Education is big key for refugees to Canada, says Surrey man who knows from experience

Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Mohamed Muktar Mussa spoke Tuesday at the Surrey Social Innovation Summit. — Surrey Now

advertisements

Mohamed Muktar Mussa grew up in a refugee camp in Eritrea, where his family lived after fleeing civil war in Somalia.

After immigrating to Canada in 2010 and ending up in Surrey, Mussa had a difficult time figuring out how to continue his education, which had been disrupted while living in the refugee camp.

“When you are a refugee, it’s very hard to study,” said Mussa. “I was working to survive the day.”

Following the advice of friends, he went to Alberta to work as a labourer for a couple of years, but it wasn’t work he wanted to do for the rest of his life, so he returned to Surrey and started school at Invergarry Adult Education Centre in March.

Mussa thought that if there had been someone to help him continue his education right away, he would be in a better position today.

For that reason, he joined Our Community, Our Voice, an integration and settlement research project run out of Simon Fraser University’s Surrey campus.

“I knew, even though I don’t have enough skills, I knew that we needed someone to help our community,” said Mussa, now 25 years old.

His position as a community research assistant with the program landed him on the stage at the Surrey Social Innovation Summit at city hall on Tuesday, where he told his story to a packed house.

The Our Community, Our Voice project involves researchers, research assistants, community research assistants (all of whom are recent refugees) and representatives from numerous community organizations that work with refugees.

Focus groups are held with front line staff, community leaders and refugees to find out what the challenges, barriers and opportunities are for refugees in Surrey and to help the city develop a plan for settling refugees.

“The City of Surrey is showing leadership on building a plan that is just kind of not a knee-jerk thing, it’s something that will be sustainable over a longer period of time,” said Stephen Dooley, executive director of Simon Fraser University Surrey.

The project began in March and is currently in the middle of the data-collection phase. In February, the results of the project will be presented at a community planning day.

The project is timely because on Tuesday, the federal government announced that 10,000 Syrian refugees are expected to be resettled in Canada by the end of the year and a further 15,000 by the end of February. Initially, it was thought that 25,000 refugees would be resettled by Dec. 31, 2015.

About 3,000 of those people will likely coming to B.C. Surrey is the province’s largest recipient of refugees and about 30 per cent of B.C.’s Syrian refugees are expected to end up in Surrey.

When asked if there are insights from the project that could help with the influx of refugees, Dooley said that based on what he’s seen, local agencies that support new refugees need to be further supported to make sure they are ready to help.

“Most agencies are already pretty stretched,” he said.

One advantage of having the refugee-serving agencies working together already is that they can be more co-ordinated in their response, Dooley added.

Dooley said that as a society, we shouldn’t look at refugees a drain on the system.

“These are a very diverse group of people who are bringing their own skill sets, so you have to provide opportunities for them to build on their own strengths, and as they build on their own strengths they’re going to help all of us,” he said.

Home
Email

Hiiraan Online