FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — Watata Mwenda’s family had it good.

There was no electricity in their village in the Democratic Republic of Congo, but Mr. Mwenda, an itinerant salesman of cattle, gold and other commodities, could afford a battery to power a television. They lived in a brick-and-mortar house, with enough room for his nine children and then some. There was always food on the table.

“Ah, we lived well in the Congo,” Mr. Mwenda, 60, said this week in French, one of the languages he learned in his travels.

But eight years ago, six militiamen invaded the family compound, murdered his oldest son and his son’s wife and briefly kidnapped Mr. Mwenda. The family left everything behind, and after four days of travel by foot, car and dinghy made it to safety in a refugee camp more than 1,000 miles away in Malawi.

This month, they were again lucky to make a skin-of-their-teeth escape, when an International Organization for Migration vehicle pulled into the camp and transported them to an airport, with one-way tickets to the United States.