A crash course on Canadian life at camp for young Syrian refugees
— It’s a familiar chant belted out at summer camps across the continent, but the call-and-response uttered at one Toronto day camp on a sticky July day is hesitant, even shy.
“I don’t know what you’ve been told!” an eager counsellor bellows in singsong fashion at a group of young Syrian refugees.
“H.appi Campers cheers the most,” her wary charges mumble back in broken English.
It takes a moment for the middle schoolers to grasp this peculiar game, but three tries later, they gel into a more-or-less unified chorus.
“Five! Six! Seven! Eight! Weeeeeeee’re great!” they holler, letting loose with exuberant cheers.
The fun and games at this day camp are more than just a rite of passage for these new Canadians, they’re a key step in easing their transition into a strange country with unfamiliar customs.
H.appi Camper founder Mazen El-Baba says he tried to design a getaway that would offer the staples of any typical North American summer camp: drama, arts and crafts and sports.
But it would also offer muchneeded lessons tailored to the specific needs of young Syrian refugees: intensive literacy classes, a crash course in Canadian cultural norms and self-esteem exercises.
That last goal is possibly the most challenging, given the fact that most of these war-weary children — 75 in all, ranging in age from five to 15 — have been through horrific traumas.
El-Baba says it’s hard to know exactly how these kids are suffering because they have not been formally diagnosed with behavioural or mental-health issues. But they clearly bear the scars.
When confronted with something they’ve done wrong, it’s not uncommon to hear a frustrated camper say, “I should go kill myself ” or “I should go stab myself or shoot myself,” says El-Baba.
“I’m not sure if they actually understand it because you’re hearing that from an eight-yearold, you’re hearing that from a nine-year-old,” he adds.
“An eight-year-old and nineyear-old saying that, ‘I want to stab myself,’ it’s really hard to hear that. It’s like, ‘Wow, OK, let’s talk more about it.’ That’s some of the things we see.”
Activities were designed with the help of mental-health professionals, family doctors, social workers and crisis-intervention professionals. Every week, each counsellor meets with three mental-health experts to discuss behavioural problems they’ve observed.
But this is not a counselling camp, stresses El-Baba. The biggest goal is to let these kids be kids, and have the opportunity to let loose and have fun.
Soft-spoken 11-year-old Hanin Jaamour says she’s learning a lot, and that’s easing some of her anxiety about attending school in the fall.
She and her family landed in Toronto in February, and she went to school for three months. But she didn’t like it at all.
“Everything is different,” she says in Arabic, with El-Baba translating.
She’s excited about entering Grade 6, but she’s also scared.
“This year it’s going to be harder for English because we’re going to be learning more things,” she frets.
“Here it’s a very diverse culture, you have many people coming from various different countries and backgrounds and religions. Back home we don’t have the mixing of boys and girls and this is completely new, which is amazing.”
Camp supervisor Windemere Jarvis, the only counsellor who doesn’t speak Arabic, says she’s impressed by how eager the kids are to learn new customs.
They’ve opened their hearts and bared their souls everyday, she says, pointing to painful anecdotes about bombings, destroyed homes, and grief that can send her home “crying all night.”
“I was talking to a friend of mine and they said: ‘You know what, I think the most important thing when you hear these stories is not to cry because that is their reality. Just let them talk and let them know that what happened to them was OK and that they’re here now and we want them to be super happy here and feel like this is safe,’” Jarvis says.