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Photo by Brianna Soukup
Matondo and her 1-year-old daughter sit in their hotel room in South Portland. Matondo, her husband and their daughter had been in Maine for about a month last January and were among hundreds of families seeking asylum in Maine.
Photo by Gregory Rec
Carrying newly donated backpacks and wearing donated clothes, four girls staying at the Quality Inn with their asylum-seeking families wait to board a bus to take them to school in South Portland.
Photo by Brianna Soukup
Aninha Mbuyi Muka takes food for herself and her children after an employee at the Freeport Inn dropped it off at lunch time in April. She arrived in Maine from Angola in early April with her son, 13, and the two teenage children of her late husband. She initially entered the U.S. through Texas, but wanted to come to Maine because she saw it as a safe place. “Maine is very quiet,” Muka said. “There is no violence. We already left a place that was very violent and dangerous.”
Photo by Gregory Rec
In the parking lot of the Quality Inn in South Portland, Reina Dieu Merci Nsona, right, and two other women who recently arrived in Maine listen as Prince Pombo Mafumba translates information about how to receive a COVID-19 vaccine.
Photo by Gregory Rec
Adolfo Lucadji carries bags of his family’s belongings from their room at the Beach Gardens hotel in Old Orchard Beach. Lucadji, his wife, Carlota, and their two children moved to a hotel in Freeport in late April so the Beach Gardens could make room for seasonal workers and tourists. They are asylum seekers from Angola.
Photo by Brianna Soukup
A group of men spend time outside while one of them gets a haircut at the Freeport Inn in April. The inn is one of the latest hotels in southern Maine to begin housing asylum seekers. The inn’s manager said it would not take reservations through the end of the year to make rooms available for emergency temporary housing.
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Photo by Derek Davis
Christopher Valentim Fonseca Andre, 3, plays outside the Howard Johnson Hotel in South Portland, where he is staying with his family from Angola.
Photo by Gregory Rec
Samuel Kinianga, holding his daughter Charon, looks to Josh Pobrisolo as Prince Pombo Mafumba translates in a trailer in the parking lot of the Quality Inn in South Portland. Kinianga, from the Democratic Republic of Congo, had been in Maine for two months and was filling out paperwork with Mafumba’s help to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Mafumba, who came to Maine two years ago from Angola, has become a critical source of information for newly arrived asylum seekers.
Photo by Gregory Rec
In their hotel room with their two children and a child from a neighboring room, Carlota Lucadji, left, and her husband, Adolfo, listen to Joanna Testa, a human services counselor with the City of Portland, on April 27. In Yarmouth, 37 new students from the Freeport Inn enrolled in the school district.
Photo by Shawn Patrick Ouellette
Luisa Mandiangu,13, standing, an eighth-grader at Memorial Middle School in South Portland who came to Maine from Angola, assists classmate Pedro Sebastiao 13, another eighth-grader from Angola, with an assignment during “target time” an intervention program where students work to get caught up to grade level on school subjects.
Photo by Brianna Soukup
Guylain Lounangou walks down Route 1 toward the room he is staying in at the Freeport Inn with a rice cooker in-hand. The hotels rooms don’t have kitchens so cooking devices such as rice cookers are necessary. Everyday, Lounangou walks his daughter to the school bus stop and then returns to the hotel, where he stays in his room most of the time. The lack of affordable transportation to and from the hotel is a big challenge. In the Congo, Lounangou was a flight attendant.
Photo by Gregory Rec
Kilembo Joana Mandiangu, 16, pushes Neymar Gabriel Selemani on a bicycle through the parking lot of the Quality Inn in South Portland. Mandiangu, who speaks four languages and aspires to become a journalist, arrived in Maine from Angola with her parents and two sisters in mid-December 2021.
Photo by Derek Davis
Maria Carlota Fonseca talks on her phone in the lobby of Howard Johnson Hotel in South Portland while her 3-year-old son plays on a luggage carrier. Fonseca, from Angola, came to Maine in May with her husband and two sons in search of a safe place to live. As a new immigrant who doesn’t speak English, she said, it would be nearly impossible to navigate housing without some kind of help. “I’m new here and starting my life from the bottom,” she said, speaking in Portuguese through an interpreter. “As an immigrant, I know everything will be hard for me to do on my own.”
Photo by Gregory Rec
Ndelela and her husband, John, asylum seekers from Angola, found this apartment in Westbrook in May with the help of Greater Portland Family Promise after living in a South Portland hotel since they arrived the previous September. They did not want to use their last name because of political persecution they faced in Angola.
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