With fingers gone, refugees take hold of their future
STORY HAS BECOME A FOCUS OF SYMPATHY AND CRITICISM
There are many differences between the two Ghanaian refugees in Winnipeg, but the most significant comes down to a single thumb.
Razzak Iyal and Seidu Mohammad became the public face of desperation among refugees in the United States after President Donald Trump’s election. A trucker found them half-frozen north of the Canadian border on Christmas Eve. They had walked — sometimes waist deep in snow — across farm fields to avoid being deported from the United States. Their fingers were so severely frostbitten that all of them had to be amputated — with the exception of Iyal’s right thumb.
That single digit means he can fry up his own breakfast, pull on his clothes and pinch the knob of the washing machine to do his laundry. “That thumb I have left helps me a lot,” said Iyal, 35, a former appliance store owner from Accra, Ghana. “I thank God for it.”
Both men won permission to stay permanently in Canada. But while they are rebuilding their lives, their story has become a focus of sympathy and criticism among advocates in Canada, who say their fate shows that the United States is not fair or safe for refugees.
Some advocates argue that Canada should scrap its 13-year-old pact with the United States that requires asylum seekers to demand refuge in the first country of the two in which they arrive. After arriving in one country, refugees are not allowed to enter the other at an official border crossing, which creates a perverse incentive to sneak across the border and then seek asylum.
“We are forcing people to lose fingers and toes, making them go to such lengths to seek our protection,” said Efrat A. Arbel, an assistant law professor at the University of British Columbia.
‘Check the weather’
Others say the story of Iyal and Mohammad is more an example of stupidity mixed with opportunism, pointing out that neither fled their country because of persecution.
“They haven’t had to flee over the bodies of their relatives or undergo torture,” said Karin Gordon, executive director of settlement at the Hospitality House Refugee Ministry in Winnipeg, which has a waiting list of about 30,000 refugees looking for sponsorship to Canada.
While Gordon supports both men personally — and welcomed them into the refugee home she runs in north Winnipeg — she blames them for losing their fingers.
“They should have checked the Weather Channel,” she added, noting they were underdressed for the frigid prairie temperatures. “They were damaged by their own ignorance. They are suffering the consequence of that.”
Three refugee-supporting organisations, including Amnesty International, have started a legal challenge to Canada’s designation of the United States as a “safe country” for asylum seekers under the pact, the Safe Third Country Agreement.
But Canada’s minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, Ahmad Hussain, says government monitoring reports show the US system remains fair. Despite fears among residents along the border that the men would be the first of many to be in the same plight, the rush of asylum seekers heading north has slowed with the warming weather.
“We don’t encourage people to come,” Iyal said. “But if you come, please, check the weather before. My life changed totally. They have to take a lesson from what happened to us.”
The men met by chance on December 23, in a Minneapolis bus station. Each had planned to walk across the border from northern Minnesota into Manitoba, and they decided to join forces and split the fare for a cab. Both admit they were underdressed for the trip, which for both men was the last leg of a long journey across many borders, beginning in Brazil years before.
Iyal left Ghana after a dispute over inheritance with his brothers became violent and put him in the hospital. Police, he said, were unwilling to take action. He bought a ticket to Sao Paulo, Brazil, and from there, made his way slowly — by plane, bus, boat and foot — to the US border, where he filed for asylum and was detained for 21 months.
Mohammad’s journey also took to him to Brazil, trying out for a professional soccer team. After his agent found him in bed with a man — an act that could get him imprisoned in Ghana — and threatened to expose him, Mohammad fled. He, too, made the arduous journey to the United States, where he also asked for asylum and spent seven months in detention.
Both men lost in their hearings. The system, they say, was rigged against them; they could not afford lawyers.
Football dream
In Canada, they were granted legal aid and won their cases.
The road ahead is daunting, particularly for Mohammad, 24, who has only two paddle-like hands. His plastic surgeon has offered to transfer two toes from each foot, which would operate like fingers and offer him complete independence — with all costs covered by Canada’s social medicine programme.
“He is crazy lucky,” said Dr Edward Buchel, head of plastic surgery for the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority. “He ended up in a country willing to put out multimillion dollars for repeated hospital trips, surgeries, drugs, rehab, physiotherapy and occupational therapy for years.”
But to date, Mohammad has refused. He quit school at 11 to train full time as a football player, and he dreams of playing professionally again. For that, he thinks he needs his toes.
Iyal’s prospects seem brighter. Every morning, he showers, makes himself breakfast and boards a city bus to a charity for Muslim women, where he volunteers daily.