What does it mean to carry a household on your own—every day, without pause?

In this third chapter of Marie’s oral history, we move into the structure of her daily life in Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Not as a single moment of crisis, but as a system of responsibilities that repeat, accumulate, and rarely ease.

Marie describes what it means to raise three children as the sole provider. Her days begin before sunrise with housework, and unfold into a constant search for income—through training sessions, community work, and basket-making. Some days bring small earnings. Others bring none. But the routine continues, because it has to.

She speaks about the absence of shared responsibility—how roles that are often divided between two people now rest on one. Work, childcare, caregiving, financial planning, and decision-making all move through her. Even relationships are shaped by this reality, as offers of support often come without acceptance of her children.

Her story also opens into the systems that sustain survival. Informal savings groups. Short-term NGO contracts. Skills learned in fragments—eight days of training that became a livelihood. These are not safety nets. They are adaptations.

What emerges is not a single hardship, but a pattern: work that is unstable, support that is conditional, and a life that must keep moving despite both.

Marie’s voice brings us close to the everyday structure of survival—where nothing is guaranteed, but everything depends on her continuing.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

00:39 Daily Life as a Single Mother07:51Work, Income, and Survival19:08 Childcare and Care Burden22:18 Housing and Living with Your Aunt26:54 Documents, Financial, and Digital Access34:29 Feeding and Adaptation Strategy35:30 Health, Security, and Violence46:16 Faith, Dignity, and Community Life01:00:25 Community, Leadership, and Voice

Why This Story Matters

Across contexts of conflict and economic instability, female heads of household are often expected to sustain families without consistent support, protection, or recognition.

Marie’s story reflects a broader reality: survival is not only about access to aid, but about the daily labor required to hold a household together when systems are uncertain or unavailable.

Her experience highlights how women build continuity in environments where stability is not guaranteed—through work, community knowledge, and persistence.

Listening to her expands our understanding of what it means to “cope.” Not as a temporary state, but as a long-term condition shaped by responsibility.

About The Archive Speaks

The Archive Speaks documents oral histories of displaced women and female heads of households. These stories are preserved as they are told—without interpretation, without alignment—so that lived experiences remain visible in their own terms.

Goma is a city where life continues, but not freely.

In this second part of Marie’s story, we return with her to a place she knows well, yet experiences differently each time she comes back. She speaks about living in Goma now—not as a child moving between homes, but as a mother responsible for three children, navigating a city shaped by conflict, uncertainty, and watchfulness.

She describes what daily life looks like when movement is limited, when trust is fragile, and when routines are built around caution. Even small decisions—when to leave the house, where to go, who to speak to—carry weight. The city has changed. So have the people in it.

Marie also reflects on what it means to raise children in this environment. She manages fear quietly, making sure it does not settle into them the same way it has settled into the city. At the same time, she carries the full responsibility of providing—food, education, stability—without a partner, and with limited support.

Through local women’s groups and small savings systems, she works alongside other women to create some form of continuity. It is not enough to remove the uncertainty, but it allows life to keep moving.

This part of her story does not move toward resolution. It stays with what is here: a woman, her children, and a city where leaving is not always possible.

Timestamps

00:00 Returning to Goma06:10 Living under constant vigilance13:45 Motherhood and responsibility21:30 What it means to stay

About The Archive Speaks

The Archive Speaks documents oral histories of displaced women and female heads of households. These stories are preserved as they are told—without interpretation, without alignment—so that lived experiences remain visible in their own terms.

What does it mean to grow up in a place where conflict never fully leaves?

In Part 1 of Marie’s oral history, we meet her as a daughter of eastern Congo—born in Masisi, raised between Bukavu and Goma, and shaped early by movement, family expectations, and instability. Long before she became a displaced single mother, Marie was already learning how quickly life could change.

She speaks about childhood marked by love and discipline, pride in Congolese identity, and the quiet weight placed on girls inside extended families. Her memories move between schoolyards and family homes, volcanic eruptions and armed conflict, moments of belonging and moments of rejection. Each transition left an imprint.

This episode traces the foundations of Marie’s life—before motherhood, before displacement, before survival became her daily responsibility. It reminds us that displacement is not a single rupture, but a series of early interruptions that shape who women are forced to become.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

00:56 Introduction & Marie’s early life in Masisi, North Kivu07:48 Family, gender expectations, and childhood inside extended households10:37 Growing up between Bukavu and Goma, war and volcano13:26 Education, creativity, and the first losses of stability17:10 Becoming a young woman22:03 Displacement in Marie’s Life

Why This Story Matters

Women in eastern Congo are often displaced long before they are formally called “displaced.” Through conflict, disaster, and family breakdown, many girls grow up learning to adapt early—without protection or choice.

Marie’s story shows how instability shapes womanhood long before adulthood arrives. Listening to her childhood memories helps us understand what displacement takes—not only homes, but futures that were still forming.

About The Archive SpeaksThe Archive Speaks centers the voices of displaced women and female heads of households—stories often missing from policy, media, and historical record. These oral histories reflect lived memory, shaped by time, trauma, and survival. We hold space for these voices without political alignment or editorial interference.

What does life look like when displacement stretches into years?

In the final chapter of Kolima’s oral history, we hear from her as she lives now — inside the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Her days are shaped by sickness, ration schedules, paperwork, and the quiet labor of keeping a household together without a husband or extended family nearby.

Kolima speaks about managing illness with limited medical care, repairing her shelter after landslides, standing in long lines for food, gas, and cash assistance, and raising her children while navigating systems that were never designed for women doing everything alone. She shares the work she once did in Myanmar, the work she wishes she could do now, and the small skills she hopes to learn so she can survive through honest labor.

This episode is not about escape or resolution. It is about continuation. About what it takes to endure when displacement becomes routine and when survival depends on patience, faith, and the support of other women living through the same conditions.

Kolima’s story brings us inside the everyday reality of Rohingya women leading households — not as statistics, but as people living full lives inside constraint.

This oral history was recorded live inside the refugee camps in Bangladesh in partnership with the Ziabul Hossain Foundation, whose community-based work made it possible for Kolima’s voice to be documented where she lives.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

00:00 Fleeing Myanmar06:32 The Struggle for Shelters10:34 Living conditions and Rations15:58 Access to livelihood and means for income16:39 Hygiene and Security in the camp21:44 Necessities outside of basic needs23:30 Work for Rohingya Refugees28:10 Registration problems31:20 Open drains and unsafe latrines in the camp31:59 WATER PROBLEMS33:05 Kolima's son, and her problems as a widow

Why This Story Matters

For many Rohingya women, displacement is not defined by the moment they fled — it is defined by the years that followed. Female heads of household often carry the heaviest burden: caring for children, managing aid systems, maintaining shelters, and making daily decisions without income or protection.

Kolima’s story shows how survival is built through accumulation — of labor, patience, and care — rather than through singular moments of resilience. Her testimony helps us understand displacement as a condition that reshapes every part of daily life.

Listening to her is an act of recognition.

The Archive Speaks centers the voices of refugee and internally displaced women leading households—stories often missing from policy, media, and historical record.

These oral histories reflect personal memory, shaped by time, trauma, and survival. The Refugee Archive preserves these stories without political alignment or editorial interference—so women can speak in their own words, on their own terms.

What does it mean to learn survival before you have words for it?

In the first chapter of Kolima’s oral history, we meet a Rohingya woman whose early life was shaped by family, restraint, and the quiet labor expected of girls as they grew into womanhood. Her story begins in Rakhine State, Myanmar, where daily life unfolded inside the boundaries of tradition, poverty, and increasing restriction.

Kolima speaks about growing up, reaching maturity, and how her world narrowed as expectations changed. Education faded from reach. Movement became limited. Skills learned at home—especially sewing—slowly became a way to stay useful, to contribute, and to imagine a future that still had shape.

Part 1 is about beginnings. Not displacement yet. Not the camps. But the first stitch—how women’s work is learned early, often silently, and how those skills later become lifelines when everything else is taken away.

This oral history was recorded live inside the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh in partnership with the Ziabul Hossain Foundation, whose work supports Rohingya women through education, documentation, and community-based programs.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

00:00 Introduction to Kolima00:55 Childhood and family life in Rakhine State17:33 Growing into womanhood19:22 Getting married at 15

Why This Story Matters

Rohingya women are often spoken about only after displacement—rarely before. Kolima’s story reminds us that long before camps, borders, and aid systems, women were already navigating limits placed on their bodies, movement, and futures.

For female heads of households, these early skills are not incidental. They become the difference between dependence and survival. Between silence and self-reliance.

Listening to Kolima helps us understand how displacement doesn’t begin at the border—it begins much earlier, in the lives women are taught to live.

The Archive Speaks centers the voices of refugee and internally displaced women leading households—stories often missing from policy, media, and historical record.

These oral histories reflect personal memory, shaped by time, trauma, and survival. The Refugee Archive preserves these stories without political alignment or editorial interference—so women can speak in their own words, on their own terms.

In Part 2 of Lucille’s oral history, she returns to the morning everything changed in Goma. One moment, the neighborhood hummed with its usual rhythm — children walking to school, women bargaining at the market, the soft echo of church songs drifting between houses. And then, without warning, the city fell quiet in a way only conflict can silence a place.

Lucille recounts the moment she knew the rebels were close, how the streets emptied, how families pressed together behind locked doors, listening for footsteps that might decide their fate. She speaks about gathering her children, the frantic choices, the haunting calm that comes right before fear breaks open.

Through her voice, we witness what “the day the city went silent” really means for a mother, for a woman responsible for the rhythm of a home. We hear how displacement begins not with movement, but with sound — its absence — and the decisions a mother makes before she ever steps across a border.

This episode continues our commitment to centering the lives and leadership of female heads of households navigating conflict and displacement.

What does it feel like when a familiar city begins to shift — not all at once, but in small, almost invisible ways? In this second chapter of Lucille’s oral history, we return to Goma with her, to the moment when everyday life began to thin out: the quieting streets, the tense glances between neighbors, the unspoken knowledge that something was approaching.

Lucille describes the days when danger didn’t announce itself with gunfire — it seeped in through rumors, empty roads, and mothers calling their children home earlier than usual. These were the first tremors before displacement, the moments that rarely make it into reports but live sharply in a woman’s memory.

Part 2 carries us through those early signals: the city’s slow unraveling, the fear settling beneath ordinary routines, and the moment Lucille understood she could no longer keep her children safe in the only home they’d ever known. Before flight comes awareness. Before a mother runs, she listens.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode:

01:24 Background And Arrival In Goma04:09 Settling In Goma09:40 Life Before And During The War14:20 Financial Difficulties And Daily Struggle16:29 Human Rights And Women’s Security19:47 Your Voice As A Journalist And Your Courage25:10 Hope, Community, And The Future32:33 The Realities Of The War And Current Living37:23 Female-Headed Household

Why This Story Matters:

For many families in eastern Congo — especially mothers raising children amid decades of militia presence and instability — displacement is not a single event. It begins slowly, in the pauses between normal routines, in the silence that replaces a bustling street, in the whispered warnings passed from one household to another.

Yet these intimate, early chapters of displacement are rarely documented. Lucille’s voice opens that space.

Her story reminds us that internally displaced women carry the memory of a world before rupture and the burden of recognizing danger early enough to protect their children. Part 2 reveals the emotional and psychological landscape that precedes flight — the part of conflict the world almost never hears.

Listening to her story widens our understanding of what conflict does long before a family picks up their belongings and runs — and of the vigilance mothers hold long before the world acknowledges a crisis.

These oral histories reflect personal memory, shaped by time, trauma, and survival. The Refugee Archive preserves these voices without political alignment or editorial interference — honoring the stories exactly as they are told.

What does childhood look like in a place where conflict is always humming in the background?In this first chapter of Lucille’s oral history, we meet a daughter of Goma, North Kivu — a girl raised between volcanic soil, family tenderness, and the constant shadow of armed groups moving across her homeland.

Lucille grew up in a house where her father taught strength through discipline, her mother taught gentleness through faith, and the mountains around them taught unpredictability. Before displacement, before the rebels, before everything changed, she lived a life shaped by sickness, laughter, school mornings, and the warning signs of a country unraveling.

Part 1 brings us into those early years — the foundations of who Lucille became long before she was forced to flee. Her story reminds us that every internally displaced woman carries two timelines: the world she lost and the world she had to survive.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

00:33 Introduction01:25 Early memories of illness, caretaking, and family life06:12 Lucille’s childhood in Butembo11:47 Cultural rhythms of Congolese girlhood17:55 Her Womanhood19:45 The prejudices of society21:56 The concept of displacement for Lucille

Why This Story Matters

For many Congolese women, especially those living through decades of conflict in North Kivu, displacement is not a single moment — it’s a lifetime of interruptions. Yet the world rarely hears from internally displaced mothers, even as they hold entire families together in the absence of stability, safety, and support.

Lucille’s voice brings us into the intimate world before the rupture — the place where resilience is first formed. Her childhood memories are not just nostalgia; they are testimony. They remind us that every woman uprooted by war once had a life full of ordinary routines and small joys that deserved to continue.

Listening to her story widens our understanding of what displacement steals — and what women rebuild anyway.

These oral histories reflect personal memory, shaped by time, trauma, and survival. The Refugee Archive holds space for these voices without political alignment or editorial interference.

The Refugee Archive: Global Center for Displaced FHH is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

In the final chapter of Sakena’s story, we return to her quiet corner of Cox’s Bazar, where life moves between memory and prayer.Each morning begins with the call to fajr and ends with the sound of her children’s laughter — reminders that even in exile, life continues.

Sakena reflects on what it means to raise her children alone, to live in a tent that has become home, and to keep faith alive after everything she’s lost.Through her words, we hear the strength of a Rohingya mother whose love outlasts displacement, and whose prayers still reach the soil she once called her own.

This episode holds space for reflection — not on politics, but on the resilience of women who hold families, stories, and hope together when the world looks away.In Sakena’s voice, we hear something sacred: the belief that faith and love can still build a home, even when the ground beneath you isn’t yours.

What You’ll Hear in This Episode

* Sakena’s life after years in Cox’s Bazar

* How faith and motherhood shape her sense of home

* The memory of her husband and the weight of loss

* Finding peace in prayer, and passing hope to her children

* Her reflection on what “home” means when return feels impossible

Why This Story Matters

Female-headed households like Sakena’s make up a quiet majority in displacement.Their stories reveal not just survival, but the invisible labor that sustains entire communities — the love, endurance, and faith that keep life moving forward.

To hear Sakena’s story is to witness history through the eyes of a mother — one who still believes that “where there is hope, there is life, and there is peace.”

The Refugee Archive: Global Center for Displaced FHH is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.