‘This team was the hope of other kids in Burundi’
CHAPERONE HAUNTED BY REALIZATION SIX USED U.S. TRIP TO VANISH
From where he was sitting, Canisius Bindaba couldn’t see his students. The 34-year-old from Burundi was in the stands at a cavernous U.S. concert hall on Tuesday for the closing ceremonies of an international robotics competition.
The six Burundian teenagers in his charge were supposedly on the floor of the hall in Washington, D.C. They were wearing blue T-shirts. But so was every other participant from roughly 160 national teams at the First Global Challenge.
“I could not really know who is who,” Bindaba told the National Post on Sunday.
After the ceremony, at Daughters of the American Revolution Constitution Hall, the six students from Team Burundi, all between 16 and 18 years old, vanished.
Almost a week later, a Washington Metropolitan Police investigation is ongoing, with little indication of why they left or where they went — save for a report that two of the six were spotted crossing into Canada.
When the ceremonies finished Tuesday, Bindaba, the team’s designated mentor and chaperone, said he went about packing his team’s robot into a box. There were buses outside, shuttling the students back to their dorms at Trinity Washington University about six kilometres away.
Bindaba saw one of his students and asked him to help him load a box onto one of the shuttle buses. None of the others were around.
“I thought maybe they would be around, talking with their friends,” he said. He expected them to take one of the shuttles back to campus.
At the dorm, the student helped cart the box up to Bindaba’s room, then excused himself. “I’m going to have a bath,” Bindaba recalled him saying.
Bindaba was to meet the team at the dorm for pizza. He wanted to debrief after the competition, where his team had placed 73rd out of 163 teams — a decent accomplishment considering Bindaba had no experience in robotics before starting preparations in March.
His plan, he said, was return home to Burundi on Wednesday with the students and teach other kids what they’d learned.
Before he left for Washington, a friend in Burundi had told him, “be careful that some of them might run.
“Are you sure the kids will come back?” the friend said. “I’m sure,” Bindaba said. Back at the dorm, however, he started to feel uneasy. He opened his bag and saw the students had put their dorm keys and competition badges inside.
“I said, ‘No. There is something wrong here.’ ”
He knocked on their doors. “There was no one there,” he said. Even the boy who helped with the box was gone.
“I started feeling really bad in my gut,” he said.
Bindaba reported them missing, asking event organizers to sweep Constitution Hall. He walked all over the campus looking for them, asking other national teams if they’d seen anything. There was a party, someone told him.
“And I said, ‘No no, they would have told me because I have to give permission.’ ”
“I thought maybe they went out to have fun,” he said. “But I started questioning myself, ‘Why? We had a plan to get pizza together. Something must be happening right now.’ ”
By Wednesday, before dawn, Washington police had opened a missing persons investigation. Bindaba said investigators asked him about “the reality” of life in Burundi, apparently trying to determine whether the teens had a reason to flee.
“I could not really hold my tears,” he said. “This team was the hope of other kids in Burundi.”
In 2015, Burundi went through unrest not seen since the end of its civil war in 2005, when protests broke out over the constitutionality of President Pierre Nkurunziza’s reelection for a third time, according to the BBC. Global Affairs Canada still warns against travel to the East African country “due to ongoing political tensions, civil unrest and daily armed violence.”
And last month, Canada designated refugees claims from Burundi to be eligible for “expedited processing.”
But Bindaba said the situation is stabilizing. Since March, he said, the team worked on their robot in Burundi roughly three nights a week. The students often wanted to work late.
“I’d say ‘Let’s go back home, guys, it’s getting dark.’ And they’d say, ‘No let’s just finish this. Let’s fix this part of the robot,’ ” Bindaba said. On those walks home, late at night, “no one gave them any trouble.”
He said he takes issue with the assumption that the teens left because Burundi is unsafe.
“I came back,” he said from his home. “As I am talking right now, there is no shooting.”
What’s more likely, he said, is the students were looking “to get a better life.” He believes they had help disappearing, saying it’s improbable that six teens who don’t speak English, can’t drive and had never left Burundi managed to navigate a metropolis alone and even cross an international border.
“Alright, they planned it,” he said, “maybe with people who are underground in the United States and their parents.”
Bindaba earlier told The Washington Post that his frantic texts to the teens’ parents were met with a suspicious calmness — with one mother telling him to cool down.
“I am not seeing the kids,” he told the paper. “How can I cool down?”
When he returned home on Friday, one of the parents visited him. He asked if the father knew in advance about a plan to disappear, if they all kept it from him. The father was as astonished as he was, Bindaba said.
As of Sunday, the teens’ whereabouts were still unclear. Don Charu Ingabire, 16, and 17-year-old Audrey Mwamikazi, were seen entering Canada, Washington police announced on Thursday morning. Canadian authorities have refused to comment on the case, citing privacy concerns. The Canada Border Services Agency would not answer questions about whether the pair were considered safe.
The others are still unaccounted for.
For Bindaba, reports that at least two had crossed into Canada brought some comfort.
“At least I know you guys really respect human life,” he said.
“How am I going to manage? I had already made all kinds of plans.”
“Mostly, what made me sad was to come back alone.”
I AM NOT SEEING THE KIDS. HOW CAN I COOL DOWN?