Where there’s hope, there’s help

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This article was published 28/09/2015 (3445 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

EMERSON — After walking for six hours through muddy fields with her six-year-old son in tow, Sahra Ali Ahmed and her boy, Amin, crossed into Canada Saturday.

“I’m happy, only my feet are hurting me and my leg,” the Somali refugee claimant said Sunday.

She and her son spent the night at the Emerson Inn with three other asylum-seekers. They had no place to go and Canada Border Services Agency officials called around looking for settlement agencies or church groups who could help them.

“They were desperate,” said Karin Gordon of Hospitality House Refugee Ministry in Winnipeg.

After singing in her church choir Sunday morning, Gordon drove to Emerson to get the refugee claimants. She lined up another driver, a booster seat for the boy and an interpreter, Yahya Samatar, the first of many refugee claimants Gordon has picked up at the border. In August, Samatar’s incredible journey from Somalia to Brazil, then overland to North Dakota where he swam up the Red River into Canada, made international headlines. On Sunday, he went back to the border with Gordon for the fourth time as an interpreter.

This time, the people they went to get could speak English — especially Amin.

“Look at the backpack they gave me,” Amin said, proudly displaying the bag containing a colouring book and crayons one of the border agents gave him. The boy attended kindergarten for several months in Minneapolis and barely has an accent.

His mom said they had little hope of being accepted permanently in the U.S., so they came to Canada, hoping they’d be welcome.

In Emerson, they were picked up by police and taken to the Canada Border Services Agency port of entry where they made their refugee claim. With nowhere to go and no one to call, they spent the night at the hotel.

“They were happy when I told them I had two rooms available,” Emerson Inn employee Wayne Pfiel said. He said border officials dropped off the four adults and child at 1:30 Sunday a.m.

The CBSA contacted Emerson’s May Boehlig, who belongs to the local Baptist church, to find help for the asylum-seekers. She went to the inn Sunday morning to welcome them and started calling around to settlement groups and church contacts in Winnipeg to see if anyone could take them.

She’s trying to buy one of the local church buildings that’s no longer in use and turn it into a temporary shelter.

“We’re at a place where we need it,” Boehlig said. She managed to contact Gordon, Hospitality House’s 69-year-old settlement manager who lives at its Winnipeg residence, to pick up the refugee claimants.

Before driving to Emerson, Gordon left messages for members of Winnipeg’s Somali community to see if the asylum-seekers could be billeted at someone’s home.

The Hospitality House residence has just one double bed available because so many refugee claimants have arrived needing a place to stay, Gordon said. She hoped Amin and his mother could stay there because there’s another six-year-old boy and his mom staying at Hospitality House right now.

Back in Winnipeg Sunday afternoon, Gordon had all five asylum-seekers and their meagre belongings at the residence.

Amin’s mom wanted to do laundry. One of the men, Mahad Mohamed, wanted to catch a bus Sunday night to meet relatives in Toronto. The other man on the journey, Feysal Osman Malen, couldn’t find his cellphone and wanted to go back to Emerson to look for it. Aasiya Maxmuud was looking forward to a good night’s sleep — somewhere.

Gordon still hadn’t heard back from the Somali community. Its members are more than willing to help but are afraid to drive to the border for fear they’ll be accused of being part of a smuggling operation, she said. “They could find themselves deported,” she said.

The federal government no longer funds temporary housing or services of any kind for refugee claimants.

So the well-being of a rising number of asylum-seekers showing up at Emerson is left to charities, church ladies and the kindness of border agents.

While usually it’s single men crossing into Canada on foot, this weekend it was two women and, for the first time, a child.

With no co-ordinated response to the influx of refugee claimants, Gordon is worried about what will happen to them.

She helped to organize a meeting with the Manitoba Interfaith Immigration Council this week. Local representatives from the Canada Border Services Agency were expected to attend but couldn’t get approval from the federal government to take part in the discussion, Gordon said.

For the time being, people such as Amin and his mom will have to rely on the kindness of strangers, she said.

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca