Syrian family settles down in peaceful Fairfield
Some updates on recent columns:
• On Family Day, we met Syrian refugee Maz Al-Wafai, who spoke of his gratitude for the Victorians who embraced him upon his arrival in Canada last June.
After years of living alone, unwanted and under the radar in Lebanon, it was a shock — in a good way — when the 25-year-old computer programmer found himself with an instant family of two dozen people, the Fairfield sponsors who had spent three years working to bring Maz, his brother Moe, his sister Maissa and her two young children here. Maz was the first to arrive.
Now the rest of them are here, having been greeted by a small mob at the Victoria airport last week. It’s the first time in eight years — since before the war — that the siblings have all been together.
Moe, a 30-year-old computer engineer, had been stranded in Turkey, working for a humanitarian organization there. Chemist Maissa, 32, also made her way here from Turkey, though until recently she and her six- and four-year-old children were stuck in the Al-Wafais’ Syrian hometown of Homs, where bombing and fighting has left most of the city in ruins.
Again it’s a shock, in a good way, to go from that to pleasant, peaceful Victoria. Maz says Maissa feels relief. “She knows she’s safe, the kids are safe.”
Any surprises for the newcomers? “How calm the city is and how nice the people are.” When you make eye contact with strangers on the street, they say hi.
The past week has been a blur as the new arrivals get used to the home their sponsors furnished for them. They’re registering the older girl in school, learning the wonders of online grocery shopping, figuring out what Canadians eat.
“They have tried a lot of food, I can tell you that,” Maz said. “Pizza was popular.”
He says they’re already ahead of him at mastering public transportation: The first time he rode a bus he stuck his pass in the cash box by mistake. “You learn the hard way.”
They’re also relearning, after seven years of war and three years in the queue for Canada, what family feels like.
“After waiting for something for so long, when it finally arrives it almost feels unreal.” • West Coast Trail fans, rejoice: Chez Monique’s will open again in May.
In January, I wrote about Monique Knighton, a legendary Vancouver Island figure who died in Victoria General Hospital on New Year’s Eve at age 78.
Hikers wondered if her death meant the end of Chez Monique’s, which she and husband Peter Knighton opened a quarter century ago just south of Carmanah Point, halfway down the 75-kilometre trail.
As it turns out, family and friends, led by Monique and Peter’s daughter Sandi, will reopen Canada’s least likely/most appreciated restaurant and store — a makeshift oasis whose isolation has allowed it to operate without the regulation and red tape of the urban world — in time for this year’s hiking season.
The challenge turned out to be even more daunting than expected, though. Just after Monique’s death, the site was devastated by the wildest storm in decades, with waves that loomed like the walls of buildings crashing onto the beach. The store was left standing, but giant logs were strewn about like matchsticks. The storm surge even filled the kitchen sink. All the tarps were ripped.
“It literally destroyed everything that was on the beach,” Sandi said Tuesday. “It’s been a logistical nightmare.”
They have spent 10 days clearing debris with come-along winches and chokers packed in through the bush. “I’m hurting now,” she said. Hope people appreciate that when they chow down on their cheeseburgers this summer. • Just in time for the dismantling of the 94-year-old Johnson Street Bridge, the Grumpy Taxpayer$ of Victoria advocacy group has released its estimate of span’s construction cost in 2018 dollars.
The bridge cost $830,000 to build in 1924. Using the Bank of Canada inflation calculator, the Grumpies calculated that would translate to a hair under $12 million today. Compare that with the cost of the new bridge: $105.6 million (so far) or 37 per cent above the amount approved in a referendum.
If it’s any comfort, taxpayers howled in 1924 when overruns forced the city to top up its $420,000 share of the costs with an additional $110,000, a jump of 27 per cent. • Last week’s column about the death of handwriting resulted in a small flood of handwritten letters from correspondents who argued, gently and self-evidently, that cursive writing is not yet kaput.
“Telephone messages are wonderful but there is still something quite special in a letter that you can hold in your hand,” wrote nonagenarian Dorothy Evans, although she added that H.B. MacLean, the author of the onceubiquitous MacLean Method of Handwriting and one of her teachers at Vancouver Normal School, would not approve of her penmanship today (it looked fine to me.)
Next time I’ll write about the death of single-malt scotch and see what arrives in the mail.