Refugees come to Canada seeking freedoms Canadians take for granted. Having walked in their shoes, their children are unlikely to become complacent about the democracy they’ve found here. Meet the students in Lethbridge College’s Youth in Transition program.
The first thing you notice are the smiles, some tentative, the others fever-bright with the peace of mind and freedom they’ve recently discovered in Canada. Listening to them tell their stories, you almost forget they are all between 16 and 24 years old, some still in high school, and have been though an adult portion of terror in their short lives.
The students in Lethbridge College’s Youth In Transition program come from a newscast of world trouble spots, places where the humanity runs as thin as the food supply and each day requires a degree of luck to be alive at sundown.
Yet, when they begin eagerly explaining their class project, the students don’t focus on their own histories. Instead, they want you to know about Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese dissident now in her 14th year of house arrest, and the subject of their letter-writing campaign to the United Nations calling for her freedom.
Despite their disparate backgrounds and varying levels of English, they can spell her name aloud and quote her philosophy. Suu Kyi has become their lightning rod, their project an avenue for them to flex their new-found freedom to speak their minds and be heard by those who matter.
Watch out, Stephen Harper: these young folk are about to become Canadian voters.
The activism project, designed by instructors Candace Lewko and Tobiah Goldstein, was intended merely to give the students a vehicle to develop their English reading and writing skills. While all are intelligent and have learned to speak English, some have never been to school and have low literacy in their own languages, let alone ours.
“I have so many freedoms here I can’t even explain them all.”
- Youth in Transition student, Cecilia Akpaloo-Nyavor
But somewhere along the route, the students embraced the project as their cause célèbre, and the tribulations of a political prisoner on the far side of the world became their own.
“All Suu Kyi wants is freedom for her country,” says Mandy Thai, a Vietnamese whose family left the communist country for increased freedoms of their own.
They are slowly learning to test the right of free speech accorded to them in Canada, where they are all landed immigrants.
“I have so many freedoms here I can’t even explain them all,” says an expressive Cecilia Akpaloo-Nyavor, whose family fled Togo for a refugee camp in Ghana after her father became a target for state reprisals. “In the camp, you are classified as a nobody. You can’t concentrate on school because you’re too worried about whether there will be food for supper.”
Of the Burmese situation, Akpaloo-Nyavor remains puzzled how a government can treat its own citizens so shabbily, but she and her classmates are learning they have the power to have their voices heard.
“If you can stand up, you should take the hand of someone who has fallen down.” - Abdulla Lutfulla
“I had no idea about activism before,” she says. “Here, I can take a step without being punished. “This guy [Burmese dictator Than Shwe] has to hit the road. I don’t think his mother is very proud of him. What we have done on our Wiki is so fantastic (and that’s a big word for me).”
Sara Azizi has lived in Canada nine years, coming from Iraq as a small child. But she remembers life spent under the rule of Saddam Hussein and can compare it to life in her adopted country.
“I was naïve when I was younger,” says Azizi. “As a woman, I have the freedom to go to school here. There, people were afraid to speak out about the government. Someone like Suu Kyi inspired me. I realize one person can turn a country around.”
All allow themselves a smug giggle when asked to comment on the “hardships” faced by Canadian-born friends, interrupted cellphone service or a poor selection at the shoe store, for example. But Azizi cuts them some slack.
“It’s natural to not appreciate what you have when you always have it,” she says.
All seem to understand the emotional roads others have traveled to be here. They commiserate with each other and have formed a bond from their participation in the YIT program.
Eva Moran’s geographical journey might have been the shortest, but has taken a heavy emotional toll. She is mindful of how and why her family fled El Salvador; recounting the details is still painful and brings a hitch to her voice.
“Our project reminds me of home because Suu Kyi is not allowed to talk about the government,” says Moran. “That’s the situation in El Salvador. I am so glad I’m here. I love to write in my journal. There, I had no freedom to talk. Here I can express myself. There is no opposition in my country; we have to advocate for ourselves. I have that freedom now. We have learned that persistence connected to activism is powerful. That has inspired everyone.”
Abdulla Lutfulla grew up knowing nothing but a country embroiled in war. Born in Pakistan to a doctor in the Afghani army, he crossed borders several times before the family fled to neighbouring Tajikistan.
“If you can stand up, you should take the hand of someone who has fallen down,” says Lutfulla. “If we are free, others should be, too. If we come together, we can do good things.”
Khatere Azimi, also from Afghanistan, also moved from place to place during her time in the country where, she says, under the Taliban there was no work, no school and no freedom.
Now, she has heard reports Iran is hanging refugees from her country, some mere children. She, like the rest, displays no eagerness to return to the land of her birth.
“I am so happy here, I can’t even imagine living in the past,” says Thai. Many Vietnamese dream of coming here.” “I’m here to stay,” declares Akpaloo-Nyavor. “I’m going to get married, become a nurse and live here.”
When Azizi gets her citizenship, she plans to take part in democracy’s most powerful act and vote.
“Sometimes I’ll wish I was back home because I’ve had a bad day and think ‘this was the worst day of my life,’ but it’s not true. Here is like heaven.”
The Youth in Transition program was profiled in the Fall 2009 issue of Wider Horizons.
Suu Kyi: freedom fighter
After returning to Burma in 1988 to lead a pro-democracy movement, The Oxford-educated Aung San Suu Kyi was democratically elected prime minister in 1990. However, the ruling military junta refused to relinquish power. Under its repressive rule, she has spent 14 of the past 20 years under house arrest. Ironically, her father is credited with establishing the modern Burmese army. He negotiated independence from Britain in 1947, and was assassinated by rivals the same year, when Suu Kyi was two.
In 1972, she married Cuban Michael Aris, recognized as an expert on Nepalese and Tibetan culture. Aris died in England in 1999. Due to Suu Kyi’s arrest, the couple had not been permitted to see each other for the last four years of his life.
Denying Aris an entry visa after he contracted cancer in 1997,the Burmese government was willing to allow Suu Kyi to leave the country to be with him, but she feared it would not allow her to return.
Suu Kyi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, accepted on her behalf by her sons. She used the prize money to establish a health and education trust for the Burmese people. She also won the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought in 1990.
Suu Kyi is still under house arrest as a possible threat to “community peace and stability.” Several nations have called for her release, and that of more than 2,000 other Burmese political prisoners.
