Renfrew group frustrated by long wait to bring Syrian refugees to Ottawa Valley

It's been one year since a group of people in Renfrew, Ont., raised money, got paired up with a family fleeing Syria and furnished a home for them.

But the family they were assigned never came. The couple and their three children, desperate to escape a refugee camp in Jordan, accepted another offer that took less time to be finalized.

The group in Renfrew has reapplied for another family but say they're feeling frustrated with money in the bank and a bottled up desire to help.

It began around the time a picture of Alan Kurdi dead on a beach in Turkey shocked the world. About 70 people in Renfrew got together to help, calling themselves the Renfrew Refugee Welcome Group.

'Never seen that much enthusiasm'

Peter Raaphorst, who's in charge of volunteering and fundraising for the group, says he was amazed by the response.

"Pretty well all of Renfrew County participated in that, and we raised $15,000 on just five kilometres of walking. Then we had a trivia night, a musical variety show, but the one that struck me, really, was the ... high school in Renfrew. I did an assembly, and some of the students had tears in their eyes. So they got a fundraiser going, and they raised, in a bake sale, $1,250," Raaphorst said.

"It was the most amazing experience. I've never seen that much enthusiasm and commitment."

Eventually $50,000 was raised along with clothing and toy donations. Allison Collins and her husband then offered up a place for the family to live, a three-bedroom garden home her parents used to live in. 

"It was a no-brainer for us. It was the Canadian thing to do, it was the Ottawa Valley thing to do. ... Here's a house, let's get moving on this," Collins says.

As the process continued and months went by without word, a family living in the area lost everything in a fire. The group decided to let the family stay in the garden home on the condition that, when the refugees arrived, they would get the home back.

U.S. offer arrived first

The family they were paired with — a carpenter and his wife and their children — had fled Syria into Jordan and had been living in a camp for four years, where their youngest child was born. They were declared official refugees by the UN and both the United States and Canada were interested in accepting them.

The U.S. screening process was completed sooner, and so that country's offer ended up arriving first.

The Renfrew group found out late this summer, when a letter from the family arrived from Baltimore, Maryland.

"This family was desperate, and in the letter that they sent to us by email ... they were very grateful for our faith in them, and very grateful for our encouragement, but they very clearly said they were living in hell. ... They got so desperate that they said, time's up to go to the United States, let's do it," says Kurt Johnson, another core member of the group.

'We're just waiting and waiting'

They were surprised but happy for the family. The group then called a meeting and started work to apply for a new family. They once again have a list of possible names, but it'll take until next spring at the earliest for them to arrive.

"Our earliest possible arrival date is now April next year. So that's kind of hard to take, we're just waiting and waiting. But it's not just us waiting, it's some poor refugee family waiting in a camp," Raaphorst says.

The group is calling on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to speed up the process by making refugee resettlement a staffing priority again, as the government did late last year when it pledged to bring 25,000 refugees to Canada quickly.

In the Ottawa Valley, private sponsorship groups have been paired with 20 Syrian refugee families. Nine of those families have arrived.