Saturday, September 13, 2008
Broken Dreams of a Somali Refugee in Canada

The Parallels between the movie “Family Motel” and the real life of Sahra Ali (Shams) are astonishing. In the movie, a “headstrong” woman named Ayan comes to Canada with big dreams.

Ayan jumps into her new life in Canada with both feet. She starts working two jobs to take care of herself and her two teenage daughters. But things fall apart when Ayan is evicted from her apartment for late payment of rent. She is forced from her nice, safe neighborhood into the bowels of the Inner City. Here life gets tough and the family is forced to live a life they didn’t want to live.

The real life of Shams takes a similar path. Shams came to Canada in 1998. Like Ayan, Shams starts her new life in Canada with big dreams. She establishes the first ever Somali restaurant in Scarborough to support her family of 6 children. But the dream to run a successful business dies a pre-mature death when Shams falls seriously ill and is hospitalized in a coma.

Shams is forced to sell her newly-bought house situated in a nice, leafy neighborhood. Her illness depletes the family savings. And when the money runs out, Shams finds herself in the Inner City, her dreams abandoned.

The Inner City has been brutal to Shams. She was the badly-beaten victim of a home invasion which has not been solved even now. The people who robbed her of her gold jewelry after beating her to near-death have never been caught.

“I was really badly affected by this,” She says in an interview from her public housing apartment. “No one really helped me and even here in the inner city and the police abandoned me and never captured the people who almost took my life.”

Instead, she says, police started investigating her.

“They asked me, the victim, why I was robbed” she says. “I could not believe this but they started to investigate me, asking me whether I sold drugs, what do you sell, they asked.”

But Shams was no drug dealer. She is a well-known and well-respected Somali musician and entertainer. Her husband, Mohamed, also worked and brought income into the family.

“That’s all we did, work hard legally” she says. “But because I am black, the police thought I was a bad woman.”

As if life had not dealt her a bad enough hand, her children were taken away from her by Children’s Aid Society (CAS) when her illness made it impossible for her to feed and care for her family.

When illness forced her to sell her house, she had to go to a shelter. Shams says she was abused by staff at the shelter.

“I didn’t even want to go to the shelter, why should I?” she says. “I was an independent woman who worked hard, running her own business. I knew the shelter was going to be bad but I wasn’t prepared for the hell that it became.”

She says the shelter was for victims of abuse. It was full of single mothers who fled their homes and their men because of violence at home.
“I knew I could not stay here with my children because I am very ill,” she says before she starts crying. Every time Shams talks about her experiences in Canada, she cries. “My doctor intervened and asked the staff to transfer me to a shelter that would accommodate my illness. They told me to stay for the weekend and the next Monday they would find a better place for me.”

But astonishingly, she was still stuck in this shelter a week later, she says, despite the staff promise. Apparently, the woman who interviewed her and promised to find her a better place had gone on vacation.

“I couldn’t believe and all I could all that week was cry,” she adds.

All in all, Shams says her life in Canada has been a horrid experience so far. For years now, these bitter experiences have haunted her and she has been in this country for almost 20 years. She says she not only disabled by disease, she has lost her family. Her children at one point were taken by the CAS because she could no longer look after them. She says she lost some of her children to the streets and to crime.

“That’s what CAS did to me, they gave my children to the street and to the culture of the street,” she says bitterly. “I blame CAS for destroying my family for ever.”

Now, Shams is on disability. She lives in a four bedroom apartment on public housing. But even here, she faces severe problems of mobility because of her disability. For example, she cannot use her bathroom because it is too small for the equipment she uses to get around.. She also cannot go up and down her two story unit.

“Health wise, this place is no good for me” she says. “I need a home where I can move around freely and use all my disabled person’s equipment. I need a place that’s easier on my disability.”

She says the place needs many repairs too. The doors are broken and for six months she had been complaining and asking the public housing authority to repair the problems, but to no avail.

“They don’t do anything,” she adds. However, Midaynta Community Services staff are working with to ease her life.

Midaynta Community Services is a registered Canadian charity organization that provides settlement services and other programs that advance education by providing courses, seminars, meetings, counseling and other support services for refugees and immigrants in need.

By Ali Sharrif at Midaynta Community Services