Help must go beyond food, clothing, shelter

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This article was published 16/03/2018 (2545 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After seeing her father killed by rebels in South Sudan, growing up in a refugee camp and then moving to the other side of the world by herself, Rebecca Riak is a survivor on a mission.

She’s trying to get more mental-health supports for refugees who resettle in Manitoba.

“We are very good at giving them food and clothing and shelter, but there are other things they need,” said Riak, who completed her Grade 12 in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya and was awarded a World University Service of Canada scholarship in 2013 to attend the University of Winnipeg.

She has organized an event Saturday afternoon at the U of W to raise awareness of the need for more mental-health supports for refugee newcomers.

“I’m not saying refugees are mentally ill. I’m just saying we need to add that to the list,” said Riak, adding she made it through her own rough patch a few years ago.

“If we were to meet, you couldn’t tell that anything is going on in my life. We don’t know a lot about what is going on in the background.”

For a young international student on her own far from home, there was a lot going on in her background in 2015.

That’s when her mother, who was at the refugee camp, was diagnosed with breast cancer.

To get the treatment to fight it, she had to be in Nairobi. With no income, travel documents or health coverage, it was up to Riek to save her mom and younger siblings.

Riak scaled back her time in school and got more hours at her residential support-worker job to move them to the Kenyan capital and to pay for their support and her mother’s cancer fight.

“One chemo treatment costs $850 and she had to do 12. The mastectomy cost $5,000.” Her mother survived, but Riak isn’t sure how she did, with so much to worry about.

“Maybe through God’s grace I made it,” said Riak, who now has two jobs and is working toward two university degrees.

Helping refugees who need mental-health services now will pay dividends in the future, she said. “They can welcome other refugees and heal each other.”

Canada owes it to them — and it’s a good investment, agreed immigration researcher Lori Wilkinson.

“With refugees, we signed an international agreement saying we will settle 11,000 to 14,000 refugees per year,” the director of Immigration Research West at the University of Manitoba said.

“If we want to resettle people successfully, we need to give them the tools to resettle.”

The short-term costs are high but the long-term benefits are huge, the U of M sociology professor said.

“Most (refugees) come before their 30th birthday,” she said, adding the amount of income taxes they pay over a lifetime of work is vastly greater than the cost of government services they receive.

Wilkinson is one of the Saturday event’s speakers, joined by former refugees sharing their personal stories.

She said she plans to dispel some myths, such as the one about all refugees having mental-health issues.

Among non-refugees, around 15 per cent will experience a mental-health issue, said Wilkinson. For refugees, it’s closer to 20 per cent, she said. Another myth is refugees’ mental-health issues all stem from traumatic experiences.

“Most of the mental-health problems come up six to 24 months after arrival and they mostly have to do with issues of resettlement,” Wilkinson said.

“It’s when they get here and can take a breath and realize, ‘I’m not running anymore. Now that I’ve stopped running and have a life to look forward to and a little stability, it’s going to be harder than I imagined.’

“In Manitoba, they’ll give you 10 one-hour counselling sessions but, for many people, that’s not enough.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca