Canadians are embracing Syrian refugees. Why can't we?
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Version 0 of 1. Nobody warned the Hendawis about Canadian girls. Wadah and Raghdaa Hendawi survived the civil war in Syria, fleeing the devastation of Aleppo with their children for the relative safety of Lebanon. For three years their teenage sons missed out on an education while they worked to support the family. Then they hit the immigration jackpot – Canada. They were greeted at Halifax airport not by immigration officials or social workers, but by their sponsors – a bunch of well-meaning locals whose fundraising efforts would support the family for the next 12 months. And so the Hendawis arrived in the small fishing town of Shelburne, Nova Scotia, swaddled in new ski jackets, blinded by the winter sunshine bouncing off fresh February snow. They were the only Syrians in the village, and had no idea what was in store for them. The Rev. Joanne McFadden knew the names and ages of the family she was helping to sponsor, but apart from that she too didn’t know what to expect. She certainly wasn’t prepared for the phone call that came three days after Saed (18), Mohamad (16) and Ahmed (15) started attending Shelburne Regional High School. I get a phone call from the principal. ‘Uhhh, Joanne, we have a problem.’ ‘What’s the problem, Mary?’ ‘Well, all the girls in the school are chasing the boys.’ This hadn’t even crossed our mind, right, that this was even a possibility. It was like, pardon me, we’ve got some things to figure out. As Joanne’s telling me this story six months later, over a dinner the Hendawis are hosting for their sponsors, Mohamad helpfully flexes his muscles, as if to explain his magnetic appeal to the local girls. It’s true, all three boys are ridiculously good-looking, and Mohamad in particular knows it – but his brazen preening is an act put on for your amusement, and you can’t help being charmed by him. With the Hendawi boys’ charm making waves at school, McFadden enlisted the help of a volunteer interpreter (a Lebanese man who owns the local pizzeria) and sat down with Wadah and Raghdaa. Her face was just ashen while I’m saying, ‘We have a little concern about the boys’ situation at the school. Your sons are being pursued by all of the girls in the school who sort of want a conquest.’ Fears about young Arab men are not uncommon in Europe, where the refugee crisis and rightwing rhetoric have fuelled cultural tensions. But as I discovered in Nova Scotia, Canadians don’t always follow the standard script. Canada has so much in common with Australia, and yet spending time there with Syrian families and their sponsors felt like stepping through a looking glass. This is a country where politicians tried to outbid one another during the last federal election with pledges to resettle Syrian refugees. It’s a country in which no political party has an anti-immigration platform. And it’s a country where the government, after fulfilling its promise to welcome 25,000 Syrians, was forced to extend the program after protests from would-be sponsors who’d already raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and signed leases for homes. More than 30,000 Syrians have arrived since November (excluding Quebec, which has its own settlement program), and almost half of those are being privately sponsored to some extent. While government-assisted refugees are usually settled in cities and large towns, families who are privately sponsored can end up anywhere. In more than 300 communities across the country, locals have banded together to provide housing, English classes, driving lessons, a crash course in Canadian customs (pot luck dinners, poutine) and, most important of all, friendship. The trigger for this outpouring of compassion was a tragedy that touched people around the world last September – the drowning of three year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up on a Turkish beach. But unlike Australians, Canadians who were moved to do something actually could. “When that picture became public, the phones were ringing off the hook,” Naomi Alboim tells me. “We couldn’t keep up with the phone calls and emails of people who wanted to help.” Alboim is the co-founder of Lifeline Syria in Toronto, which recruits and trains sponsors, and she’s involved in sponsoring two families herself. She was also instrumental in the first great wave of private sponsorship, which transformed Canada almost 40 years ago. From 1979-81 Canada resettled 60,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, and half of those were sponsored. Alboim was the civil servant responsible for the program in Ontario. She says that ever since, sponsorship has become part of the national DNA. I think everybody in Canada, and I don’t think this is an exaggeration, was either directly involved or knew someone who was – their neighbour, their colleague, their friend, their relative, or themselves. People saw the Vietnamese population integrated very, very well. What I find most heart-warming, is that many of the Vietnamese refugees who were privately sponsored have now come forward to privately sponsor Syrian refugees. So are Canadians immune from the sort of fears (and Islamophobia) that are so common in other countries? Not entirely. But when I asked people in Shelburne if there had been any opposition or even unease at the prospect of a Muslim family being settled in their midst, there was precious little prejudice on display. There were a few concerns about supporting strangers while local families were struggling, and about newcomers taking jobs. And according to Bill Murphy, who’s befriended Wadah Hendawi, there were some politically incorrect attempts at humour. Some people would make a kind of wise crack comment you know, ‘We’ll just check them for vests when they come into the country’. I heard that, but you never hear it now, that was all before the fact. More than six months later, there are now two Syrian families in Shelburne. Wadah surprised his sponsors by accepting a part time job bottling beer in the local craft brewery. And another refugee, Alaa Almanjar, has already opened a barbershop on the main street; as a result, one sponsor told me, “We have very, very well-groomed men for such a small town.” And what of the Hendawi boys, who’d unwittingly unleashed all those female hormones at the local high school? In the end, McFadden explained, the girls were told to be mindful that the boys had different cultural traditions and to slow down a bit. “Yeah, that is good for me,” Mohamad pipes up, “because I am tired every time.” See more of Amos Robert’s story Tuesday night on Dateline, 9.30pm on SBS. |