Gathering celebrates refugees, awareness
About 100 people gathered at the Marlborough Community Association Monday afternoon to celebrate World Refugee Day and hear from refugee advocates, local politicians and refugees themselves.
After the death of two-year-old Alan Kurdi and Canada’s decision to welcome 25,000 Syrian refugees, awareness of refugees in Canada seems to be at an all-time high.
Even so, Calgary’s Centre for Newcomers organized the event as part of its first month-long citywide awareness campaign and to celebrate how refugees have contributed to Canada over the decades.
“We’d like to go into a deeper discussion, and a deeper dive and hopefully get more of the community interested in volunteering and participating and paying attention to what’s going on in the world,” said Anila Lee Yuen, chief executive of the Centre for Newcomers, which served more than 2,000 refugees who resettled in Calgary during the 2015-2016 fiscal year.
“This to educate the public about how hard the refugees work,” said Bukurie Mino, who manages the Centre’s settlements program and herself came to Canada as a refugee from Albania just over two decades ago. Eight months pregnant, she had never before felt so isolated, she told the attendees.
But she made friends with people from all over the world who helped her to ease into Canadian life, she said.
She also faced many of the same challenges that the refugees she helps today face, including little knowledge of English and having to spend years to upgrade her educational qualifications to Canadian standards.
Her eldest daughter Ela, who was born shortly after Mino arrived in Canada and is now studying to be a refugee lawyer, recalls her mother studying until four or five in the morning when she was a little child.
“If you hope, if you do the right thing, if you connect to the right resources, everything is possible,” said Mino, who uses her own story to encourage other refugees.
“I think positive.”