A month later…

A month later, and how much has changed, besides the year on our calendars.  We shared a difficult couple of weeks of indecision about how we were supposed to choose a family. There are about four million refugees who have fled Syria– how is one supposed to find the right family? It felt a bit like having a single spot in the lifeboat as the Titanic sunk in front of you. 

Except there were a few factors that helped. Most Syrians don’t want to come to Canada. The CUC (Canadian Unitarian Congress) and Annette from First Unitarian suggested nine families. But we knew so little about them that it was almost impossible to decide.

I contacted a lawyer friend who had once been a student of mine and who is herself a Syrian refugee. She said the person I really needed to talk to was her sister, the Communications Manager of the Union of Syrian Medical Relief Organizations. Amazingly, she was someone whom I’d met in the past, and I remembered the two books she had written. She suggested bringing a project manager from Dawanet, a Muslim charitable organization, who would help if we needed extra money. He turned out to be another ex-student of mine, and remembered me happily from high school days. They both supported our taking the Alm.'s, a family of five. That was a larger family than we had originally imagined we could take on, but Dawanet offered to make up the difference between the money we had and what we needed,  a wonderful and kind offer. All this was presented at the December meeting of SEA, and we have chosen to sponsor the Alm.'s.

What do we know about them? The family consists of a mother and four children. The oldest of the children is a 26 year old male, the other three are females, the youngest of whom is 17. The husband/ father was killed when a bomb fell on the house he was in a few months ago. They are currently living in grim straits in Jordan, as the UN has run out of money to support refugees there. They all speak some English.

We have been filling out forms. There are so many forms! But when they’re done, which we hope will be in a week or so, we submit them to the CUC and then we wait, for some period of time between two weeks and six months. Then we get 48 hours notice that the Alm.'s are arriving, and we go into high gear. But the uncertainty in time lines has challenges: we can’t really rent any place, as we might have to pay rent for six months before they arrive. Clothing collection? For February or July? We just don’t know.

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