The Best American Travel Writing 2017 Page 14

  We left our money in Belize—where much of it went back to U.S. real estate developers—and we left our tips in the hands of men who delivered us to regal manatees and shipwrecks covered in coral. We fed our daughter chicken fingers in the land of coconut chipotle snapper. We leapt from the grip of our guilt and landed in the deep end of the swimming pool, where her bliss at chasing mermaids was one truth and the construction workers beyond our balcony were another—the truth of joy and the truth of profit—and neither truth ever canceled the other.

  JODI KANTOR AND CATRIN EINHORN

  Refugees Hear a Foreign Word:Welcome

  FROM The New York Times

  TORONTO—One frigid day in February, Kerry McLorg drove to an airport hotel here to pick up a family of Syrian refugees. She was cautious by nature, with a job poring over insurance data, but she had never even spoken to the people who were about to move into her basement.

  “I don’t know if they even know we exist,” she said.

  At the hotel, Abdullah Mohammad’s room phone rang, and an interpreter told him to go downstairs. His children’s only belongings were in pink plastic bags, and the family’s documents lay in a white paper bag printed with a Canadian flag. His sponsors had come, he was told. He had no idea what that meant.

  Across Canada, ordinary citizens, distressed by news reports of drowning children and the shunning of desperate migrants, are intervening in one of the world’s most pressing problems. Their country allows them a rare power and responsibility: They can band together in small groups and personally resettle—essentially adopt—a refugee family. In Toronto alone, hockey moms, dog-walking friends, book club members, poker buddies, and lawyers have formed circles to take in Syrian families. The Canadian government says sponsors officially number in the thousands, but the groups have many more extended members.

  When Ms. McLorg walked into the hotel lobby to meet Mr. Mohammad and his wife, Eman, she had a letter to explain how sponsorship worked: For one year, Ms. McLorg and her group would provide financial and practical support, from subsidizing food and rent to supplying clothes to helping them learn English and find work. She and her partners had already raised more than 40,000 Canadian dollars (about $30,700), selected an apartment, talked to the local school, and found a nearby mosque.

  Ms. McLorg, the mother of two teenagers, made her way through the crowded lobby, a kind of purgatory for newly arrived Syrians. Another member of the group clutched a welcome sign she had written in Arabic but then realized she could not tell if the words faced up or down. When the Mohammads appeared, Ms. McLorg asked their permission to shake hands and took in the people standing before her, no longer just names on a form. Mr. Mohammad looked older than his thirty-five years. His wife was unreadable, wearing a flowing niqab that obscured her face except for a narrow slot for her eyes. Their four children, all under ten, wore donated parkas with the tags still on.

  For the Mohammads, who had been in Canada less than forty-eight hours, the signals were even harder to read. In Syria, Abdullah had worked in his family’s grocery stores and Eman had been a nurse, but after three years of barely hanging on in Jordan, they were not used to being wanted or welcomed. “You mean we’re leaving the hotel?” Abdullah asked. To himself, he was wondering, What do these people want in return?

  Much of the world is reacting to the refugee crisis—21 million displaced from their countries, nearly 5 million of them Syrian—with hesitation or hostility. Greece shipped desperate migrants back to Turkey; Denmark confiscated their valuables; and even Germany, which has accepted more than half a million refugees, is struggling with growing resistance to them. Broader anxiety about immigration and borders helped motivate Britons to take the extraordinary step last week of voting to leave the European Union.

  In the United States, even before the Orlando massacre spawned new dread about “lone wolf” terrorism, a majority of American governors said they wanted to block Syrian refugees because some could be dangerous. Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called for temporary bans on all Muslims from entering the country and recently warned that Syrian refugees would cause “big problems in the future.” The Obama administration promised to take in 10,000 Syrians by September 30 but has so far admitted about half that many.

  Just across the border, however, the Canadian government can barely keep up with the demand to welcome them. Many volunteers felt called to action by the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose body washed up last fall on a Turkish beach. He had only a slight connection to Canada—his aunt lived near Vancouver—but his death caused recrimination so strong it helped elect an idealistic, refugee-friendly prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

  “Angry Mob of Do-Gooders”

  The Toronto Star greeted the first planeload by splashing “Welcome to Canada” in English and Arabic across its front page. Eager sponsors toured local Middle Eastern supermarkets to learn what to buy and cook and used a toll-free hotline for instant Arabic translation. Impatient would-be sponsors—“an angry mob of do-gooders,” the Star called them—have been seeking more families. The new government committed to taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees and then raised the total by tens of thousands.

  “I can’t provide refugees fast enough for all the Canadians who want to sponsor them,” John McCallum, the country’s immigration minister, said in an interview.

  In the ideal version of private sponsorship, the groups become concierges and surrogate family members who help integrate the outsiders, called “New Canadians.” The hope is that the Syrians will form bonds with those unlike them, from openly gay sponsors to business owners who will help them find jobs to lifelong residents who will take them skating and canoeing. Ms. McLorg’s group of neighbors and friends includes doctors, economists, a lawyer, an artist, teachers, and a bookkeeper.

  Advocates for sponsorship believe that private citizens can achieve more than the government alone, raising the number of refugees admitted, guiding newcomers more effectively, and potentially helping solve the puzzle of how best to resettle Muslims in Western countries. Some advocates even talk about extending the Canadian system across the globe. (Slightly fewer than half of the Syrian refugees who recently arrived in Canada have private sponsors, including some deemed particularly vulnerable who get additional public funds. The rest are resettled by the government.)

  The fear is that all of this effort could end badly, with the Canadians looking naive in more ways than one.

  The Syrians are screened, and many sponsors and refugees take offense at the notion that they could be dangerous, saying they are often victims of terrorism themselves. But American officials point out that it is very difficult to track activity in the chaotic, multifaceted Syrian war. Several Islamic State members involved in the 2015 Paris attacks arrived on Europe’s shores from Syria posing as refugees.

  Some of the refugees in Canada have middle- and upper-class backgrounds, including a businessman who started a Canadian version of his medical marketing company within a month after arriving. But many more face steep paths to integration, with no money of their own, uncertain employment prospects, and huge cultural gaps. Some had never heard of Canada until shortly before coming here, and a significant number are illiterate in Arabic, which makes learning English—or reading a street sign or sending an email in any language—a titanic task. No one knows how refugees will navigate the currents of longing, trauma, dependence, or resentment they may feel.

  And volunteers cannot fully anticipate what they may confront—clashing expectations of whether Syrian women should work, tensions over how money is spent, families that are still dependent when the year is up, disagreements within sponsor groups.

  Still, by mid-April, only eight weeks after their first encounter with Ms. McLorg, the Mohammads had a downtown apartment with a pristine kitchen, bikes for the children to zip around the courtyard, and a Canadian flag taped to their window. The sponsors knew the children’s shoe sizes; Abdullah and Ema
n still had keys to Ms. McLorg’s house. He studied the neighborhood’s supermarkets, and his wife took a counseling course so she could help others who had experienced dislocation and loss. When the male sponsors visited, she sat at the dining room table with them instead of eating in the kitchen—as she would have done back home—as long as her husband was around too.

  Mr. Mohammad searched for the right words to describe what the sponsors had done for him. “It’s like I’ve been on fire, and now I’m safe in the water,” he said.

  But he and other new arrivals were beginning to confront fresh questions: How were they supposed to work with these enthusiastic strangers? What would it mean to reinvent their lives under their watch?

  Being Ready for Anything

  As sponsors sign the paperwork that commits them, no one really explains the potential range of their unofficial duties: showing a newcomer to spit in a dentist’s sink by miming the motions, rushing over late at night to calm a war-rattled family terrified by a garage door blown open by the wind, or using Google Translate to tell children who lived through war and exile that they are supposed to wear pink at school for anti-bullying day.

  One April morning, Liz Stark, the grandmother in chief of another sponsor group, could not find Mouhamad Ahmed, the father in the family. She tried his phone and waited in vain outside their new apartment. This was a problem: Wissam, his wife, was in labor with their fifth child.

  The pregnancy had been anxious because the couple had lost even more than their old life in Syria, where Mr. Ahmed used to farm wheat, cotton, and cumin. They had spent years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, their three children never attending school because tuition was too expensive. Ms. Ahmed became pregnant there with their fourth child, but labor was troubled and the girl lived only six hours. They named her Amira, which means princess.

  “I was thinking maybe the same thing will happen to me here as well,” Ms. Ahmed said.

  As Ms. Stark hunted for Mr. Ahmed, Peggy Karas, another sponsor, stayed at the hospital massaging Ms. Ahmed’s hand during contractions. Like other such pairs, the two women had come together through opaque, bureaucratic machinery. A United Nations agency referred Ms. Ahmed and her family to Canadian officials who interviewed and screened them, then passed their file to a new nonprofit dedicated to matching Syrians with private sponsors, who had twenty-four hours to say yes or no based on the barest of details.

  Ms. Stark and many of her cosponsors were retired teachers, bossy and doting, and they had become hell-bent on bringing this new child into the world safely. They had introduced Ms. Ahmed to the vitamins she would take, the machines that would monitor her, the hospital ward where she would deliver. The older women had repeated the doctors’ reassurances that all would go smoothly this time. They had helped her pick out tiny outfits and baby gear, but she was too superstitious to take them home, so they formed a small mountain in a sponsor’s living room.

  Ms. Stark had recruited another newly arrived Syrian refugee to serve as an interpreter during labor. When she finally found Mr. Ahmed, who had been playing soccer, unaware of what was happening, she ushered him to the hospital room, where he took over holding his wife’s hand.

  Suddenly a medical team rushed her away, saying the umbilical cord was in a dangerous position and she needed an emergency cesarean section. Ms. Ahmed, terrified, asked her husband to take care of their children if she did not survive. As Mr. Ahmed collapsed, sobbing, the sponsors asked his permission to pray.

  When a nurse finally appeared to say the newborn was healthy, whisked off to intensive care for observation, Ms. Ahmed said she would not believe it until she held the baby, but Mr. Ahmed was jubilant. He called his father in Syria and let him choose a name: Julia, the family’s first Canadian citizen.

  Once the infant was home, she went from being the Ahmed family member the sponsors worried about most to the one they fretted about least. She would grow up hearing English, going to Canadian preschool and beyond. For her siblings—ten-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and an eight-year-old brother—the sponsors found a program for children who had never been to school. Their father, who had gone through only second grade, worked on learning enough English to find a job.

  Everyone was on a deadline: After one year, the sponsors’ obligation ends, and the families are expected to become self-sufficient. Toronto rents are high, and the Ahmeds may not be able to stay in the relatively inexpensive apartment the sponsors found for them—the monthly rent is 1,400 Canadian dollars, or about $1,100—even if Mr. Ahmed finds a job.

  Ms. Stark was optimistic because she had lived through other versions of this story. Almost four decades ago, as a young geography teacher, she joined in the first mass wave of Canadian private sponsorship, in which citizens resettled tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Hmong. She helped sponsor three Vietnamese brothers and a Cambodian family, later attending their weddings, celebrating the births of their children, and watching them find their places in Toronto, a city so diverse that half the population is foreign-born. Now some former Southeast Asian refugees are completing the cycle by sponsoring Syrians.

  Why Canada Makes Sense

  Like many sponsors, Ms. Stark believes that her country is especially suited to resettling refugees, with its vast size, strong social welfare system, and a government that emphasizes multiculturalism. Canada has not endured acts of terrorism like the September 11 hijackings or the Paris attacks, or even an assault on the scale of the Orlando nightclub killings. And with only one land border, little illegal immigration, and a tenth of the population of the United States, Canada is hungry for migrants. Officials around the country have clamored to bring Syrian refugees to their provinces.

  “We are an accident of geography and history,” said Ratna Omidvar, who cofounded Lifeline Syria, a group that matches Syrians with sponsors.

  Opposition to the influx has been relatively muted. The Conservative Party argues that the country is taking in more refugees than it can provide for, but supports accepting Syrians. Some Canadians complain that the country should take care of its own first, and new chapters of the Soldiers of Odin, a European anti-immigrant group, have cropped up in recent months. A few incidents targeting Syrians—graffiti reading SYRIANS GO HOME AND DIE at a Calgary school, a pepper spray attack at an event welcoming refugees—drew widespread condemnation.

  One May evening, three weeks after Julia’s birth, Ms. Stark stopped by the Ahmeds’ apartment with a plastic table for the balcony and cradled the baby. She had a new grandchild, but she had spent more time with Julia. The cookie-baking retirees were planning a party to welcome her the Syrian way, by feasting on a newly slaughtered lamb on her fortieth day. Meanwhile, Mr. Ahmed had adopted a new custom: He sometimes brought his wife breakfast in bed and got the children ready. “When I came here, I saw men just doing everything that women do in Syria,” he said. “And I thought, yeah, of course, I will do the same.”

  That night, Ms. Ahmed handed Ms. Stark a form from the twins’ school, unsure what it was about. “What? You’re going to the Blue Jays game?” she crowed to the boy, Majed, who grinned back under his dark curls. Then she turned to his parents. “This costs money, but your sponsors will pay for it because this is important.”

  The Ahmeds were so frugal that their benefactors sometimes worried whether they were buying enough to eat. Ms. Ahmed said they wanted to purchase no more than the family needed.

  Before leaving, Ms. Stark explained the proper Tylenol dosage for the couple’s daughter, Zahiya, who had a fever. She and her twin now spent their school bus rides exchanging language lessons with a pair of Chinese brothers, pointing to objects and naming them. One day when their parents tried to bring them home after a dentist appointment, the Syrian children refused, insisting on returning to school for the time remaining.

  English words were starting to emerge from the older children’s mouths, but the sponsors and the adult refugees could barely understand one another without help, often relyi
ng on mimed gestures or balky translation apps. Even when the groups use interpreters, they often get stuck in roundelays of Canadian and Syrian courtesy, so reluctant to impose that they do not say what they mean. Ms. Ahmed, who had a first-grade education and was not attending English classes because she was home with a newborn, said that not being able to communicate was painful.

  “Sometimes I feel like I am losing my mind,” she said, because she felt so close to the sponsors but could not even tell them little things about the baby.

  Still, some groups faced greater challenges. Some Syrians have backed out before traveling to Canada, intimidated by the geographic and cultural leap. Sam Nammoura, a refugee advocate in Calgary, said he was tracking dozens of cases in which Syrian-Canadians sponsored friends and relatives and then left them destitute. Other pairings have turned out to be mismatches of expectations; one formerly well-off Syrian family expressed disappointment that its apartment was a second-floor walk-up and lacked a washing machine. Others were shocked to discover that their sponsors were posting Facebook messages and blog entries about them that strangers could read.

  Even when sponsors and refugees become enmeshed in one another’s lives, they do not fully know one another. Not every family is open about its history, and many sponsors would like to know the worst but do not want to ask. (The Ahmeds and the Mohammads asked not to be identified by their full surnames, and were reluctant to publicly share details of their experiences in Syria because they feared reprisals against relatives still there. Most of the refugees in this article left Syria around 2013, during fighting between the Assad regime and rebels.)