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This is a story that spans five countries, 25 years and two religions.
It begins during Liberia’s blood-drenched civil war, and though it is far from over, it has moved through Ivory Coast, Guinea, Ottawa and a family’s passover table in Donald Trump’s America.
It involves a father slain and sons lost; a group of Ottawa women who wanted to share their sense of freedom with another woman from a world away; and an American Jew who refused stand idly by when he saw others suffering.
At its centre, is soft-spoken Martharlen Gaye: mother, student, refugee.
Martharlen
“We never even found the body,” Martharlen Gaye, 43, says of her father’s death. In the early 1990s, Liberia was wracked by civil war, one of the bloodiest in Africa’s long history of civil wars. Rebels led by Charles Taylor rampaged through the country. Martharlen’s father worked at the airport when the rebels moved in to slaughter.
Martharlen’s mother got a call saying her husband had been killed. The family — Martharlen and her mother — left the city to live in the countryside where they would be safer. At least for a while. As the war dragged on, in 1992 the family and others in their Gio tribe fled for their lives to the neighbouring country of Ivory Coast.
They walked for a month, among a million Liberians displaced by the seven-year civil war in which 200,000 of their countrymen would die. Martharlen was 17.
“We walked through the forest,” she said. “We couldn’t have fires. The helicopters would fly over and if they saw the smoke they would send soldiers in.”
They were desperately hungry, surviving on raw cassava and mangoes they found along the way. They lived in fear of the rebel soldiers who would patrol the forest, shooting those they found.
“They would just feel like killing,” she said matter of factly.
When the refugees reached the Cavalla River that marks the border between Liberia and Ivory Coast, they held hands and waded into the water, sinking neck deep in places.
“We lost many, many people in the water,” she said.
Though there were refugee camps in Ivory Coast, Martharlen and her mother were taken into the home of a family from the same Gio tribe in the small village of Zouan Hounien, about 10 kilometres from the Liberian border.
Martharlen would wait there 10 years before being identified as a person at risk by the UN High Commission on Refugees. Then she would wait 10 years more.
Poplar
They are a half dozen young women in their 30s, a support network of friends who share a commitment to feminism and social causes. They take their name from the street in Little Italy where they held their first meeting. Overwhelmed by the horror of the Syrian refugee crisis — in particular the image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach — the Poplar women knew they had to do something. They decided to sponsor a refugee, preferably a young single Syrian woman like themselves.
The women of Poplar greet Martharlen Gaye at Ottawa Airport on Sept. 13, 2016, the day she arrived in Canada from Ivory Coast. From left, Erin Sirett, Joanne Tucker, Kelly Sirett, Rachel Levine Katz, Martharlen Gaye and Kathryn Dingle.
“For me it was about friendships and being part of a group with a leaning toward social justice and solidarity with people around the world,” said Poplar member Kathryn Dingle. “It was that awareness we have of being women who have so much freedom and so much capacity to have control over our lives. Our freedoms. Our mobility. Opportunities for personal growth. That’s why we were thinking about a woman.
“We felt that this groups of ours had power and love in it and we could do something for someone else.”
The Poplar women pored over the list of eligible Syrian refugees but found there were few single women listed.
“It’s a really dehumanizing list,” Dingle said. “You imagine each line is a life and for us to keep saying ‘No … no … no,’ just because they weren’t the right category for us, it started to feel wrong.”
So they widened their search criteria and soon found Martharlen. With her UNHCR designation, Martharlen was eligible to come to Canada through a process known as the Blended Visa Office-Referred Program or BVOR.
In a complicated process, the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa, through an agreement with the Canadian government, funnelled her case through Jewish Family Services of Ottawa, which in turn worked with the Poplar women to bring Martharlen to Ottawa.
They knew little about her, but several of the Poplar women managed to reach Martharlen by phone in Africa.
“We called. She joked that we’d be her mom and dad. We laughed. That we found space to laugh on that first call was so great,” Dingle said. “Right away, there was such warmth and so much trust. She trusted us immediately and we trusted her.”
A couple of months later, Poplar members were on hand to greet Martharlen as she stepped off a plane at Ottawa airport.
Chaim
When Chaim Finkelman travelled to his parent’s home in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, for the Passover holiday last April, U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-refugee campaign was in full swing.
“In our family, themes of the Holocaust and themes of how you treat strangers are pretty common at Passover,” Finkelman said from his home in Oakland, Calif. “The times are distressing to us. We didn’t know how to respond.”
Chaim Finkelman of Oakland, California.
Like many Jews, the desperate flight of Syrian Muslims from the regime of Bashar al-Assad reminded the Finkelmans of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. In the 1930s, anti-Semitism meant many countries, the United States and Canada included, shut their doors to many Jews.
“I know for me, I was really identifying with American Jews during the Holocaust who said, ’They already don’t like us. Let’s not raise too many waves.’ And they didn’t do anything to get Jews out,” Finkelman said.
“I felt like I was standing by while people in the name of ideology were killing other people. People were fleeing for their lives and I couldn’t do anything about it.”
The Finkelmans wanted to help, but what to do in Trump’s America, where refugees are non grata?
Their answer: Look to Canada.
“When our government came out and said, ’We are not going to do anything. We are opposed to helping these people,’ then that really spurred me to say ’No. No. That’s not what we should be doing,’ Finkelman said. “The U.S. had closed its doors, (but) Canada had been out there in the front saying they were welcoming; they were doing the right thing.
“Obviously, since we weren’t Canadian citizens we couldn’t be the direct sponsor, but there are also people who are mostly financial sponsors.”
A few minutes of internet sleuthing brought him to Jewish Family Services of Ottawa.
Martharlen
Martharlen knew almost nothing about Canada when she landed in Ottawa on Sept. 13, 2016. She’d been given a brochure of information just the week before in Ivory Coast.
“We imagined having a Syrian person and we’d heard that a lot of them were well-educated and had been living a life that was a bit closer to ours,” Dingle said. “And here is Martharlen, who had to walk to get water and cooked on wood fires. Those differences, we weren’t even prepared for them.“
Martharlen Gaye is a refugee from Liberia supported by a group of women in Ottawa. The group is also receiving financial support from a family in the U.S., who wanted to help a refugee but couldn’t do it in the U.S. because of Trump’s policies.
In Ottawa, the Poplar women set about helping Martharlen settle in. They helped her find an apartment. She took literacy and ESL classes at adult high schools and Algonquin College. Though she worked as a hair dresser in Ivory Coast, in Ottawa she dreams of becoming a personal support worker for the elderly.
“I didn’t imagine all the conversations I was going to have with Martharlen,“ Dingle said. ”What is racism? What are taxes? How do payment systems work in Canada?
“Martharlen is so stoic. She so rarely asks for things and is from a culture that is so different. She’s so used to a survival lifestyle. It was a hard to get a sense of when she was OK and when she was not OK.”
There aren’t many other Liberians in Ottawa, but Martharlen set about building a social network. She joined a choir of refugees and recent immigrants that meets weekly. She found a job as a dishwasher at the University of Ottawa cafeteria, although it didn’t lead to full-time work.
And then came the biggest surprise of all. On her UN documents, Martharlen had said that she had two sons, but the boys had disappeared mysteriously five years earlier. Martharlen came to Canada alone. Then suddenly, and just as mysteriously, her boys came home.
CB and Cooper
Martharlen had two sons when she lived in Ivory Coast: CB, born in 1999, and Cooper in 2004. The boys have different fathers, neither of whom stayed around to parent. By 2011, Martharlen had moved 60 kilometres away to the town of Danane, where she found work as hairdresser, sending money back to her mother and sons and visiting when she could.
But the safety the family had known in Ivory Coast ended in 2011 with the outbreak of the second Ivory Coast civil war. That February, rebel forces stormed into the town of Zouan Hounien, where CB and Cooper had been living with their grandmother. The grandmother, who had left the village for a few days, returned to find rebel troops had taken control and were indiscriminately shooting villagers. The boys, eight and 12 at the time, were gone.
What had happened? No one seems to know. For a while, Martharlen was afraid they had been conscripted as child soldiers, though that appears not to have been the case. Martharlen’s mother searched for them for months without success. She refused to leave the house where she was staying. She wanted to be there if and when the boys ever returned.
Five agonizing years passed. Martharlen was offered the chance to start a new life in Canada. The Poplar women asked the International Red Cross for help locating CB and Cooper.
Then, out of the blue last February, Martharlen got a call in Ottawa from her mother in Ivory Coast. Her boys were alive. Her boys were home.
The story of CB and Cooper’s return is murky, but as best as the Poplar women have discovered, the story begins with a travelling saleswoman who was in Guinea, the West African country that borders both Liberia and Ivory Coast. The woman came across two young Liberian boys who had been separated from their family during the conflict. She began asking around and was eventually put in touch with Martharlen’s mother, still living in the same house in Zouan Hounien from where they disappeared.
“I hated having to tell my friends and family about how her boys were lost because we don’t have all the details,” Dingle said. “That’s just the way it is. We’re so accustomed to having stories that are so exact on details and timing. And that Martharlen isn’t even sure what year her sons were born says so much. There’s a totally different approach to records and timing.
“People ask, ‘How were the boys lost? Why did she leave the country if her sons were there?’ All that Western skepticism — we have to check our cynicism.”
Now that the boys have been found, the group has begun searching for additional paperwork that will prove the family connection, paperwork that can be lacking in countries such as Liberia and Ivory Coast. Ultimately, it might require a DNA test to prove the lineage that could eventually reunite CB and Cooper with Martharlen in Canada. No one expects the problem to be resolved soon.
“At first we did not anticipate that Martharlen had two sons,“ Dingle said. ”My mom said to me, ‘You have a moral obligation to support this family,’ and it’s true. We do.”
The Benefactors
Poplar have tapped their family and friends to support Martharlen in Canada. They’ve raised $20,000 so far from about 120 individuals, far above the $12,700 minimum set by the government for groups sponsoring refugees. The 12 months of guaranteed support is over, but the Poplar women aren’t about to abandon Martharlen.
“I asked my friends and family to contribute and almost everyone said yes. And every gift was meaningful, from my friends who gave $35 to the guy on my Frisbee team who gave $500. That’s been one of my favourite parts,” Dingle said.
And then there is the money being contributed by the Finkelmans, the family of Jewish Americans supporting a woman of another faith and in a different country.
When the furor over Trump’s travel ban was at its peak, last winter, Andrea Gardner, the assistant director for settlement at Jewish Family Services of Ottawa, said she was deluged with calls from Americans looking to help.
The women of Poplar with Martharlen Gaye, the Liberian woman they are sponsoring in Canada
Front row, from left: Kathryn Dingle, Martharlen Gaye and Erin Sirett
Back row: Kelly Sirett, Rachel Levine Katz, Joanne Tucker and Tamara Levine.
“I spent a lot of time on the phone with people in the United States, but (the Finkelmans) was the only one of all those that actually came to fruition,” she said.
The Finkelmans, too, thought they would be supporting a Syrian Muslim fleeing Assad regime. But it doesn’t matter to them that they’ve ended up supporting a Liberian Christian.
The stance Trump is taking on refugees is “a horror and a travesty,” said Chaim Finkelman. Finkelman, who worked as a personal support worker for developmentally disabled adults until an on-the-job injury forced him to begin a new career as a web designer, said he was inspired by the story of the “Righteous Gentile”, the non-Jews such as Oskar Schindler who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.
“Often, they didn’t set out to risk their lives to save Jews. Their story usually starts that something happened right in front of them and they took action. Someone knocked on their door. Oskar Schindler started because he saw a business deal. The Jews came to him. They start out with very modest steps.”
“Obviously, giving a little bit of money is not equivalent, but these are people who are fleeing for their lives because of their religious beliefs or practices. Do I stand by and say this is not my problem? Or do I do something?
“If I don’t do anything, then I will be like one of the vast majority of Germans (during the Holocaust) who said, ’This is a dangerous time. Let’s put our heads down and just get through it. And it’s understandable, but that’s what let awful regimes take power and do what they want.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
It begins during Liberia’s blood-drenched civil war, and though it is far from over, it has moved through Ivory Coast, Guinea, Ottawa and a family’s passover table in Donald Trump’s America.
It involves a father slain and sons lost; a group of Ottawa women who wanted to share their sense of freedom with another woman from a world away; and an American Jew who refused stand idly by when he saw others suffering.
At its centre, is soft-spoken Martharlen Gaye: mother, student, refugee.
Martharlen
“We never even found the body,” Martharlen Gaye, 43, says of her father’s death. In the early 1990s, Liberia was wracked by civil war, one of the bloodiest in Africa’s long history of civil wars. Rebels led by Charles Taylor rampaged through the country. Martharlen’s father worked at the airport when the rebels moved in to slaughter.
Martharlen’s mother got a call saying her husband had been killed. The family — Martharlen and her mother — left the city to live in the countryside where they would be safer. At least for a while. As the war dragged on, in 1992 the family and others in their Gio tribe fled for their lives to the neighbouring country of Ivory Coast.
They walked for a month, among a million Liberians displaced by the seven-year civil war in which 200,000 of their countrymen would die. Martharlen was 17.
“We walked through the forest,” she said. “We couldn’t have fires. The helicopters would fly over and if they saw the smoke they would send soldiers in.”
They were desperately hungry, surviving on raw cassava and mangoes they found along the way. They lived in fear of the rebel soldiers who would patrol the forest, shooting those they found.
“They would just feel like killing,” she said matter of factly.
When the refugees reached the Cavalla River that marks the border between Liberia and Ivory Coast, they held hands and waded into the water, sinking neck deep in places.
“We lost many, many people in the water,” she said.
Though there were refugee camps in Ivory Coast, Martharlen and her mother were taken into the home of a family from the same Gio tribe in the small village of Zouan Hounien, about 10 kilometres from the Liberian border.
Martharlen would wait there 10 years before being identified as a person at risk by the UN High Commission on Refugees. Then she would wait 10 years more.
Poplar
They are a half dozen young women in their 30s, a support network of friends who share a commitment to feminism and social causes. They take their name from the street in Little Italy where they held their first meeting. Overwhelmed by the horror of the Syrian refugee crisis — in particular the image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s body washed up on a Turkish beach — the Poplar women knew they had to do something. They decided to sponsor a refugee, preferably a young single Syrian woman like themselves.
The women of Poplar greet Martharlen Gaye at Ottawa Airport on Sept. 13, 2016, the day she arrived in Canada from Ivory Coast. From left, Erin Sirett, Joanne Tucker, Kelly Sirett, Rachel Levine Katz, Martharlen Gaye and Kathryn Dingle.
“For me it was about friendships and being part of a group with a leaning toward social justice and solidarity with people around the world,” said Poplar member Kathryn Dingle. “It was that awareness we have of being women who have so much freedom and so much capacity to have control over our lives. Our freedoms. Our mobility. Opportunities for personal growth. That’s why we were thinking about a woman.
“We felt that this groups of ours had power and love in it and we could do something for someone else.”
The Poplar women pored over the list of eligible Syrian refugees but found there were few single women listed.
“It’s a really dehumanizing list,” Dingle said. “You imagine each line is a life and for us to keep saying ‘No … no … no,’ just because they weren’t the right category for us, it started to feel wrong.”
So they widened their search criteria and soon found Martharlen. With her UNHCR designation, Martharlen was eligible to come to Canada through a process known as the Blended Visa Office-Referred Program or BVOR.
In a complicated process, the Anglican Diocese of Ottawa, through an agreement with the Canadian government, funnelled her case through Jewish Family Services of Ottawa, which in turn worked with the Poplar women to bring Martharlen to Ottawa.
They knew little about her, but several of the Poplar women managed to reach Martharlen by phone in Africa.
“We called. She joked that we’d be her mom and dad. We laughed. That we found space to laugh on that first call was so great,” Dingle said. “Right away, there was such warmth and so much trust. She trusted us immediately and we trusted her.”
A couple of months later, Poplar members were on hand to greet Martharlen as she stepped off a plane at Ottawa airport.
Chaim
When Chaim Finkelman travelled to his parent’s home in the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Michigan, for the Passover holiday last April, U.S. President Donald Trump’s anti-refugee campaign was in full swing.
“In our family, themes of the Holocaust and themes of how you treat strangers are pretty common at Passover,” Finkelman said from his home in Oakland, Calif. “The times are distressing to us. We didn’t know how to respond.”
Chaim Finkelman of Oakland, California.
Like many Jews, the desperate flight of Syrian Muslims from the regime of Bashar al-Assad reminded the Finkelmans of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. In the 1930s, anti-Semitism meant many countries, the United States and Canada included, shut their doors to many Jews.
“I know for me, I was really identifying with American Jews during the Holocaust who said, ’They already don’t like us. Let’s not raise too many waves.’ And they didn’t do anything to get Jews out,” Finkelman said.
“I felt like I was standing by while people in the name of ideology were killing other people. People were fleeing for their lives and I couldn’t do anything about it.”
The Finkelmans wanted to help, but what to do in Trump’s America, where refugees are non grata?
Their answer: Look to Canada.
“When our government came out and said, ’We are not going to do anything. We are opposed to helping these people,’ then that really spurred me to say ’No. No. That’s not what we should be doing,’ Finkelman said. “The U.S. had closed its doors, (but) Canada had been out there in the front saying they were welcoming; they were doing the right thing.
“Obviously, since we weren’t Canadian citizens we couldn’t be the direct sponsor, but there are also people who are mostly financial sponsors.”
A few minutes of internet sleuthing brought him to Jewish Family Services of Ottawa.
Martharlen
Martharlen knew almost nothing about Canada when she landed in Ottawa on Sept. 13, 2016. She’d been given a brochure of information just the week before in Ivory Coast.
“We imagined having a Syrian person and we’d heard that a lot of them were well-educated and had been living a life that was a bit closer to ours,” Dingle said. “And here is Martharlen, who had to walk to get water and cooked on wood fires. Those differences, we weren’t even prepared for them.“
Martharlen Gaye is a refugee from Liberia supported by a group of women in Ottawa. The group is also receiving financial support from a family in the U.S., who wanted to help a refugee but couldn’t do it in the U.S. because of Trump’s policies.
In Ottawa, the Poplar women set about helping Martharlen settle in. They helped her find an apartment. She took literacy and ESL classes at adult high schools and Algonquin College. Though she worked as a hair dresser in Ivory Coast, in Ottawa she dreams of becoming a personal support worker for the elderly.
“I didn’t imagine all the conversations I was going to have with Martharlen,“ Dingle said. ”What is racism? What are taxes? How do payment systems work in Canada?
“Martharlen is so stoic. She so rarely asks for things and is from a culture that is so different. She’s so used to a survival lifestyle. It was a hard to get a sense of when she was OK and when she was not OK.”
There aren’t many other Liberians in Ottawa, but Martharlen set about building a social network. She joined a choir of refugees and recent immigrants that meets weekly. She found a job as a dishwasher at the University of Ottawa cafeteria, although it didn’t lead to full-time work.
And then came the biggest surprise of all. On her UN documents, Martharlen had said that she had two sons, but the boys had disappeared mysteriously five years earlier. Martharlen came to Canada alone. Then suddenly, and just as mysteriously, her boys came home.
CB and Cooper
Martharlen had two sons when she lived in Ivory Coast: CB, born in 1999, and Cooper in 2004. The boys have different fathers, neither of whom stayed around to parent. By 2011, Martharlen had moved 60 kilometres away to the town of Danane, where she found work as hairdresser, sending money back to her mother and sons and visiting when she could.
But the safety the family had known in Ivory Coast ended in 2011 with the outbreak of the second Ivory Coast civil war. That February, rebel forces stormed into the town of Zouan Hounien, where CB and Cooper had been living with their grandmother. The grandmother, who had left the village for a few days, returned to find rebel troops had taken control and were indiscriminately shooting villagers. The boys, eight and 12 at the time, were gone.
Five agonizing years passed. Martharlen was offered the chance to start a new life in Canada. The Poplar women asked the International Red Cross for help locating CB and Cooper.
Then, out of the blue last February, Martharlen got a call in Ottawa from her mother in Ivory Coast. Her boys were alive. Her boys were home.
The story of CB and Cooper’s return is murky, but as best as the Poplar women have discovered, the story begins with a travelling saleswoman who was in Guinea, the West African country that borders both Liberia and Ivory Coast. The woman came across two young Liberian boys who had been separated from their family during the conflict. She began asking around and was eventually put in touch with Martharlen’s mother, still living in the same house in Zouan Hounien from where they disappeared.
“I hated having to tell my friends and family about how her boys were lost because we don’t have all the details,” Dingle said. “That’s just the way it is. We’re so accustomed to having stories that are so exact on details and timing. And that Martharlen isn’t even sure what year her sons were born says so much. There’s a totally different approach to records and timing.
“People ask, ‘How were the boys lost? Why did she leave the country if her sons were there?’ All that Western skepticism — we have to check our cynicism.”
Now that the boys have been found, the group has begun searching for additional paperwork that will prove the family connection, paperwork that can be lacking in countries such as Liberia and Ivory Coast. Ultimately, it might require a DNA test to prove the lineage that could eventually reunite CB and Cooper with Martharlen in Canada. No one expects the problem to be resolved soon.
“At first we did not anticipate that Martharlen had two sons,“ Dingle said. ”My mom said to me, ‘You have a moral obligation to support this family,’ and it’s true. We do.”
The Benefactors
Poplar have tapped their family and friends to support Martharlen in Canada. They’ve raised $20,000 so far from about 120 individuals, far above the $12,700 minimum set by the government for groups sponsoring refugees. The 12 months of guaranteed support is over, but the Poplar women aren’t about to abandon Martharlen.
“I asked my friends and family to contribute and almost everyone said yes. And every gift was meaningful, from my friends who gave $35 to the guy on my Frisbee team who gave $500. That’s been one of my favourite parts,” Dingle said.
And then there is the money being contributed by the Finkelmans, the family of Jewish Americans supporting a woman of another faith and in a different country.
When the furor over Trump’s travel ban was at its peak, last winter, Andrea Gardner, the assistant director for settlement at Jewish Family Services of Ottawa, said she was deluged with calls from Americans looking to help.
The women of Poplar with Martharlen Gaye, the Liberian woman they are sponsoring in Canada
Front row, from left: Kathryn Dingle, Martharlen Gaye and Erin Sirett
Back row: Kelly Sirett, Rachel Levine Katz, Joanne Tucker and Tamara Levine.
“I spent a lot of time on the phone with people in the United States, but (the Finkelmans) was the only one of all those that actually came to fruition,” she said.
The Finkelmans, too, thought they would be supporting a Syrian Muslim fleeing Assad regime. But it doesn’t matter to them that they’ve ended up supporting a Liberian Christian.
The stance Trump is taking on refugees is “a horror and a travesty,” said Chaim Finkelman. Finkelman, who worked as a personal support worker for developmentally disabled adults until an on-the-job injury forced him to begin a new career as a web designer, said he was inspired by the story of the “Righteous Gentile”, the non-Jews such as Oskar Schindler who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.
“Often, they didn’t set out to risk their lives to save Jews. Their story usually starts that something happened right in front of them and they took action. Someone knocked on their door. Oskar Schindler started because he saw a business deal. The Jews came to him. They start out with very modest steps.”
“Obviously, giving a little bit of money is not equivalent, but these are people who are fleeing for their lives because of their religious beliefs or practices. Do I stand by and say this is not my problem? Or do I do something?
“If I don’t do anything, then I will be like one of the vast majority of Germans (during the Holocaust) who said, ’This is a dangerous time. Let’s put our heads down and just get through it. And it’s understandable, but that’s what let awful regimes take power and do what they want.”
bcrawford@postmedia.com
Twitter.com/getBAC
查看原文...
