SOMETIMES, FOR MUNO, the books she read were a way of leaving the reality of her loneliness behind—all those characters with all those stories to entertain her. But sometimes, reading was simply a means of procrastinating, a way to avoid thinking of the personal choices she felt she had to start making. This was her “transitional term,” she said near the end of the winter semester, a term when she would have to start considering some tough decisions: where she would live the next year and how she would pay for her rent, food and tuition. Other students, born or raised in Canada, had a better understanding of the mechanics of finding jobs and comparing costs of rental units than she did. At twenty, Muno had always lived where there had been few opportunities for work and no choices in homes. And back in the camp, she’d had her parents for guidance in any matters she did have to consider; but they were far away from her now and, in any case, they wouldn’t understand the options facing Muno any better than she did.
Muno’s WUSC committee at the University of Toronto Mississauga campus had made many of the decisions about her first year in Canada long before she’d even arrived. They’d arranged where she would live and how she would get her meals, and they’d taken care of all the costs. She could count on financial support until the next sponsored student arrived in late August. The deadline for applying for student loans for second year was months away, and the WUSC committee would help her with the paperwork long before that. In March, she still had almost half a year of breathing space, but Muno had an active imagination and it was filling her empty moments with dread. She’d read enough books to know that life can take disastrous turns.
When she wasn’t studying or procrastinating, she mentally listed all the steps she’d have to take to become self-sufficient by the end of summer. She knew she should be getting out of her apartment more often now to hand out resumés at nearby stores and restaurants if she wanted a job by spring. Wendy’s Restaurant had offered her a part-time position, but because there was pork on the menu and it was haram for her to even handle that meat, she had had to turn the job down. She had gone to another interview where a Muslim woman, waiting to be interviewed as well, had advised her that she’d have a better chance if she took off her hijab. But no job was worth that to Muno.
Then there was the question of whether she should live alone or find a roommate in her second year. She knew she couldn’t afford the privacy and the proximity to classes that her residence offered if she had to pay the fees herself. And moving in with her cousins didn’t seem like much of an option either, considering the long commute from their place in Toronto to the Mississauga campus. She had talked to a Muslim woman in the cafeteria who rented a basement apartment for a reasonable price, but her friend Abdinoor had discouraged her from that choice. He had told her basements were cold in the winter and hot in the summer. Muno wasn’t sure what a basement was. All she knew was it was just another new thing to worry about, among the many unknown problems that lay ahead.
All of the eleven students faced transitions that could, ultimately, affect their career choices down the road. Across Canada, both the level of financial support and the approach to the Student Refugee Program varied from university to university. In evaluations with sponsored students, WUSC’S Asni Mekonnen finds that right from the beginning of the year, one of the biggest complaints she hears is the disparity of support students receive: “They start to email and they compare what each other has, so that has been a bone of contention—like how come this person when he came was provided with a laptop and I was not.”
Glen Peterson, faculty adviser for the WUSC committee at the University of British Columbia since 1994, says there has not been much discussion within the larger WUSC community about the differing levels of support across the country because each university cobbles the money together in its own way. He says that even before students arrive in Canada, they are often intensely aware of the differences at universities because local committees send letters to the students outlining their programs, although WUSC Ottawa discourages the practice.
There are also philosophical differences among universities. Some committees operate on the belief that it is better to fulfill the basic requirements of private sponsorship—twelve months of financial support, bringing one or more students every year—in order to get as many students as possible out of refugee camps. Others believe that it is important to provide some continued support to the current students to give them a better chance at success.
On top of that, the way each committee is organized can affect the level of practical support the sponsored student receives. Committees run entirely by students, by nature, have a higher turnover than committees with staff and faculty involved. In student-run committees, once graduates leave the university, new volunteers take over, often unaware of any past problems that could be corrected and unfamiliar with the former students who might still appreciate moral, if not financial, help past their first year. Peterson says that even at UBC, where the program has been running for years, faculty members still need to be reminded of what WUSC is and what the Student Refugee Program actually does.
Throughout the year, WUSC administrators in Ottawa send out checklists for committees that they should be following to guide the student through the seasons. The April checklist suggests helping the student with income tax returns, with summer housing and with applications for financial assistance for the second year if needed. But WUSC headquarters is not sponsoring the student. Each local committee is, and each can decide how to raise its money, how to spend it and how to help its student.
Financially, there was no advantage to Halima to continuing her studies at Mount Saint Vincent. In her second year she would have to pay her own tuition and living expenses, so it didn’t matter where she attended university—either still in Halifax or somewhere in the west. Paula Barry and the students on the committee tried to figure out ways they could ease the transition if Halima did stay at the university. Paula told Halima, “If you find yourself in a situation next year where you need a root canal or you’re hungry or you need your rent paid, you can come and see me. We have some money in the second year to support you. But at the same time I feel very strongly about bringing a student per year.” Halima, who was now a member of the committee, agreed with that approach. How could she expect more when so many students were left behind in Dadaab?
The Brandon program would not cover Aden’s tuition or other costs in his second year either. But the committee did have money to smooth out the transition. “Usually they move out of residence because of the food,” Brandy Robertson said. “It’s difficult for them because they want to be able to cook, so we help them find an apartment. We pay their first month’s rent. We furnish their apartment if they need a bed or a desk or a bicycle. We help them apply for student loans. We help them find a job. But other than that, their financial assistance ends basically once we’ve got them settled—unless there’s an emergency.”
Aden didn’t know yet how he would manage in his second year, but he knew he would. He didn’t think the financial situation would alter his desire to become a doctor, although he knew it would make it harder. He had lived through war, made it to Dadaab, succeeded in finishing secondary school with marks high enough to win a prized scholarship. In his few months in Canada he’d already found a job at the cafeteria and, after successfully handling the “bear pit” session, had secured the position as the science commissioner for the student body at the university. Figuring out how to support himself would be a challenge to be sure, but it was doable.
Siyad and Abdi would find the transition to second year financially easier than the other students. As one of largest universities in Canada with an established levy, the University of British Columbia collected close to $100,000 in the 2008/09 school year. The university sponsored three students in 2008, including Siyad. The money raised by the levy paid the students’ living expenses for the first year only, but the university gave the students free tuition for their first degree at the university as well as an annual allowance for their textbooks.
The program at UBC started in 1981 when students, unsure how they would pay for even one whole year, brought a young man from Eritrea to the campus. Glen Peterson says the program at UBC and others across Canada have become institutionalized since those early years because of the “dogged effort” of local committees and faculty members who got agreements for stable funding.
At Huron University College, which has only about 1,200 students, Abdi would also get free tuition for his undergraduate degree. Mark Franke, an assistant professor at Huron’s Centre for Global Studies, was the faculty adviser to the WUSC committee from 2003 to 2009, during a time when the university did some soul searching over its responsibilities to sponsored students. He says he’s always found the Student Refugee Program to be an “amazing educational program,” but not one without flaws. Over the years, he’s seen students struggle to adjust to the Canadian university environment without families, without anyone close they could turn to. And he’s seen students arrive with severe health problems and psychological traumas that made focusing on studies hard. Of the nine students who were at Huron during his years as adviser, he watched one struggle for years at his studies and two others “kind of drift away.”
Franke decries an attitude he has perceived among some committees that the Student Refugee Program is charity work: “I’ve heard so many times from members working in local committees and administrators at universities who are supportive of this idea that, my gosh, we give them a whole year of support and then it’s up to them to pull up their socks and get to work.” Franke said what’s wrong with that attitude is that it supposes the sponsored students are on the same footing as students who were born in Canada.
Franke believes that the attitude stems from a lack of awareness of the difficulties immigrants to Canada face and a lack of awareness of the ethical responsibility of the program at large: “There is a huge thesis within WUSC of human development through education, and the whole carrot WUSC holds out to people in Dadaab and Kakuma is, come to Canada, take advantage of this program and you’ll have a chance to get a university degree, and they come here and they may get decent support for the first year and then it’s, ‘Okay, go ahead.’ They are pointed toward the financial assistance office and told, put yourself forty, fifty thousand dollars in debt and try your best to make a career with that debt load, with no credit history and no Canadian work experience. And deal with all the stresses of being a student in this country.” In the last three years in his role with WUSC, Franke started to notice a sharp turn away from that attitude and toward greater responsibility to the students. “Thank goodness that’s being addressed. But that’s been a hard one.”
At Huron, the committee worked hard to convince the student body and administrators of their ethical responsibility to the young person they’ve brought to the campus and to make them see the program as a social responsibility that meshed with Canada’s international obligations to take the plight of refugees seriously. The new commitment resulted in an increase in the student levy from $4 in 2003 to $8, and then in 2007 to $12, “by far the highest levy” in Canada, Franke says. Two years before Abdi came to Huron, the administrators agreed to the proposal to make the sponsored students’ tuition free for up to five years.
While Abdi didn’t have to worry about his tuition costs, he still had other decisions to make, and he was already starting to think about them in late winter. He knew he would have to pay for his living expenses and planned to apply for a student loan. But he hoped to work in the summer to supplement the loan and leave himself with enough money to send to his relatives back in the camp.
Abdi would have to find a place on his own, and he’d have to learn to cook. In the cafeteria he’d survived on rice and spaghetti, and fish when they had it, so he was looking forward to eating meat more regularly. In a kitchen of his own he would be able to store halal meat in the freezer. But where would he start? How would he learn his way around a kitchen?
Abdi was even less confident about finding a summer job. London is a small city with few jobs Abdi could do at the best of times. As a student of economics, he knew the recession would make matters worse. Mark Franke says that finding summer jobs is always tough for refugee and immigrant students: “The vast majority of Canadian students have someone to go to, a family friend who says, you can work for my uncle putting in swimming pools or something like that, and they [refugee students] don’t even have that. They’re just lacking the social connections.”
As I drove Abdi through London one day, he picked up a misshapen penny from the cupholder in my car. An edge had been cut away from it, forming a sharp, spiral shape. My daughter, Jane, like many university students before her, had learned about Vector Marketing on campus and had worked during the summer selling Cutco knives. The sliced penny had been part of her sales pitch, and now it lay, rather useless in its present form, in my car.
I started to explain what it was, but Abdi already knew. He had seen someone cut a penny with scissors in a Cutco demonstration, and he planned to join the Cutco team for three days of training the next month. The company representative told him that even if he didn’t sell any knives, he would earn money for each presentation. Abdi thought this was a great opportunity: maybe he could make more money merely trying to sell knives than working in a store that paid minimum wage. My daughter had been able to build a list of potential clients through her friends and the friends and colleagues of her parents. I couldn’t imagine where Abdi would start. I warned him about all the calls and follow-ups Jane had done before getting into homes to do her presentation, and how she’d earned more the summer before, working in a hardware store. But it was when I asked Abdi how he’d feel if a homeowner he was visiting owned a dog that he said he might decline the training and rethink his summer job options.
Abdi was still haunted by the horror stories of sponsored students who buckled under the stress of second year. A couple had given up on their degrees, and he wanted to make sure that didn’t happen to him. He was doing well in his courses. He’d got 24 out of 25 in a calculus midterm and had yet to figure out where he’d made a mistake. He received 90 per cent in biology and 88 in economics midterms. He planned to take two summer courses that year so that he would have 4.5 of the 20 credits he’d need to graduate. Then he would take five courses and maybe six the following year. He hoped to finish in three or three and a half years, to rush through it before the difficulties of getting by on his own got to him.
He still wanted to go to graduate school, but he wanted to make sure he was working toward a practical career. “I am still undecided. My mind changes every two months,” he said. One possibility was business. The other was pharmacology, which would give him the opportunity to do research on new drugs: “It’s working in drug companies where there are good jobs, and it’s interesting, learning how chemicals react when they are injected in the body. You can do research and contribute.” What he wanted to figure out was which skills were more marketable, especially in the current economy.
In 2007, WUSC wrote a study about the students who had come to Canada through the Student Refugee Program. By that time, the program had brought almost 900 students to Canada. WUSC prepared a survey and tried to reach as many students as it could by emailing it to 283 participants who had arrived prior to 2004 and posting it online as well. The organization received a total of 111 responses. Of those who responded, 96.8 per cent were either pursuing or had completed their post-secondary program, in fields such as social sciences, applied sciences, engineering and medicine. Almost half of the respondents said they were “somewhat or completely integrated into Canadian society; 85 per cent claimed that “enrollment in a college or university upon arrival was a key factor in the integration process.”
It’s anyone’s guess what became of those who didn’t respond to the questionnaire. Paul Davidson, executive director of WUSC from 2002 to 2009, says the organization just doesn’t have the resources to come up with complete data. In late 1990, after some bad real estate decisions, the non-profit non-governmental organization asked the Canadian International Development Agency for an advance on funds. When CIDA refused, WUSC was forced to file for bankruptcy. Later, CIDA did come up with bridge financing and WUSC worked its way out of receivership in a year’s time—but it took almost another decade to pay off the debt. Then, in 2002, CIDA, which had been a core partner in the Student Refugee Program, announced it would stop its contribution of $250,000 that covered the administration costs of the program. “That left a big hole,” Davidson says. “I guess for me that was part of the lesson on how hard it is to do refugee work in Canada, because a quarter of a million dollars for a lot of organizations is not a lot of money to raise, but we started knocking on doors with the foundation community, with the private sector, with individual donors, and it proved to be very difficult to raise money for refugee issues.” Several foundations did come through with short-term grants, and the WUSC board agreed to carry a deficit until administrators could find a new business plan. In that plan, each local committee sponsoring students agreed to pay an annual fee of $2,500 to cover all the expenses of the selection and preparation process.
In Ottawa, administration costs have been kept low. After the financial collapse, WUSC returned to its two-storey building on Scott Street in Ottawa, the building that it had been trying to sell so it could move into a larger space. Only a handful of people, including Asni Mekonnen, work full-time on the Student Refugee Program. There has been little time or money for in-depth research. But based on the tracking Davidson has seen and his visits across the country, he believes that “most of our students complete undergraduate education, most of them are employed in their field of study, most of them remain in Canada.” He says that virtually all students complete their first year of studies, although there have been “some very rare experiences where the culture shock and the post-traumatic shock” prevented that. In those cases the local committee continued to support the student for the year, but “that’s sort of the end of their academic career.”
John Everitt, one of the founders of the program at Brandon University, has kept track of the more than twenty students that program brought to Canada during his years at the university. He says that about half the students who came to Brandon University graduated from that institution. Most of the others, he adds, finished their education elsewhere. Some wanted programs Brandon didn’t offer; some just never felt at home in the small prairie city. There were those who struggled, Everitt admits, usually because they didn’t have enough English or, in a few cases, because they had problems with alcohol “after the traumas they’d been through.” He recalls two who moved away to Calgary to find work.
At UBC, Glen Peterson says he knows about twenty-five students who have come through the program there, and, of those, four or five didn’t finish their degrees. “My experience,” he says, “has been if somebody comes and they have huge problems at the outset, they will drop out after a year. If somebody can persevere through the first two years, then they will likely make it.” Among the graduates of their program, some have gone to high-profile positions at places such as the United Nations and the BC Cancer Agency. Their first student, who came from Eritrea in 1991, went on to work in refugee issues before becoming executive director of Mosaic, an immigrant and refugee support centre in Vancouver. Peterson has encouraged students to look beyond the obvious careers in law and medicine and build on their refugee experiences and knowledge of the hardships of life instead.
Pascaline Nsekera, a former WUSC student who graduated from UBC, did just that. During the civil war in her native Burundi in the ‘90s, Pascaline was completing a degree in environmental chemistry when it became too dangerous for her to continue her studies. She was half Tutsi and half Hutu, caught in the middle of the deadly power struggle between the two. She fled when she learned she was on a list of people who would be killed at the university one night. When she finally made it to UBC in 1997, she picked up her studies in sciences, changing her major to earth sciences. But her graduation from UBC coincided with profound post-traumatic stress that left her questioning her career choice. Although she jokes that she no longer wanted to be a geologist because it was too cold in Alberta where the jobs were, she knew she had to find a way to help others who had lived through the horrors of war. So she took more courses at UBC—this time in social work—and found employment with La Boussole, a public agency for francophone immigrants in Vancouver. There she developed a storytelling project called The Illustrated Journey, which allows youth of all languages to “tell” their stories through the universal language of comic-book art. She doesn’t like the expression she sees in the literature to describe people like her: the “wounded healer”; but she realized she had become one.
Referring to the 2007 evaluation, Davidson points out that WUSC-sponsored students become heavily involved in Canadian life. Of those who responded, 92.9 per cent are active in community groups and associations; 65 per cent vote in federal, provincial and municipal elections. “There is a pervasive sense in Canada that immigrants— and refugees in particular—are a drain on Canada and a burden, but when you look at the social capital that students have brought to Canada, it’s real.” Davidson points to a new program at Citizenship and Immigration. CIC created an internship so that former WUSC-sponsored students could bring their experience as refugees to the department. “People are now looking at our former sponsored students as resources,” Davidson says.
Even those who find work in the university disciplines they first chose in Canada often find a way to help others. Irene Kyompaire, who became a refugee from her native Uganda, studied commerce at St. Mary’s University in Halifax in the ‘90s. After graduation she found a job with the Business Development Bank of Canada in Toronto, a job that has allowed her to build a good life for herself. But over the years she volunteered at the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre because she had heard so many stories of rape from other refugees. And she volunteered at a hospice for people dying with AIDS. She saw that as a way of giving back to Canada for the help she received, and also as a way to pay tribute to the suffering in the country of her birth: “I’ve lost family and I’m still losing family. It’s real. So me helping someone in Canada, a place I now call home, in a way brings the comfort of saying: I wasn’t there, but at least I’m helping this family here.”
Mark Franke of Huron University College says the success of the WUSC program should not be measured solely by how many students complete university: “One of the great things refugees try to obtain is just an agency, being able to realize the right of self-determination, and I think that’s one of the most important parts of the program. When I was adviser of the committee here, I said we should not be aiming to make these students stay in school and get a degree. That’s up to them. We should make it inviting. All the advantages are here. But the main thing is to support them so they can calm down a bit in their lives and make good judgements about themselves.”
Sultan Ghaznawi is an example of the good judgement that Franke describes. Ghaznawi came from Pakistan to Canada as a WUSC student in 1999, leaving behind his family, who had fled from oppression in Afghanistan during the Soviet–Afghani war. He began his courses at the University of Toronto and discovered he had a high aptitude in computer science. But after the attacks of 9/11 and the war against the Taliban, Ghaznawi’s fear for his family’s safety in Peshawar overtook his need to finish his degree. He became a part-time student and a full-time employee, working as a software designer. Within a year he was able to prove to the Canadian government that he earned enough income to personally sponsor the seven members of his family. Today, he measures his success not by his own education—he still has not completed his degree—but by the improved lives of his brothers and sisters, who were able to go to universities in Canada without the kind of pressure he had experienced.
As they neared the end of the winter term, none of the Dadaab eleven could imagine dropping out of university. They had fought so hard and waited so long for this chance to study. And while the Somalis worried about the escalating violence in their homeland and the degradation of conditions in the camps, they believed their families were relatively safe there—better to help them out in the small ways they could and finish university so they could bring greater changes to their lives later. All of the students who had come before them through WUSC from Dadaab had stuck with their studies, despite the need to pay their own way and the pressures from home. None of the Dadaab eleven wanted to be the first to break that record or disappoint their families.
In their anxiety over how they would get by, none of them talked about quitting. Instead, they talked about how they could afford to stay in school, how they would work, take out loans, seek out scholarships and bursaries, sew together whatever patchwork of financial support they could to get them through. But for Muno, as the reality of being truly on her own came closer, her fears of the unknown challenges in her second year deepened, unrelieved by the assurances of others: “Transition, transition. Everybody is like it just happens. You don’t have to worry about it. I’m just so scared about the transition.”
