City-bound refugees stuck in Beirut
An Edmonton group sponsoring a Syrian refugee family that was turned away from a Beirut airport says the federal government must intervene to get the family to Canada.
Four years after fleeing Syria’s civil war, Iwan and Zamzam Da-laa, along with daughters Karima, 3, and 15-month-old Ayat, spent the last of their money travelling to a Lebanon airport Wednesday ready to begin a new life in Edmonton, said Colm MacCarthy, who’s a member of a St. Joseph’s College group sponsoring the family.
Their flight was cancelled and a Lebanese security official took all their immigration documents away, MacCarthy said.
“I think they were probably pretty depressed. They’ve been waiting and hoping to come and give themselves and their kids a chance for a new life,” MacCarthy said.
With the help of a translator, the St. Joseph’s group reached the Da-laa family in Lebanon on Friday, he said. After sleeping on a mosque floor for two nights, the Dalaas found a ride back to their temporary home — an unfinished house north of Beirut.
The family hasn’t received their travel documents back, and they have no idea why the official took them.
Now, the sponsoring group is sending the family money, asking Premier Rachel Notley for assistance, and prodding the federal immigration departmentto intervene.
“We need Canadian officials on the ground over in Lebanon to try and phone this family, somehow get them back out to the airport, or somewhere where they can be reissued documents so they can continue on here to Canada,” MacCarthy said.
He’s afraid they’ll miss out on Canadian airlifts from Lebanon if the problem isn’t resolved quickly.
Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada won’t comment on the case without permission from the family, a department spokeswoman said in an email.
The Dalaas were supposed to be the first of three Syrian families sponsored by St. Joseph’s College groups to arrive in Edmonton.
After pictures circulated of threeyear-old Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, enthusiasm for sponsoring Syrian refugees exploded among the college’s parishioners, said chaplain Rev. Glenn McDonald.
“People were just wild. They were like, ‘Take our money. What can we do to help?’” McDonald said.
Three parish groups have raised enough money to each sponsor a family, plus two single men from Syria.
When they first arrive, the refugees will stay in an apartment in a newly-constructed women’s residence on the University of Alberta campus.
McDonald loved the Dalaas as soon as he saw their picture.
“We feel like we have to push now. They’ll get lost. We need someone to reach in there and pull them out. We need someone with political pull to make this happen,” he said.
Some of those politicians are politely trying to steer well-meaning Canadians away from the airports where Syrians are destined to arrive.
In a Friday statement welcoming Syrians to Edmonton, Mayor Don Iveson asked the public to “refrain from overwhelming the refugees on their arrival at Edmonton International Airport, and respect their and their sponsors’ privacy as they get settled in the coming days and weeks.”
People have called the airport asking when refugees are arriving so they can greet them with donations of warm coats, Canadian flags, soccer balls, and other gifts, spokeswoman Heather Hamilton said.
“It’s very Canadian,” she said. The airport can’t accommodate donations, and won’t release their arrival information for privacy reasons, she said.
The premier also issued a state-ment welcoming refugees to Alberta. “Have no fear,” Notley’s statement reads.
“Canada was largely built by the collective aspirations and values of countless newcomers. Our strength is in our diversity, our sense of inclusion and our commitment to stepping up in a humanitarian crisis.”
At its heart, sponsorship is an invitation, to a stranger, from another country and another culture, into the centre of one’s own circle of circles. It’s a promise to let them lean, when they need it most, when they need it in ways most Canadians can barely fathom.
It is, in other words, a heavy thing. It has weight.
And in a way that often gets lost in easy narratives, it can be difficult and profound: full of joy and misunderstanding, anger, sorrow and in some cases a connection that can be deep and lifelong.
On Friday in Toronto, dozens of newly arrived refugees met their sponsors at an Armenian church in the north end of the city. They were handed tiny Canadian flags. The children were given chocolate. There was naked joy on tired faces, relief and excitement for what might come next.
Most of the refugees at the church Friday were sponsored by family members already living in Canada. On the way inside, Raffi Boudakian hugged his cousin Natalie, who he’d never met before in person. “We were happy to be able to help,” he said.
For other sponsors, though, thousands of them, the refugees they’re bringing in will be complete strangers, with no ties to them or to the community. That process can be a challenge, according to Barbara Gamble.
Gamble was 27 when she first saw TV reports about the Vietnamese boat people. It was the late 1970s. She was already politically active. But the images struck her in a way nothing had before.
Gamble ached to do something, to make a tangible difference, so she joined the sponsorship group Project 4000. And for the next four years, she dedicated a huge part of her life to getting Vietnamese refugees to Ottawa, and settling them in once they’d arrived.
The process “was an eyeopener,” she says.
“The amount of energy (it took) to take on the care of other people — I was a young woman and I hadn’t had to do that yet. That was one surprise,” she says. “The second surprise was how gratifying it was. I don’t think I was prepared for that level of positive feedback and energy. “It was overwhelming.” Back then, Gamble didn’t personally sponsor refugees, she worked more as a supervisor. But she did eventually, taking in families from El Salvador and Iran.
Speaking to her now, it’s clear how much she values that work, how enriching she found it.
But at the same time, she doesn’t think anyone can — or should — be a sponsor. Doing it well involves an enormous commitment of time and emotional energy. It’s a moral commitment, too: a vow of deep friendship to a stranger that can’t be taken back.
“There are many other ways that people can contribute,” Gamble says.
The process requires a significant financial pledge, to begin with, starting at about $27,000 for a family of four. But it’s much more than that, says Brian Dyck, the national resettlement co-ordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee in Manitoba. “You basically are responsible for taking care of them. You’re their social safety net and their community for the first 12 months they’re in Canada.”
There are logistics to sort out: setting up bank accounts and medical and dental appointments, co-ordinating language lessons, finding furniture. But there are less tangible issues, too.
Dr. Soma Ganesan knows what that means for both sponsors and refugees. He spent six months in a Communist re-education camp before he was able to escape Vietnam in the 1970s, and he’s worked with refugees in Vancouver for several decades.
He points out that many refugees, fleeing war or terrorism or poverty, suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder. Helping them through that, giving them a feeling of community and connecting them with the professional care they need, can be a difficult, heart-rending process. It can expose sponsors in a very visceral way to the horrors of other peoples’ lives, and to the limits of what they personally can do to help.
For Gamble, one key is to acknowledge what you can’t do. “You have to know your limitations as a friend,” she says. “And a good friend refers their friends to where they need to go when they need to go there, be it a doctor, a school, a dentist, a psychiatrist, whatever.”
Neil MacCarthy, a spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Toronto, recalls one family his church sponsored that couldn’t be convinced to buy their own food. The church had found them an apartment within walking distance of a grocery store, but for weeks they refused to go. “We couldn’t understand why,” he says. It turned out that, where the family had come from, going for groceries meant dodging snipers. It meant violence and the possibility of rape. “Our understanding of the psychological trauma just wasn’t there,” he says.
There’s also the question of cultural difference. When asked to sum up the challenges of refugee sponsorship, Dyck cites “awkwardness” before anything else. “There will likely be a lot of misunderstanding and need for forgiveness on both sides.”
Remzi Cej came to St. John’s, N.L., as a refugee from Kosovo. His family had wonderful, generous sponsors, he says, but the wires still sometimes got crossed. It took the Cejs months to figure out, for example, that, when their new Newfoundlander friends called their cooking different, it meant they couldn’t stand it.
For all the potential pitfalls of refugee sponsorship, though, the benefits can be enormous, for sponsors and refugees alike.
Decades later, Cej and his family remain close to their sponsors. The sense of community they offered is a big reason the Cejs stayed in St. John’s rather than moving somewhere with a larger Kosovar population.
It wasn’t always easy. “I haven’t had that conversation with them about how difficult it was for them, but I know it was,” Cej says. “They were figuring out what worked for us, what didn’t work for us, whether they were making us uncomfortable.”
But the accumulated gestures, from birthday cakes to dinner invitations and trips to Cape Spear, did add up. “I don’t think they knew the impact of the little things they were doing and the difference it made in our adjustment,” he says. “And I don’t think we realized it at the time either.”
That doesn’t happen in every case. “There can sometimes be unrealistic expectations,” said MacCarthy. Some refugees don’t want a lifelong bond. Others just never click with their sponsors.
Sponsorship, after all, is an unnatural thing, in some ways. It’s an offer of temporary but deep connection, an invitation into the intimate circles that make us whole.
For his part, Ganesan believes most sponsors know what they’re getting into, to some extent. They’re motivated to help and they expect challenges along the way.
But “how challenging it will be,” he says, “I don’t think anybody has any clue.”
THERE WILL LIKELY BE A LOT OF MISUNDERSTANDING AND NEED FOR FORGIVENESS ON BOTH SIDES. — BRIAN DYCK, RESETTLEMENT CO-ORDINATOR