Franck Mputu Beya recalls sunny days in the Democratic Republic of the Congo—cutting his siblings’ hair in the shade of the veranda. Happy family moments which ended when an escalation of violence in the Kasai region displaced 1.4 million people, including Beya’s family.
“They were killing everybody, and I made the decision to run,” he recalls.
Beya’s first stop was the capital city of the Kasai-Central province, Kananga, where the hobby he once used to spend time with his family became his livelihood.
“I worked every day from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., saving money until I had enough to leave Congo. When I left my country, I didn’t know where my parents were or where my sister was,” Beya said. “Even today, I don’t know if they killed my parents.
He was 26 when he emigrated to the U.S. after spending 11 months at a detention center in California. He was young, did not yet speak English and was all alone.
A friend, whom Beya met in the detention center, bought him a bus ticket to Maine where he met a Congolese trucker that claimed to have contact with his great uncle, Kazadi “Ray” Ntambwe.
Ntambwe arrived in the U.S. in 1997, retiring from a career with the military. People, he says, go missing from the Congo all the time, but when he caught wind of the violence in 2016, he started to worry.
“I was wondering about them,” Ntambwe said. “People go missing there all the time.”
When contact was finally made between the two, Beya immediately joined Ntambwe in Dallas, Texas, where they initiated a Restoring Family Links case with the American
Franck Mputu Beya and Kazadi “Ray” Ntambwe smile with their Restoring Family Links caseworker Muneera Didarali. She helped Franck reconnect with his sister after
eight years. Red Cross.
Through the program, the Red Cross leverages a network of 191 Red Cross and Red Crescent societies worldwide to help people reconnect with their loved ones when they are separated by events such as armed conflict, natural disasters or migration.
Beya and Ntambwe’s case was assigned to Muneera Didarali, a lead casework volunteer with the Red Cross North Texas Region, who completed an elaborate tracing form and connected with the Red Cross society of the
