"Soon, all of Canada will be our family"

"We were humiliated in Lebanon. Here, we're happy and feel respected,' the Abdallah family told the CBC's Piya Chattopadhyaya in a lovely documentary that aired on the The Current this morning. Thank you to the CBC for letting the (very articulate) family tell their story in their own words - from their traumatic experiences in Syria and Lebanon to a hopeful new beginning in Canada. 

The Waving Hand Emoji: How technology helped us connect

Our sponsored Syrian family was all the ways different from us you’d imagine: war refugees, languishing in Beirut for three years, Sunni Muslim, and Arabic-speaking only, according to the government profile. For our sponsor group, technology has been a great relationship accelerator and equalizer in this most intense period and undertaking.

Technology, that same hardware and social media platforms that are supposedly decaying our relationships and making us lonely, has made possible lovely and essential moments of connection between us and individual members of the Abdallah family. Here are five favourites:

1. Glimpsing our family on TV for the first time. Far from the ultimate in being alone with everyone, it was on tv we first glimpsed our family. Seeing them disarmed any fear about who we were sponsoring. Watching them take care of each other, how they interacted, made us want to do even more. They’re just like us. At the same time, the tv was a glass wall: the Abdullahs couldn’t see us, didn’t know we existed, and that people in Canada cared about them 
2. Seeing each other on Skype. And then, they could see us! We yelled across the valley between Toronto and Beirut over the internet. Because we now heard each others’ tones of voice and choices of words, we had agency in communicating our own messages and how we’d receive the others.
3. Smartphones keep us connected. The Abdullah family had smartphones, and remained in contact with family in Syria via WhatsApp and Facebook while in Lebanon for three years. On his first day in Canada, Anas and I exchanged WhatsApp contact details for file transfers and other admin uses
4. Yes, a waving hand emoji. But on November 26, I woke up to… a waving hand emoji. I remember feeling Whoa, there’s a connection here! Was it deliberate? I texted Anas back a greeting of my own and got a thumbs up. Instant messages act much like postcards: authentic feelings pinged in asynchronous snapshots. The connection I felt with Anas was real; turns out we get along quite well.
5. SayHi Translate brings us closer. 75 percent of the time, this SayHi Translate voice translation app saves the day as a game-changer in communicating and planning. The rest of the time, it’s a source of great hilarity, which only brings us closer.
   

There’s also time to connect through silence. The Abdallahs have had close relatives killed by snipers, die of other trauma, and disappear altogether. The Abdallahs were solidly middle-class, and it will take years to build their lives again. Recently, of course, we’ve been watching cities under siege in Syria and people dying of malnutrition. Some things are unutterable for the Abdallahs, and would be impossible for us, their Canadian sponsors, to understand. In these moments, we’ve learned to turn off the technology and let the silence connect us.
Some chose to sponsor a family through a church congregation because that means more hands to do all the front-line and hands-on work, and that’s understandable. But for me, it’s the quotidian that has been the richest part of this experience: drives to the dentist and Service Ontario, zoo visits, winter clothes shopping. The quotidian, made possible by the technology that we have to connect us. 

This post by Rebecca Davies was first published on the YongeStreet blog.

A healthy beginning

We are in the fortunate position of having a strong medical contingent in our group - four physicians and two nurses! 

They spent a lot of time researching health care options and have set up many medical and dental appointments for the family after their arrival. Special arrangements were made for Oais, the mobility-challenged son of the Abdallahs, such as the acquisition of a special bed and a wheelchair. 

Our group member Nancy Graham, a nurse with Toronto Public Health, has put together an information sheet about health-related matters that will hopefully be as useful to other sponsorship groups as it was for us - please click here.

At Service Ontario registering for Ontario Health Insurance (OHIP)

The Christmas spirit is alive this year...

The Abdallah family has been in Toronto for two weeks now, and it's been a complete whirlwind of activities for them and many of our group members who took turns taking family members to various appointments around town. It's incredible how much has been achieved in just 14 days. Reemas and Aya have already spent a week in grade 2 and senior kindergarten in their local school and all adults are enrolled in English classes that will start at the beginning of January. 

Major health check ups and some dental appointments have been done, meetings with settlement workers have taken place, bank accounts have been opened, most necessary documents have been obtained and a meeting with immigration officials been completed. 

It has been a steep learning curve for us, and certainly at times been quite overwhelming for the family. Now it's time to take a break over Christmas and hopefully have more time for fun activities. 


We are very honored that the Abdallahs are calling us their (very big!) Canadian family. A highlight for all of us was a big Christmas party with the family on Sunday to which we also invited our incredibly generous donors, without who we would not have been able to settle the family in Canada. Many thanks to everyone, and have a wonderful Christmas! 

To view an album with more photos on our facebook page, please click on this link 

Why we share our experience with the public

Our sponsorship group continues to get a quite a bit of media attention, possibly because the family we are sponsoring arrived a few days before most of the other Syrian newcomers who are coming to Canada this week.

One of the reasons we have accepted to do so many interviews is that from the start, we wanted to be advocates and encourage others to get involved. We also feel it is important to put a human face on the overall refugee issue so that people move beyond the numbers.

Our group's chair Andrew FitzGerald talked to the CBC News Network today about our group's experience with the sponsorship process.



He was also a guest on the CBC's Power and Politics last night, following a discussion of MPs in Ottawa about the refugee settlement program. 

The CBC posted a very nice video of Anas' memorable first week end in Canada on their website, which he spent at the cottage of his temporary hosts Lisa and John.

And a photo of the Abdallah family featured prominently in the online version of a wonderful Toronto Star editorial welcoming newcomers from Syria into Canada. 

The whole Abdallah family is finally in Toronto!

Today was the day we have been waiting for so long! After a sleepless night, a very tense and excited Anas went with 9 of our group members to Pearson Airport, where the rest of the family landed early in the morning on a plane from Beirut, via Cairo. 

Everything went smoothly, and we were relieved that Oais' scooter arrived in one piece. Seeing the Abdallahs was like meeting old friends  - partly because we had already been in touch via social media for 10 days - and there were smiles, hugs and a flurry of Arabic and English greetings all around. Anas' incredibly cute nieces Aya and Reemas kept on shouting 'I love you' and charmed all of us. We all felt quite emotional and teary-eyed. 

The family members are now in their newly furnished apartments to take a rest and start the first day of their new lives in Canada. After losing everything in Syria and living in dire conditions in Lebanon as refugees for several years, they will finally live in a safe place they can call their own. The family's life has been changed forever - but so have our lives, in more ways than we could have imagined. The arrival is not the end of the journey, it's a beginning. 

To see more photos of the family's arrival, please click on this link

The emotional reunion of the family was captured by a camera team of the CBC's The National

Everything is ready for the family's arrival

Saturday was moving day! Several group members and a few student volunteers from Ryerson University moved furniture and other donated items from different places in Toronto to the two apartments we found for the family. Everything went smoothly and the two places look terrific. Thanks so much to our very generous in-kind donors, who only gave us high-quality items, and to the volunteers who helped out! The strong community support continues to amaze us.
To view more photos of the move and the apartments, please click on this link. 

And another ripple effect: Julie Dabrusin, the liberal MP for the Toronto-Danforth riding, met with Anas to learn about his and our sponsorship group's experiences. She wants to talk to other groups too and plans to convey their comments and suggestions to the federal government.  

Julie mentioned our group when she addressed the House of Commons.