Established refugees offer advice to arriving Syrians on how to make Canada home
"This is a new home. This is a safe place for you, and a beginning of your new life. "- Tima Kurdi on what her Syrian family should know when arriving in Canada
It's a very big day for Tima Kurdi. She is the aunt of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose lifeless body was photographed, washed up on a Turkish beach, last September.
Despite that loss, Tima Kurdi has kept on struggling to bring her other brother and his family to Canada.
Today, Mohammed Kurdi, his wife and five children are scheduled to arrive in Vancouver and move into her home in Port Coquitlam. The Kurdis are just a few of the thousands of Syrian refugees coming to Canada over the next week .... though the Liberal government says it may not meet its target of settling 10,000 refugees by year's end.
All of the new arrivals will now face the challenge of adapting to life in this country. Though of course, it's something many thousands of refugees have been through before.
So today, in order to get a better idea of the ups and downs that newly arrived refugees experience as they resettle in Canada, we reached out to three people who have made new lives here.
- Kelly Hong Mien Lee is a hair stylist and makeup artist, as well as one of the directors of the Help Kids to School Foundation, which helps kids get out of the sex trade in Vietnam. She was in our Toronto studio.
- Mahad Yusuf is the executive director of the Somali Immigrant Aid Organization, as well as the executive director of Midaynta Community Services, an organization dedicated to youth and education. He was also in our Toronto studio.
- Haidah Amirzadeh is a lawyer from Saskatoon. She teaches immigration and refugee law at the University of Saskatchewan. She was in Saskatoon.
If you have your own experience as a refugee settling in to Canada, we'd love to hear from you.
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This segment was produced by The Current's Karin Marley and Marc Apollonio.