Sitting at the bus and gas station in Plattsburgh, N.Y., 24-year-old Naomie shakes her head. She spent more than a year on what she calls le chemin de l’enfer, the road to hell, to escape persecution in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and meet up with a long-lost uncle in Montreal, only to end up exhausted and without any money back at this convenience store in upstate New York.
Naomie fled her country to neighbouring Angola in 2021, after she was raped by her stepfather, a soldier. In Angola, with next to no resources for asylum seekers, she met a man in a market who said he was willing to help her and rented a little place for her to stay. Naomie says she didn’t know he was married and that when his wife found out, she called on a group of bandits who stormed her home in the night. One of the men also raped her.
