Pathway to healing

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This article was published 21/08/2022 (759 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Nafiya Naso believes cleaning can be therapeutic.

“When I get home from a really stressful day, cleaning really gets me out of my head,” Naso said. “It’s a bit mindless, but in a way, you kind of need that to unwind from all that you’re going through.”

She thinks it could help Yazidi refugees in the city who need a job.

Naso has spearheaded the Healing Cleaning Co., a non-profit made possible with the help of the Canadian Yazidi Association and Operation Ezra. It opened for business on July 1.

“We call it a business but at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of close friends who go out and do this activity of cleaning together,” Naso said. “Framing it as a social activity for these women really helped them to get out of their head space, be out of the house, be engaging with groups of people (and) different communities.”

Naso, a Yazidi resettlement co-ordinator, said the goal is to provide safe, meaningful employment alongside a pathway to healing.

The Yazidis are an ethnic minority group from Kurdistan. For 700 years, Yazidis have faced religious persecution. Today, many Yazidis live in Iraq and Syria, where they are targeted by the Islamic State. In May 2021, the United Nations declared the Islamic State’s crimes against the Yazidis a genocide.

Naso said many of the Yazidis she interacts with have trauma that significantly affects their ability to work.

“What really differentiates them from other refugee populations is the level of trauma and PTSD that they suffered,” Naso said. “It’s still an ongoing genocide, so a lot of that resurfaces almost every single day. Sometimes, it’s an hourly thing for them.”

A Yazidi refugee herself, Naso and her family came to Canada from Syria in 1999, when she was six years old. When ISIS invaded the land of the Yazidi people in northern Iraq in August 2014, Naso felt a moral obligation to help.

“In 2014, when all that was going on back home, we got so many calls from friends and family,” Naso said. “On our end here in Winnipeg, we began reaching out to different communities and just saying, ‘You know, is there any way you can help us elevate our voice?’”

Members of Winnipeg’s Jewish community were the first to reach out.

In 2015, Naso had the opportunity to share the story of the Yazidis with Michel Aziza and five other members of the Jewish community. Aziza remembers sitting in her basement and being told the heartwrenching story about the Yazidi genocide.

“I felt that the support and the help that she needed was something that I could help with, and my community could help with,” Aziza said.

Not long after that meeting, Aziza and Naso launched Operation Ezra, which sponsored families to come to Canada. In just a few months, the organization raised $50,000 to sponsor a Yazidi family. The initiative became a multi-faith effort.

To date, Operation Ezra has privately sponsored 11 families that include 65 individuals.

In 2019, Naso and Michel helped launch the Yazidi Healing Farm. Many of the Yazidis who settled in Winnipeg are single-parent families who had backgrounds in agriculture. Each year, the Yazidi farmers grow thousands of kilograms of fresh produce that is sold in farmers markets across the province.

The Healing Cleaning Co. came from a desire to expand those skills and help Yazidis in Winnipeg become more financially independent.

“Especially when these families live in these tiny apartments, getting them out of the house is a big thing,” Aziza said. “(It gives) them an opportunity to interact with other people, not just members of the Yazidi community but also to interact with clients.”

Naso is eager to build partnerships with businesses and organizations to expand the cleaning company’s reach.

The vision behind the projects is to adapt employment to fit their needs.

“It’s all really done in collaboration in this family. They’re always in the room,” Naso said. “I think that’s why all our programs to date have been so successful, and that’s why I’m really confident that this Healing Cleaning Co. will be successful, too.”

cierra.bettens@freepress.mb.ca