A life-changing life Nour Ali took a pastor's advice to heart; the grateful Syrian refugee couldn't pay back the church for sponsoring his arrival here in 2012 so he paid it forward, likely thousands of times By: Melissa Martin Posted: 7:00 PM CDT Monday, Jun. 15, 2020 Last Modified: 8:42 PM CDT Monday, Jun. 15, 2020 Updates

Opinion

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This article was published 14/06/2020 (1558 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There’s a video a friend sent me once, and it was beautiful. It was taken last fall at the Winnipeg airport, and it shows a family reunion years in the making. At the foot of the arrivals escalator a mother waits for her son, and siblings wait for their brother: a family separated by war is about to be brought back together.

The mother had come to Canada as a refugee from Syria years before. Her son and his family had finally had their own sponsorship application approved. The video captured the joy of the moment they rush into each other’s arms, eyes bright with tears, faces glowing with relief and with love.

With the family’s permission, I put the video on Twitter. It flew all over the world, and was even shared by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. It was easy to see why: it captured something precious. Something about what it is to belong to the community of humanity, of which words alone cannot always do justice.

Or, I guess one could say, the video showed the best of people. At the time, I didn’t yet realize how much.

Because when the news broke, just days ago, I looked at the video again. I saw how, in the last few seconds of the video, a man steps into the frame. He slips discreetly into the circle of family, and bends to pick up a bag that had been forgotten on the floor amidst the reunion. Just to get it out of the way. Just to help keep it safe.

That man’s name is Nour Ali, and ever since he arrived in Winnipeg as one of the city’s first refugees from Syria in 2012, that is always where you could find him: right beside those who needed help and right in the middle, helping.

Now he is missing, vanished into the waters of Lake Winnipeg after the fishing boat he was in capsized Saturday evening. The accident claimed the life of his father, 73-year-old Hamza Ali, who had come to Canada about a year ago. Three other men in the boat were able to make it safely to shore.

With each hour that passes, the chances of a miracle grow slimmer. And with each hour that passes, more voices speak up to share their memories of Ali, their gratitude, their admiration. He and his wife, Maysoun Darweesh, had come here as refugees, and it is Manitoba that is forever indebted to them.

There is no way to count how many people Ali helped during his time in Winnipeg. But there is one number that gives an idea: since 2016, he’d been featured in the Free Press or its weekly community papers no fewer than eight times for his efforts to build and give back to the community.

Each story gives a glimpse into how Ali helped raise up the people around him. In July 2016, he was featured for his work organizing a blood drive and community cleanup with Syrian refugee volunteers; less than six months later, he was interviewed for his work finding jobs for newcomers in construction.

In July 2017, Free Press reporter Carol Sanders reported on Ali’s latest venture, a restoration business staffed by newcomers to offer critically important Canadian work experience. The effort was called simply Thank You Canada.

Other stories followed. Stories about how he helped a Syrian family that had been targeted by xenophobic threats; about how he founded a day camp for refugee youth that grew to include more than 350 kids. There is a story from when he became a Canadian citizen in 2018 and was able to vote for the first time.

The stories continue right up to April this year, when Ali was featured in the Metro weekly paper. It was a story about how, right in the middle of the pandemic, he helped organize deliveries of home-cooked meals made with love by newcomer families and brought to front-line health-care workers.

These are just some of the things Ali did to help. Other things never hit the papers. He met refugees at the airport to welcome them to Winnipeg. He served as a translator and organized fundraisers. Together with Maysoun he poured endless hours of time and care into supporting others.

There is truly no telling how many people’s lives are better today because of Ali’s efforts. Only that, without him, the province would have been much lesser.

I never met Nour Ali, though friends of mine knew him. “Larger than life” is how my friend Tirzah Maendel describes him, and she repeats a story Nour told to media, the one about how he once went to the Mennonite church that had sponsored him and asked how he could repay their kindness.

Don’t pay it back, the church pastor replied, pay it forward.

“That is exactly what Nour and Maysoun did,” Maendel says.

All these years of paying it forward here in Manitoba. All these years of helping. There is no calculating how many people Ali helped in that time through his direct efforts: in the hundreds, likely the thousands. From that, ripples of care always spread outwards, until they’ve touched the whole world.

There is truly no telling how many people’s lives are better today because of Ali’s efforts. Only that, without him, the province would have been much lesser. So that he is now missing somewhere in Lake Winnipeg is a tragedy for the Syrian community, for newcomers here more broadly, and for all of us in Manitoba.

Yet what is being said and written about him now shines a light on something special.

To live one’s life so that, when the time comes, nobody can even count all the ways you made the world better; to live one’s life so that there are so many photos and videos of you standing just beside those who need help, or right in the middle; that is the beacon Ali lit, and one that all of Lake Winnipeg could never extinguish.

 

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca