Strangers pledge to help incoming Syrians
WASHINGTON • I have a friend who has a theory, about grief and heartbreak and the burdens we bear. It goes like this. Duty operates in concentric circles. It pushes out and dissipates. The weight gets lesser with every phase. That’s how we survive. At the centre of every circle, the theory goes, there’s an event. It could be a breakup or a job loss or a death in the family. But whatever it is, it leaves a hole. A gap. A person who needs help. So they lean.
They fall backward into their first circle. Their best friend. Their lover. Their spouse. They take the burden. They offer their support. And when they’re tapped out, when the second-hand sadness becomes too much, they look to the next circle: their friends, their sisters. And they lean.
Outward it goes, from circle to circle, everybody holding what they can. That’s how the weight gets carried. That’s how we survive. For most of us, our circles are our families, the ones we’re born with and the ones we make. But for others, that line is much less clear. In her recent book, Strangers Drowning, Larissa MacFarquhar writes about people for whom the line between family and strangers is a blur. The “do-gooders,” as she calls them, give whatever they can, to whoever needs it most, no matter the cost. They go far beyond charity. They let anybody lean.
That altruism can make us profoundly uncomfortable, MacFarquhar writes. In their fervour to address the inhumane, the do- gooders can often seem somehow unhuman.
But there is another way of blurring that line, another way of substituting stranger for family. It is perhaps less extreme. But in its own way, it is no less different from what we’d normally think of as charity. In Canada, we call it sponsorship. Tens of thousands of Canadians have volunteered to sponsor refugees fleeing Syria. They’ve promised to pay their bills, to find them homes, to ease their passage to this new land.
Sponsorship is not like other charity. It’s not like writing a cheque or serving meals at a soup kitchen. It is a profoundly personal promise.
SEVERAL NEWLY ARRIVED SYRIAN REFUGEES HAVE BEEN SPONSORED BY FAMILY MEMBERS, BUT THOUSANDS MORE WILL COME TO CANADA SPONSORED BY COMPLETE STRANGERS, WHO PLEDGE TIME, MONEY AND ENERGY TO EASE THE TRANSITION
At its heart, sponsorship is an invitation, to a stranger, from another country and another culture, into the centre of one’s own circle of circles. It’s a promise to let them lean, when they need it most, when they need it in ways most Canadians can barely fathom.
It is, in other words, a heavy thing. It has weight.
And in a way that often gets lost in easy narratives, it can be difficult and profound: full of joy and misunderstanding, anger, sorrow and in some cases a connection that can be deep and lifelong.
On Friday in Toronto, dozens of newly arrived refugees met their sponsors at an Armenian church in the north end of the city. They were handed tiny Canadian flags. The children were given chocolate. There was naked joy on tired faces, relief and excitement for what might come next.
Most of the refugees at the church Friday were sponsored by family members already living in Canada. On the way inside, Raffi Boudakian hugged his cousin Natalie, who he’d never met before in person. “We were happy to be able to help,” he said.
For other sponsors, though, thousands of them, the refugees they’re bringing in will be complete strangers, with no ties to them or to the community. That process can be a challenge, according to Barbara Gamble.
Gamble was 27 when she first saw TV reports about the Vietnamese boat people. It was the late 1970s. She was already politically active. But the images struck her in a way nothing had before.
Gamble ached to do something, to make a tangible difference, so she joined the sponsorship group Project 4000. And for the next four years, she dedicated a huge part of her life to getting Vietnamese refugees to Ottawa, and settling them in once they’d arrived.
The process “was an eyeopener,” she says.
“The amount of energy (it took) to take on the care of other people — I was a young woman and I hadn’t had to do that yet. That was one surprise,” she says. “The second surprise was how gratifying it was. I don’t think I was prepared for that level of positive feedback and energy. “It was overwhelming.” Back then, Gamble didn’t personally sponsor refugees, she worked more as a supervisor. But she did eventually, taking in families from El Salvador and Iran.
Speaking to her now, it’s clear how much she values that work, how enriching she found it.
But at the same time, she doesn’t think anyone can — or should — be a sponsor. Doing it well involves an enormous commitment of time and emotional energy. It’s a moral commitment, too: a vow of deep friendship to a stranger that can’t be taken back.
“There are many other ways that people can contribute,” Gamble says.
The process requires a significant financial pledge, to begin with, starting at about $27,000 for a family of four. But it’s much more than that, says Brian Dyck, the national resettlement co-ordinator for the Mennonite Central Committee in Manitoba. “You basically are responsible for taking care of them. You’re their social safety net and their community for the first 12 months they’re in Canada.”
There are logistics to sort out: setting up bank accounts and medical and dental appointments, co-ordinating language lessons, finding furniture. But there are less tangible issues, too.
Dr. Soma Ganesan knows what that means for both sponsors and refugees. He spent six months in a Com- munist re- education camp before he was able to escape Vietnam in the 1970s, and he’s worked with refugees in Vancouver for several decades.
He points out that many refugees, fleeing war or terrorism or poverty, suffer from post- traumatic stress disorder. Helping them through that, giving them a feeling of community and connecting them with the professional care they need, can be a difficult, heart-rending process. It can expose sponsors in a very visceral way to the horrors of other peoples’ lives, and to the limits of what they personally can do to help.
For Gamble, one key is to acknowledge what you can’t do. “You have to know your limitations as a friend,” she says. “And a good friend refers their friends to where they need to go when they need to go there, be it a doctor, a school, a dentist, a psychiatrist, whatever.”
Neil MacCarthy, a spokesman for the Catholic Diocese of Toronto, recalls one family his church sponsored that couldn’t be convinced to buy their own food. The church had found them an apartment within walking distance of a grocery store, but for weeks they refused to go. “We couldn’t understand why,” he says. It turned out that, where the family had come from, going for groceries meant dodging snipers. It meant violence and the possibility of rape. “Our understanding of the psychological trauma just wasn’t there,” he says.
There’s also the question of cultural difference. When asked to sum up the challenges of refugee sponsorship, Dyck cites “awkwardness” before anything else. “There will likely be a lot of misunderstanding and need for forgiveness on both sides.”
Remzi Cej came to St. John’s, N. L., as a refugee from Kosovo. His family had wonderful, generous sponsors, he says, but the wires still sometimes got crossed. It took the Cejs months to figure out, for example, that, when their new Newfoundlander friends called their cooking different, it meant they couldn’t stand it.
For all the potential pitfalls of refugee sponsorship, though, the benefits can be enormous, for sponsors and refugees alike.
Decades later, Cej and his family remain close to their sponsors. The sense of community they offered is a big reason the Cejs stayed in St. John’s rather than moving somewhere with a larger Kosovar population.
It wasn’t always easy. “I haven’t had that conversation with them about how difficult it was for them, but I know it was,” Cej says. “They were figuring out what worked for us, what didn’t work for us, whether they were making us uncomfortable.”
But the accumulated gestures, from birthday cakes to dinner invitations and trips to Cape Spear, did add up. “I don’t think they knew the impact of the little things they were doing and the difference it made in our adjustment,” he says. “And I don’t think we realized it at the time either.”
That doesn’t happen in every case. “There can sometimes be unrealistic expectations,” said MacCarthy. Some refugees don’t want a lifelong bond. Others just never click with their sponsors.
Sponsorship, after all, is an unnatural thing, in some ways. It’s an offer of temporary but deep connection, an invitation into the intimate circles that make us whole.
For his part, Ganesan believes most sponsors know what they’re getting into, to some extent. They’re motivated to help and they expect challenges along the way.
But “how challenging it will be,” he says, “I don’t think anybody has any clue.”