| Robin Shulman |
TORONTO – Amir Al Jabouli leads the way, holding his Samsung phone out into the snowfall with his bare right hand. The instructions the speakerphone emits are barely audible in the whir of the wind. But Amir is focused.
“Turn right in 200 metres,” comes the tinny, digitised voice of Arabic Google Maps. He turns, and so do his wife, Raghda Altellawi, and their daughters, Ghena, six, and Nagham, five. The girls, who are wearing snow pants and bulky winter boots for the first time, are struggling to walk. They laugh and grab each other’s hands.
They have just come to Canada as refugees from the war in Syria, and this February is their first day of school. It is not only the girls’ first day of school in Canada, but their first ever. Ghena and Nagham were just babies when fighting closed schools in their hometown of Homs. After surviving siege, bombardment and Amir’s kidnapping, they fled to Lebanon, where school was out of reach for many Syrians. Now Nagham is starting junior kindergarten and Ghena, first grade. Twenty-two-year-old Raghda and 31-year-old Amir, who left school in seventh and ninth grades, respectively, are starting full-time English classes.
The snow looks beautiful to Amir, a clean white sheet over a dirty world. Every footstep makes a fresh imprint. It’s how he feels about all of life in Canada.
“I feel reborn,” he has been saying since he landed in Toronto 10 days ago. Of course, there are details to figure out. No one in the family speaks English. They have no jobs. And they know almost no one.
Ghena Jabouli, seven, and Nagham Jabouli, five, demonstrate what they built with click blocks in their new bedroom while their father, Amir Al Jabouli, and mother, Raghda Altellawi, tidy up the toys in their new home
Amir Al Jabouli and Raghda Altellawi pose for a portrait in the living room of their new Toronto home on March 20. They came, with their children, to Canada as refugees from the war in Syria. They have the support of 20 Canadian volunteers and 80 donors
But they do have a network of people poised to help. A group of strangers brought them to Canada, using a private sponsorship process that has become a global model and that some refugee advocates in the United States want to replicate. The programme places the power of selecting, financing and resettling refugees in the hands of regular citizens, as long as the refugees clear Canadian government security, background and health checks.
So as Amir and Raghda navigate this new landscape, they are not alone. Amir was able to access Google Maps because his sponsor Ali Khan had set him up with a new phone and data plan. Sponsor Ashley Hilkewich had taken a day off work to take them to an English assessment, and another sponsor had registered the girls in school. For one year, Amir, Raghda and the girls have the support of about 20 Canadian volunteers and 80 donors.
In December, the world saw images of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau welcoming the first planeload of incoming refugees from Syria in the Toronto airport, telling them, “You are home. Welcome home.” But as many as 10,000 of the more than 26,000 Syrians who have arrived in Canada so far are being privately sponsored by groups of regular Canadians – a dog-walking group, a book club, a choir, officemates, block associations. Young families offer up basement apartments and retirees donate housewares from the attic. Resettling refugees has become a national project.
“I have absolutely never seen anything like this in my entire career in the public service,” says Sarita Bhatla, Canada’s director of refugees.
In the United States – which has the largest refugee resettlement programme in the world but does not permit private sponsorship – lawmakers and refugee advocates are watching Canada. The US is taking in about 10,000 Syrian refugees this fiscal year, but some say private citizens could do much more. A coalition of organisations led by the libertarian Niskanen Center has been lobbying the White House for executive action to authorise a scaled-back version of private sponsorship. The centre proposes that private donors create a fund to cover costs of bringing refugees in excess of the government quotas. There’s a precedent. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan began a programme that allowed private organisations to resettle 16,000 Soviet Jews and Cubans – but it was not renewed. Meanwhile, in the borderless era of Facebook fundraising, US citizens interested in sponsoring Syrian refugees have been donating money to Canadian groups. Tens of thousands of Americans have also offered help to US resettlement agencies, the organisations the federal government contracts to help refugees begin new lives. Watching Canada, refugee advocates wonder: What if there was a mechanism to translate these offers of help into direct action? Could the ability of regular people to take action inject goodwill throughout the society?
Instead, they battle a host of anti-refugee measures, inspired by vitriolic political rhetoric and fear that terrorists posing as refugees could sneak into the country.
Amir and Raghda’s sponsors see their effort as more of an investment than a risk. None have any direct connection to Syria. Many were born in Canada to parents who came from places like Portugal, Hong Kong and Pakistan, under the liberalised immigration policies of Justin Trudeau’s father, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. In a generation, those policies remade Toronto – once a genteel, strait-laced, Anglophile town – so that half the sprawling, tolerant city is foreign-born. Today, Canada ranks among the best countries in the world for integrating newcomers, according to an annual study of 38 developed nations. That makes sponsors feel helping refugees will benefit Canada. “For most of us, it wasn’t charity – it’s more like city-building,” says Ashley.
“Our group is pretty young, a lot of young professionals downtown,” she says. Many, like Amir and Raghda, have young kids, and that will make it easy for the newcomers and the sponsors to connect, Ashley says. But there are differences. Amir is a butcher. Raghda married Amir when she was 14. They are scarred from the war. “The surprise is that they are wonderful people,” says Ashley. “They’re open, fun people who we would have been friends with in any circumstances.”
The idea to bring a Syrian family to Canada had taken shape slowly. Thirty-two-year-old Ashley Hilkewich, a non-profit manager, first brought it up in August. “Then she went quiet,” says her husband, Ali Khan, 43 and a director at Sun Life Financial. The timing wasn’t great: Their daughter, Aria, was only 18 months old, and Ashley had recently started a new job. Evenings were a dash to get home from work, get dinner on the table and get Aria to sleep. There hardly seemed time to support another family.
Raghda Altellawi and Amir Al Jabouli, visit a local supermarket with their sponsor Ali Khan in Toronto, Canada, on February 17. The Syrian couple with their two daughters recently moved to Canada after being sponsored by a Canadian family and their friends
Ali Khan and his sister-in-law Mallory Hilkewich help to carry donated items Syrian family they helped sponsor in Toronto on February 21
Then the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi washed up on the shores of Turkey. The image of the Syrian child face-down in the sand, the Velcro still fastened on his tiny shoes, appeared around the world. Soon it emerged that the child’s extended family had tried and failed to join relatives in Canada through a stalled private sponsorship, after the policies of former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper had created delays. That failure cut to a core sense of national identity. Were Canadians a people that responded to the greatest refugee crisis in decades by turning a blind eye? The consensus was: no. In the midst of a federal election campaign, the political parties began outbidding each other over how many Syrians they would admit. Justin Trudeau, a Liberal, came to office promising to work with private sponsors.
Ashley and Ali are practical people, a double MBA household of project managers who set up a daily iPhone alert to get ready for bed. Ashley has pale blue eyes and long blond hair, a solid authoritative beauty. She grew up in small-town Saskatchewan, where her father, an oil-well operations manager, and her mother, an accountant, taught her never to quit, “You don’t try to do things, you do them.” Ali is tall, shaggy-haired, slightly formal, himself an immigrant who grew up in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, where his parents ran a small garment manufacturing company. His mother would talk about helping the impoverished seamstresses who did piecework. It gave him an impulse to “identify the privilege we have and find a way of sharing it”.So in December, when Ali and Ashley’s 62-year-old housekeeper mentioned that she was sponsoring a Syrian family with members of her church – and had helped raise $20,000 selling chicken on a bun – Ashley thought, “If she can do this, we can do this.”
Ashley worked out the math with her sister, Mallory Hilkewich, a 28-year-old social work student, and Ali. They would need $35,000. How many people would they have to ask to commit $100 a month over 12 months? On Dec 20, they sent an email to friends. People responded instantly, saying, “Thank you, I was thinking of getting involved, but I didn’t know how,” says Ali. “This is what I do professionally. I’m a fundraiser,” Ashley adds. “I can tell you, people don’t usually thank you for asking them for money.” By the end of January, they had $50,000.
Any five or more citizens can form a group to bring refugees to Canada. The group must write a settlement plan dozens of pages long, specifying who will perform tasks such as pick the family up at the airport, find a dentist and provide social support. Instead, Ashley chose a less bureaucratic path through Humanity First, a volunteer-run organisation that can serve as the official sponsor.
A real estate agent in their group found a basement apartment in a neighbourhood of pristine brick houses and high-rise apartments. It was across the street from the Victoria Park subway station, and cheap enough, at about $830 a month, that after the sponsorship year, the family still might be able to afford it.
On Jan 31, Ashley called the director of Humanity First to say they would be ready for a family by March. He said, “You have housing? We have a family arriving this week!”
“Ashley called me on Sunday at 10.30 at night,” says Janice Sousa, a group member. “She said, ‘Can we get our act together?’ I said, ‘Yeah, we can do it’.”
Janice filled an online registry with everything she could imagine a family of four would need to set up house, and she blasted her contacts with requests to donate. “I said, ‘I will drive anywhere in southwestern Ontario to come pick anything up.” She took a day off from work and rented a van to manage a dozen pickups.
The night before Amir and Raghda were scheduled to arrive, eight people gathered to put together their apartment.
What makes a place feel like home? Everyone, it turns out, has a different idea. Janice knew her own parents, Portuguese immigrants, had missed familiar foods. She had heard that cumin is as essential to a Syrian dinner table as salt and pepper, so she went on a mission to find a cumin shaker. Another group member picked up pastel decals of owls for the girls’ bedroom. Mallory helped other sponsors fill a cupboard with coffee mugs and plates.
The homemaking was imperfect. Owls are considered bad luck in Syria. Cumin is well-used, but no one sprinkles it raw on food at the table. Syrians rarely drink coffee or tea from mugs.
And Amir and Raghda had their own ideas about making the apartment homey. In three suitcases, they brought 18 tiny clear glass cups for serving tea – “We like to see the color of the tea,” Amir says. They also brought a pestle, blue plastic children’s plates decorated with cartoon birds, a favourite spice mix and nigella seeds.
Ask them what really provides a sense of home, and they talk about the people they miss. They left almost everything they own behind; they are people who have already decided that home is not located in objects. Still, they appreciate all their sponsors thought to provide. – Text & photos by The Washington Post
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