SYRIAN WAVE
Refugees share stories of building new lives in Windsor
It began with a few hundred refugees coming to Windsor in late 2015, but quickly expanded to 1,000 — and then the numbers grew beyond that.
Now, Windsor is experiencing a “secondary migration” of Syrians who first arrived in other Canadian cities, say local officials.
Still, the influx of so many escaping turmoil in the Middle East — almost two-thirds of the newcomers are children — has felt more like a gentle ripple as families settle in and begin building new lives. The official tally from late 2015 to the start of 2018 shows Windsor received more than 1,400 government-assisted and privately sponsored Syrian refugees with another 200 settling in Leamington. Hundreds more are believed to have moved to the region as part of the secondary migration.
In an average year, about 300 refugees from around the world settle in Windsor.
There were initial concerns about the city’s early commitment to open its doors to 1,000 of the 35,000 Syrians the federal government pledged to accept in late 2015. Government-assisted refugees are given a year of federal public support, after which they must fend for themselves or turn to municipally provided social assistance.
Ontario Works recipients are not tracked based on citizenship, but the Syrian influx doesn’t appear to have triggered an uptick in local caseload numbers, which have been on a steady decline over the past four years, said Jelena Payne, the city’s commissioner of community development and health. Windsor had an Ontario Works caseload of 9,101 in January 2016 — the first big month of the Syrian inflow — while the caseload in January 2018 was 8,241. “We’ve hopefully helped people integrate. There was a definite coming together of the community,” said Payne. When it comes to the number of refugees arriving in Windsor, “we’ve gone back to business as usual.”
“We had great buy-in from the community. The collaboration was amazing,” said Kathleen Thomas, executive director of the Multicultural Council of Windsor-Essex, the lead agency assigned by Ottawa to co-ordinate services for Syrian refugees.
More than 90 organizations participated in that effort, part of which was responding to calls from citizens asking how they could help.
The biggest success has been on the new-found sense of safety and security felt by the families, she said.
MOHAMAD AND HANADI
Mohamad Amer Haboub and his wife Hanadi Almaraiati could barely wait to get back to business after arriving in Windsor. On March 22, just 14 months after setting foot in Canada, they opened Sham Sweets at 582 Wyandotte St. E., located in one of the most multicultural retail districts in Windsor.
Their store, specializing in fresh ba’lawah, kinafah and other Arabic desserts popular in the Middle East, is open seven days a week, from 9:30 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. (except Monday mornings). Just the two of them run the operation, spelling each other off so they can both take English classes. Haboub’s family, based in the capital city of Damascus, had a chain of baked-desserts franchises in Syria with about 130 employees. He says half of the six outlets have been bombed out of existence. The civil war back home, now in its eighth year, has generated an estimated 500,000 dead and millions of refugees. Business in Windsor has been good and word of mouth has already brought in clients from London and Leamington. It’s a tiny operation, with the rear kitchen and front retail area taking up 450 square feet. Haboub said he knows there’s a demand for his sweet treats made fresh with natural ingredients and no chemicals, but it’s a new city and new country, so he wanted to start small. “It is less risk,” the entrepreneur said. For Haboub, 48, the sweets business is just a small part of his Windsor plans. A computer designer and programmer with an engineering background in Syria, he said he’s mastered Level 5 English and once he’s conquered Level 6, he’ll be eligible to enrol in a college computer numerical control machine programmer course so he can enter that field.
Sham Sweets? It’s just “business for family,” he said — something to pay the bills and put food on the table.
Asked how he handles so many obligations and the long hours, he appears to have difficulty understanding the question.
“This is life. If you have no work, (it) is not a good life,” he said. Other recent refugees from the Syrian conflict have begun opening new Windsor businesses, including Le Ballon, a vegetarian restaurant across the street from Sham Sweets, and Alsham Market, a nearby clothing store.
If the war in Syria were to end, Haboub said he’d consider returning one day to visit, but Windsor is now the family’s home. He likes the local inclusiveness and friendliness to strangers and the weather is similar to back home, although snow was flying outside his business on the mid-April day he was interviewed.
Haboub and Almaraiati have a 12-year-old son Abdul in Windsor, but the war in their homeland has scattered the rest of their immediate family around the world. Their daughter, 28, is in Saudi Arabia and their sons, 23 and 19 years old, are in Jordan and Germany.
MUSAAB
Not only are Musaab Almasalmeh’s siblings spread around the globe, his wife and two young children are still stuck in limbo in the Middle East.
Shortly before he arrived in Canada in May 2017, his sister was killed back home in Syria, where two other brothers still live. The Syrian conflict triggered the biggest wave of refugees since the end of the Second World War. Almasalmeh’s other siblings are now living in Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, China and the United Kingdom. Almasalmeh has been given protected person status in Canada, but until he’s granted permanent residency, his wife and two young children remain stranded in the United Arab Emirates city of Dubai, where their latest visas expire in December. Without visas, they would be forced to return to the chaos and violence in Syria. Almasalmeh was in his hometown of Daraa when Syria’s revolution began in March 2011. It was in Daraa where young students were the first Syrians to pick up on the Arab Spring protests then pushing back against dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa. When high schoolers were arrested and their parents asked about them, Almasalmeh said they were told by a local security commander to “get other kids, you’ll never see these ones again.” More protests and then a brutal state crackdown ensued. The violence soon spread across the country with an estimated half-million citizens killed so far, some by poison gas attacks from government troops. Almasalmeh and his family fled to Dubai, where he had been a successful financial services consultant for years until the global recession. Theirs was a precarious situation, however, being Syrian in a country where they had no permanent right to stay. Almasalmeh heard from friends that Windsor was a welcoming place and a year ago he came to the United States on a travel visa before presenting himself at the Canadian border and requesting asylum. While still in the process of arranging affairs for himself and his family, Almasalmeh, who is fluent in English from his business background, is already helping others around him. On the seventh anniversary of the Syrian civil war in March, he and a group of likeminded newcomers announced the establishment of the Syrian Community Centre of Windsor. Located on Ottawa Street next to Lanspeary Park, it’s already a social gathering place for about 100 families with more than 200 children enrolled in weekend Arabiclanguage and other educational and cultural programs. Almasalmeh said that “especially for people from the camps” — going from poverty and crowded conditions where lending trust is fraught with risk and “fake promises” are common — landing in Windsor can be a culture shock that even other immigrants might not comprehend.
He said the idea of the new centre is to complement services, programs and organizations that already exist locally in a comfortable surrounding for people with similar backgrounds who share a language and experiences. The centre operates on a shoestring budget and has received registered charitable status. Almasalmeh said one of the goals is to “train and promote our community members to assume new roles and responsibilities” in their adopted city. Among the Syrian Community Centre’s first members are three families newly arrived from Edmonton and another family from Mississauga, part of the secondary migration.