„When they agreed that we must go back, our elders, who were taking care of us in Slovakia in Považská, when they agreed that we must go back, because our parents they need us. So one white lady, I can’t remember the village, so she decided that she just run away, she will adopt, she will just capture her son, cause she called it’s her son. So she stole a boy and she ran away with him. So it was like people were looking for her in Slovakia, Czechoslovakia government was looking for her. So... it’s like... We end up in Prachatice and they say we must go back because we cannot go without that boy. So we must go back to Motel FIM. When we heard that news, we were happy. Because we were almost to travel to go back to Germany to Frankfurt. And when we received the news that we must go back to Považská, everyone was happy. We were happy for that. And we called that boy he was a hero. Because he is the one that turn us back to go to Motel FIM.
And who was the boy?
Mwenga. His name is Mwenga. Yeah. It’s only since then I’ve never seen that boy. OK, so then we went back to Motel FIM, we stayed there, we wait until maybe two to three days. Then they got the woman and they go the boy. The brought the boy in Motel FIM. So life came back to normal, so they give us two months again to stay.”
„Lukas, I was just feeling like, where I am? Where am I? Where I’m going and OK, this is Namibia, OK. But it’s only the environment of Namibia and environment of Czech is bit different and I was just like I’m in heat country. So I was not so much happy. Because my vision, my mind was just back in Europe. Even the first time I slept in bed in Namibia and I woke up, I thought I sleep in Motel FIM. When I woke up just in the bed and check: 'Im just in Namibia? Wow. What is this place anyway?’ I was not comfortable with it. Yeah. Since I came in, I was notcmofortable. But since I am with my friends, I am with my brothers friends, cause I call them my brothers, I was bit OK, cause we can speak Slovak, we can share stories of Europe. It was second day, third day and one month it was OK, cause we still had that memories. Because it’s new. It’s still fresh. Yeah. It was like that.”
Nekongo Michael Teophelus was born on June 6, 1979 in the Lubango transit refugee camp, one of the camps of the SWAPO revolutionary movement. The movement fought for the independence of Namibia from the Republic of South Africa (JAR). He spent his first years in the Kwanza-Sul camp, mostly without his parents, under the care of nannies and strangers. As a ten-year-old, he was selected for a group of 63 Namibian children from exile who were sent to Czechoslovakia in September 1989 as part of international aid to the Marxist SWAPO movement by the countries of the former Soviet bloc. Until September 1991, he lived in the Fim motel in Považská Bystrica, Slovakia. After that, a group of Namibian children were repatriated to Namibia together with the one who had been living in the Czech Republic since 1985. He spent the following year at a boarding school in the village Usakos, where the returning children tried to integrate into Namibian society. Since returning to his homeland, he has lived in the poorer north of the country. He graduated from high school, then was a successful player in the second Namibian football league. In 2022, he was working as a laborer on a potato farm near the Namibian city Tsumeb. He was single and had four children.
