Ep. 285: Thank you Canada: A Syrian refugee’s story

Guest: Nour Suliman, Beedie Luminaries Scholarship recipient

Imagine, if you can, that for three of your 14 or 15 years of life you have been on the move in your homeland – staying one step ahead of the guns, the bullets and the bombs that are devastating you, your family and your community.

You and 16 of your family squeeze into a car so that your grandmother, your uncle, your mother and father, along with your siblings and your cousins can wake up one more day.

Finally, you arrive at what you hope will be a safe house. You’re there for a matter of hours and your father says, “We have to move.” By now, his sense of survival is so finely tuned that he is aware of pending danger. You are exhausted. You were hoping for at least one night of sleep but your father insists, “Everyone get back in the car!”

You do as you are told. All 17 of you drive through the night, hoping to get to the Jordanian border – a border that is officially closed to refugees. Your father and uncle pay a guy with no name, a guy you don’t know who says he can get you all to the border but only in the dead of night. As you walk through harsh terrain, with no light, no water and no options, you learn the house you hoped to be sleeping in last night was bombed and destroyed. The house had been targeted because you and your family were there.

The nightmare continues as you enter Jordan and are accepted into a refugee camp. The water is putrid, the air is thick with aromas that make you gag. And through all of it, you hope that one day you will escape the nightmare of your life. You pray for a miracle.

We invited Nour Suliman to join us for a Conversation That Matters about the journey she and her family endured and the blessed miracle of Canada’s welcome.