- 注册
- 2002-10-07
- 消息
- 402,287
- 荣誉分数
- 76
- 声望点数
- 0
Sue Pike remembers a frantic and somewhat comic phone call she received one winter’s day 35 years ago from Keo Khamphoune. In her halting English, Khamphoune explained that she was having great difficulty walking.
Along with her husband and two young children, Khamphoune was among the Southeast Asians who began arriving here in the summer of 1979 as part of Project 4000, a local initiative to relocate 4,000 refugees — half of Canada’s original commitment — to Ottawa. The family, which had fled Laos and had spent three years in a Thai refugee camp before coming to Canada, was sponsored by Pike’s church, Glebe-St. James United.
On this particular day, though, Keo’s immediate concern was the snow and ice on Ottawa’s streets and sidewalks. Whenever she tried to leave her home she slipped and fell. “I explained to her that there’s a certain way we’ve all learned to walk,” recalls Pike. “That shuffle, without lifting your feet too much.
“Being a sponsor was about much more than just providing clothes and shelter. It was about connecting with people in need and forming relationships with them.”
Following the publication of the photograph earlier this month of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s dead body washed up on a Turkish beach, Ottawans have responded to the Syrian refugee crisis with offers of help not seen since those days of Project 4000.
Public meetings — there’s one Thursday at the Hintonburg Community Centre and another on Oct. 1 at City Hall — and other initiatives are popping up to let people know how they can help.
Several demonstrators gave blood for a protest sign, which was placed on the steps of the Malaysian High Commission in Ottawa at 60 Boteler St., in 1979 (Drew Gragg/Ottawa Citizen)
“With Project 4000, the city rallied and a large number of very successful sponsorships were done and completed,” says Leslie Emory, executive director of Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization.
“(Former Ottawa mayor) Marion Dewar was that iconic leader that was required, but it also requires a community that can take it up. I don’t know why that happened here, but I’m feeling it again. This is sort of a calm, conservative community, but once it takes something on, look out. That’s what I’m seeing and feeling with the calls we’re getting, the engagement.”
Carl Nicholson, director of the Catholic Centre for Immigrants, has seen a similar spike in interest from the community. “We are inundated will phone calls from people wanting to help.”
These and similar organizations are hoping they can maintain the current groundswell of philanthropic largesse through a process that, barring a major shift in political will and action from the federal government, will likely take years.
In 1979, refugees whose claims were started in late May were showing up at the Ottawa bus terminal in August. By comparison, Ottawans forming Groups of Five — one of two private sponsorship streams (the other being Sponsorship Agreement Holders, largely done through faith-based groups) — can, at present rates, expect to wait at least five years before the refugees they’re sponsoring will have the opportunity to slip on Ottawa’s icy streets.
CCI settlement officer Roya Atman says that she’s known of cases that took seven years to complete, while her organization is still working on others that started in 2009.
Meanwhile, beyond the sustained enthusiasm required of private sponsors, their obligations are not insignificant: Sponsor groups are required to provide financial and settlement support to the refugee(s) for a year, or until they become self-supporting. It’s estimated that sponsorship of a family of four will cost $27,000.
Sponsors’ duties also include all kinds of logistical and moral supports, from meeting them at the airport to arranging for temporary housing and subsequently helping them find permanent accommodation. Health cards and social insurance numbers need to be obtained, doctors, dentists and other healthcare services provided, bank accounts opened, Child Tax Benefits applied for, jobs secured, connections made with a settlement agency, and English classes provided.
Additionally, refugees will require great amounts of emotional and moral support, life-skills training and orientation to a way of life in Canada that lifelong residents may take for granted.
This might include simply shopping for groceries and using Canadian currency, managing expectations — a professional who can’t get accredited in Canada, say, or schoolchildren who don’t have the iPhones or other luxuries their classmates have — or untangling deeply held cultural differences.
“There are many, many cultural things,” says Nicholson. “We have a life skills program that teaches people how to survive here. It’s like, ‘You can’t beat your wife or children. No. Inasmuch as you may think it’s the way to be, you can’t do that. You do that and we’ll lock you up.’”
“It requires a great deal of empathy,” adds Barb Gamble, who along with her husband, Dan, was among Project 2000’s organizers and, in the 1990s, sponsored refugee families from Iraq and El Salvador. “Many of these people arrive traumatized or afraid, and reluctant to trust others. You have to spend time with them and be understanding.”
She and Pike list numerous specific instances they encountered that were difficult to predict in advance: The Laotians who were reluctant to step into a boat, for example, or terrified at the sight of a harmless garter snake in Gatineau Park; the El Salvadoran family that viewed an after-dinner walk as an undertaking fraught with potential danger; the Iraqi who looked outside his apartment on an empty street at six in the morning with suspicion – back in Iraq, it would be teeming with people by then.
They cite Project 4000’s success — not one of the 298 sponsoring groups ever defaulted on its responsibilities – as evidence that most find it a rewarding experience.
“The upside is relationships,” says Gamble, who to this day remains in touch with the families she and her husband sponsored. “These people who fight to live like this and who fight for freedom, they are strong people. They want to live here in peace and they came here for peace, and they work hard for it.”
The mentoring, adds Nicholson, becomes a two-way avenue. “It’s an engagement, and you might change your opinions.”
Nicholson also dismisses critics’ claims that refugees are security threats. “Refugees come with this gratitude, and they also come with the idea that that thing they’re leaving, they don’t want any part of it. They’re saying ‘You have given me a brand-new country where I can know my children will be safe? You think I want to have anything to do with that thing over there? Forget it, it’s not even close.’”
bdeachman@ottawacitizen.com
Info box
A public information forum hosted by Kitchissippi ward councillor Jeff Leiper will take place Sept. 17 at the Hintonburg Community Centre, 1064 Wellington St. W. at 7:30 p.m. Visit kitchissippiward.ca/content/syrian-refugee-crisis-meeting for more information.
Mayor Jim Watson will host an information session and town hall meeting from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 1 at Jean Pigott Place in City Hall, 110 Laurier Ave. W. Visit ottawa.ca/en/news/mayor-watson-host-public-information-forum-syrian-refugee-resettlement-efforts for information.
Additionally, University of Ottawa is offering a Refugee Sponsorship Support Program. More information can be found at refugeehub.ca/#!ssp/c18bt.
查看原文...
Along with her husband and two young children, Khamphoune was among the Southeast Asians who began arriving here in the summer of 1979 as part of Project 4000, a local initiative to relocate 4,000 refugees — half of Canada’s original commitment — to Ottawa. The family, which had fled Laos and had spent three years in a Thai refugee camp before coming to Canada, was sponsored by Pike’s church, Glebe-St. James United.
On this particular day, though, Keo’s immediate concern was the snow and ice on Ottawa’s streets and sidewalks. Whenever she tried to leave her home she slipped and fell. “I explained to her that there’s a certain way we’ve all learned to walk,” recalls Pike. “That shuffle, without lifting your feet too much.
“Being a sponsor was about much more than just providing clothes and shelter. It was about connecting with people in need and forming relationships with them.”
•
Following the publication of the photograph earlier this month of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s dead body washed up on a Turkish beach, Ottawans have responded to the Syrian refugee crisis with offers of help not seen since those days of Project 4000.
Public meetings — there’s one Thursday at the Hintonburg Community Centre and another on Oct. 1 at City Hall — and other initiatives are popping up to let people know how they can help.
Several demonstrators gave blood for a protest sign, which was placed on the steps of the Malaysian High Commission in Ottawa at 60 Boteler St., in 1979 (Drew Gragg/Ottawa Citizen)
“With Project 4000, the city rallied and a large number of very successful sponsorships were done and completed,” says Leslie Emory, executive director of Ottawa Community Immigrant Services Organization.
“(Former Ottawa mayor) Marion Dewar was that iconic leader that was required, but it also requires a community that can take it up. I don’t know why that happened here, but I’m feeling it again. This is sort of a calm, conservative community, but once it takes something on, look out. That’s what I’m seeing and feeling with the calls we’re getting, the engagement.”
Carl Nicholson, director of the Catholic Centre for Immigrants, has seen a similar spike in interest from the community. “We are inundated will phone calls from people wanting to help.”
These and similar organizations are hoping they can maintain the current groundswell of philanthropic largesse through a process that, barring a major shift in political will and action from the federal government, will likely take years.
In 1979, refugees whose claims were started in late May were showing up at the Ottawa bus terminal in August. By comparison, Ottawans forming Groups of Five — one of two private sponsorship streams (the other being Sponsorship Agreement Holders, largely done through faith-based groups) — can, at present rates, expect to wait at least five years before the refugees they’re sponsoring will have the opportunity to slip on Ottawa’s icy streets.
CCI settlement officer Roya Atman says that she’s known of cases that took seven years to complete, while her organization is still working on others that started in 2009.
Meanwhile, beyond the sustained enthusiasm required of private sponsors, their obligations are not insignificant: Sponsor groups are required to provide financial and settlement support to the refugee(s) for a year, or until they become self-supporting. It’s estimated that sponsorship of a family of four will cost $27,000.
Sponsors’ duties also include all kinds of logistical and moral supports, from meeting them at the airport to arranging for temporary housing and subsequently helping them find permanent accommodation. Health cards and social insurance numbers need to be obtained, doctors, dentists and other healthcare services provided, bank accounts opened, Child Tax Benefits applied for, jobs secured, connections made with a settlement agency, and English classes provided.
Additionally, refugees will require great amounts of emotional and moral support, life-skills training and orientation to a way of life in Canada that lifelong residents may take for granted.
This might include simply shopping for groceries and using Canadian currency, managing expectations — a professional who can’t get accredited in Canada, say, or schoolchildren who don’t have the iPhones or other luxuries their classmates have — or untangling deeply held cultural differences.
“There are many, many cultural things,” says Nicholson. “We have a life skills program that teaches people how to survive here. It’s like, ‘You can’t beat your wife or children. No. Inasmuch as you may think it’s the way to be, you can’t do that. You do that and we’ll lock you up.’”
“It requires a great deal of empathy,” adds Barb Gamble, who along with her husband, Dan, was among Project 2000’s organizers and, in the 1990s, sponsored refugee families from Iraq and El Salvador. “Many of these people arrive traumatized or afraid, and reluctant to trust others. You have to spend time with them and be understanding.”
She and Pike list numerous specific instances they encountered that were difficult to predict in advance: The Laotians who were reluctant to step into a boat, for example, or terrified at the sight of a harmless garter snake in Gatineau Park; the El Salvadoran family that viewed an after-dinner walk as an undertaking fraught with potential danger; the Iraqi who looked outside his apartment on an empty street at six in the morning with suspicion – back in Iraq, it would be teeming with people by then.
They cite Project 4000’s success — not one of the 298 sponsoring groups ever defaulted on its responsibilities – as evidence that most find it a rewarding experience.
“The upside is relationships,” says Gamble, who to this day remains in touch with the families she and her husband sponsored. “These people who fight to live like this and who fight for freedom, they are strong people. They want to live here in peace and they came here for peace, and they work hard for it.”
The mentoring, adds Nicholson, becomes a two-way avenue. “It’s an engagement, and you might change your opinions.”
Nicholson also dismisses critics’ claims that refugees are security threats. “Refugees come with this gratitude, and they also come with the idea that that thing they’re leaving, they don’t want any part of it. They’re saying ‘You have given me a brand-new country where I can know my children will be safe? You think I want to have anything to do with that thing over there? Forget it, it’s not even close.’”
bdeachman@ottawacitizen.com
Info box
A public information forum hosted by Kitchissippi ward councillor Jeff Leiper will take place Sept. 17 at the Hintonburg Community Centre, 1064 Wellington St. W. at 7:30 p.m. Visit kitchissippiward.ca/content/syrian-refugee-crisis-meeting for more information.
Mayor Jim Watson will host an information session and town hall meeting from 5:30 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, Oct. 1 at Jean Pigott Place in City Hall, 110 Laurier Ave. W. Visit ottawa.ca/en/news/mayor-watson-host-public-information-forum-syrian-refugee-resettlement-efforts for information.
Additionally, University of Ottawa is offering a Refugee Sponsorship Support Program. More information can be found at refugeehub.ca/#!ssp/c18bt.
查看原文...
