ticking: The money the federal government pays resettlement agencies runs dry after only a few months. After refugees’ first few months, they’re largely on their own, sink or swim, with only a little in the way of support.

That short period to become self-sufficient has been American policy since long before the Trump administration. Starting in the 1980s, U.S. financial support dropped from about $12,500 per capita to roughly $3,500 in 2015.

According to a 2018 report by the Rice Kinder Institute, that’s even more true in Houston than in other cities. Here, according to researchers Yan Digilov and Yehuda Sharim, “refugees are forced into rapid employment opportunities at the cost of their long-term health, education and economic stability.” They take a job — any job they can do — fast.

The Alimasis’ Catholic Charities caseworker helped them land janitorial jobs at the Galleria and at Shell Oil. Those jobs didn’t pay much, and Alimasi, used to being his own boss, disliked working nights and being told exactly what to do and when to do it. But it was still far, far better than the struggle to survive in the refugee camp.

As Alimasi does everywhere he goes, he started a church. Not many people in Houston speak Swahili, so this time it was a little church, with only about 30 people.

But that church was a powerful network. After Alimasi and Fatuma had been in the U.S. only a couple of years, a church member told them about Plant It Forward, a group that helped refugees start small urban farms.

Founded in 2011, Plant It Forward aimed to match small parcels of underused land, made available by donors, with refugees who’d farm it. The group calculated that Houston’s high demand for chemical-free, locally grown vegetables, its year-round growing season and ready availability of underused land meant that a refugee who farmed could break free of poverty.

The group secures urban land, such as utility easements, that can be farmed and trains the refugees — all of whom had previous experience farming — to grow crops for American consumers in Houston’s climate. As independent contractors, the refugees control their own schedules and run their own farms; they’re free to sell their produce through Plant It Forward’s community-supported agriculture boxes or however else they see fit. Farmed intensively, even a small tract — half to three-quarters of an acre — can produce income of up to $60,000 a year.

This year, 13 Plant It Forward farmers worked on eight farms, said the group’s president, Liz Vallette. The organization could grow exponentially in the next few years, she says, if it can find enough land. At the moment, there are far more would-be refugee farmers than farms.

Three of the little Plant It Forward farms are tucked to one side of Westbury Community Garden, behind the community plots. Fatuma and Alimasi’s is in back.

Since Fatuma joined Alimasi on the farm, it has become the top producer of vegetables for Plant It Forward’s community-supported agriculture boxes. On a crisp day in December, she showed off beets, red cabbage, leeks, baby tatsoi. A few banana trees, ragged after a cold snap, towered over the greens, as did a little stand of sugar cane. At a row of kale, she pulled off leaves with yellow spots and discarded them: Americans don’t eat imperfections.

House in Katy

The couple work long hours on the farm, and their American lives are busy. Recently they bought a house in Katy, and their four youngest children live with them. Alimasi drives an old brown pickup, brought back to life by a son who’s a mechanic. The youngest son is a serious soccer player. Two of their adult children live in Denmark. This summer, their daughter enlisted in the Air Force.

They are acutely conscious, though, of the life they left behind. On his phone, Alimasi keeps photos of recent atrocities in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Since they came to the United States, the situation in Congo has deteriorated, even as the number of refugees resettled here has dropped. In fiscal 2016, the United States accepted roughly 85,000 refugees from around the world. In 2019, it was only 18,000 — the fewest since 1980, when the resettlement program began.

Fatuma and Alimasi became U.S. citizens this year, but English still feels strange in their mouths. They strain to pay the rent for their little church in west Houston; Alimasi hopes to find a room in some bigger church where his congregation can meet for free. Fatuma is still not used to Houston’s winters. The cheerful Ankara prints that she favors are made of light cotton, which is no good against the wind. So she layers pants under her bright dresses, and a puffy black jacket and watch cap on top. Her hands are bare: She hasn’t figured out where to buy gloves.

But winter is short, and this is home now. Fatuma, who recently completed Plant It Forward training, dreams of starting an orchard, of growing mangoes, apples, figs. Trees, she knows, take far longer than lettuces: years, not weeks. It takes time to put down roots. But once they’re established, the fruit is sweet.

lisa.gray@chron.com

twitter.com/LisaGray_HouTX