Four Christmases ago, when we first met the Shelleh family, they had just been spat out of the hurricane.
They weren’t the first Syrians to land in Victoria, but they were the first to do so in the surge of 2015, when that photo of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, his tiny body washed up on a Turkish beach, shook the world out of its slumber and inspired Canada’s vow to welcome 25,000 refugees in 100 days.
The Shellehs, who had spent two years scratching out an under-the-radar existence in Lebanon after fleeing the war in Syria, didn’t even know to which city they were destined when Canada bundled the five of them — dad Osama, mom Hanadi Kadadou and their three young children — onto a plane that December.
They landed in Toronto, where the Governor General hugged them on camera, then flew to chilly Calgary, where there was no one to help them at all. Finally, exhausted, they alit in Victoria where, a week before that Christmas, they were embraced at the airport by the five local couples who sponsored them.
Those sponsors were all the Shellehs had. The refugees arrived with no jobs, no money. They spoke no English, could communicate only through an interpreter. In their Esquimalt apartment, Osama said he hoped to resume life as a mechanic one day. Hanadi just seemed relieved that her children were finally safe. You could tell they were apprehensive, though. Could they adapt, survive?
Fast-forward four years.
They’re still in the same apartment, but this time there’s no need for an Arabic-speaking interpreter to help with the interview. Osama took two years of English at Camosun, and Hanadi has been studying at the Inter-Cultural Association five days a week. The kids? They sound like they were born here.
Osama was in Canada just six months before finding work as a mechanic. Three months ago, he bought his own garage, Victoria Today Auto. Hanadi speaks of going to Camosun once their youngest is in school. “Maybe I will choose to work in a daycare,” she says. The future is wide open.
Best of all, they’re studying for their citizenship tests. If all goes well, Osama will take the oath Jan. 23, followed by Hanadi the next day. By this time next month they will be as Canadian as you, I, Justin Trudeau or Don Cherry. Their pride is palpable.
In short, if you need validation that Canada did the right thing in opening the doors to Syrian refugees — 69,015 of whom came here between Nov. 4, 2015, and Oct. 31, 2019 — the Shellehs are a pretty good place to start.
“They’re as good a family as I’ve ever met,” says Michael Wuitchik. Michael, a psychologist-turned-novelist, and his wife Shelley, a teacher-turned-artist, were among the Shellehs’ sponsors four years ago.
At the time, Michael said the sponsors were driven to action by the photos of Kurdi, the boy on the beach. It wasn’t just about the Syrians, he said, but about the rest of us, too. It was about the reflection Canadians want to see when they look in the mirror. “It’s about the kind of country we want to live in.”
To understand the impact of that, you have to understand where the Shellehs came from. “The last years in Syria, it was very hard,” Hanadi says. “I was worried for my kids and for my husband.”
Death and violence were — are — a constant in Syria. The family is from Harasta, a district near Damascus where opposition to the Assad regime was rewarded with indiscriminate bombing. Osama lost two brothers, one in a chemical attack and the other killed by government forces while jailed. Osama still carries shrapnel from the time soldiers opened fire on him as he tried to avoid arrest at a roadblock.
He got away, but not before being shot in the knee and stomach. Strangers saved him, hiding him in their chicken coop after he knocked on their door. He would later bury them after they were killed by a bomb.
Before making their way to Lebanon, the family moved from place to place, trying to stay safe. The bedroom Osama had just painted for his boys was riddled with gunfire after they fled the apartment. Hanadi remembers seeing a young neighbour boy run past while carrying the dead, broken body of the boy’s sister, who was maybe two years old. Those could just as easily have been her own children.
Instead, her kids are safe and thriving. After a little coaxing, son Zaid, 11, bashfully produces a couple of recent spelling and math tests — perfect marks in both. At 9, his brother Abdul shows solid essay-writing skills.
What language do they dream in? Abdul pauses to think, then says, “Sometimes this, sometimes that.” Both boys play soccer for Bays United.
As for the youngest, Loujain, she has never even seen Syria. Born in Lebanon, she was just eight months old when the family landed in Victoria. Canada is all she has ever known. She delighted her parents one day by pointing at the maple leaf flag on the television and saying “that’s our country.”
How good is their life in Canada? So good that the Shellehs are reluctant to post too many pretty pictures on social media, out of concern that it will make friends and family who are trapped in less-appealing circumstances feel bad.
They worry about Osama’s brother, too. He’s stranded in limbo in Turkey, where life is hard for refugees. “It’s not safe for people to live there,” Osama says. The Wuitchiks are part of a group hoping to sponsor the brother.
Hanadi and Osama know they have a long way to go, but figure they’re on the right path. Both talk about focusing on the future. “You have to look forward, not back,” he says. “If you have a goal, everything is easy here, but if you have no goal, it’s hard.”
Hanadi, who had difficulty sleeping in the first few months after arriving in Canada, is more at ease now, happy to keep the past in the past. “I think the life here helps us forget about the bad things before.”
Still, when Hanadi speaks today, you hear echoes of four years ago when, after just a week in Canada, she spoke earnestly about what she wanted for her children here: peace, a promise of a good education, an existence free of the mental strain of refugee life. Ask her what’s best about her new life and she says, “We are safe, and I can go and come.”
Osama answers the same way. “We have safety and...” He pauses, searching for the right word, until Abdul finishes the sentence for him: “Freedom.”
If that sounds a bit like a line from Top Gun, think of where they were four years ago. “Sometimes, I don’t believe I’m here,” Osama says. Last week he told his wife: “I don’t believe I’m still alive.”
Would they go back to Syria if things settled down there? “No,” Hanadi says. “This is home.”
