Refugee group marks 30 years of caring

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This article was published 17/09/2016 (3486 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For 30 years, a group in north Winnipeg has given shelter to people fleeing chaos around the world. Today, many of them are gathering to celebrate the North End Sponsorship Team’s three decades of caring.

“I put myself in the refugee’s place,” said 85-year-old Elisabeth Kunkel, who helped found the team in 1986 with her husband, Lutheran church minister Rev. Johann Kunkel. “I try to transplant myself into a mother with kids who’s running for their life,” said the retired nurse who helped resettle many families — mostly single-parent moms and kids.

“How do you survive? You’re looking for someone from somewhere to help, and none of this is your fault, but you’re caught in there,” she said. “Somebody has to be their friend.”

The first refugees they sponsored were a single mother and her daughter fleeing famine in Ethiopia, followed by boat people from Vietnam, then refugees from El Salvador, Kunkel recalled. “It follows the conflicts in places around the globe.”

The team got its start when seven Lutheran and two United churches in north Winnipeg banded together to practise the social gospel by welcoming and resettling refugees. Elisabeth Kunkel came up with the name. The acronym NEST seemed fitting — it’s mentioned in a Bible psalm: “When the sparrow finds a home and the swallow a nest for herself, where she may lay her young at your altars, O Lord of Hosts.”

In the last 30 years, the team has received more than 200 people from 18 countries, said refugee co-ordinator Jim Mair.

“For every family we bring, we put together a caregiver team of five to seven people,” he said. The teams do everything from meeting the families at the airport to finding them a home and furnishings and helping them obtain social insurance numbers and health cards, he said.

“The first few months are very hard, very intense,” recalled Kunkel. “Sometimes they don’t speak the language. You take them to a doctor, register them in school, find them jobs. You’re at the end of the phone when they need something. You take them grocery shopping and find the foods they like. You learn a lot,” she laughed, remembering the urge to make all the choices and decisions for the families. “Once you do it for awhile, you learn to step back and let the refugee call the tunes,” she said.

The team’s financial commitment is to look after the sponsored family for one year, said Mair.

“We pay for rent, food, bus passes — all of that, for the first year,” he said. “It takes a lot of people to raise the money, and we’re paying the tab for these families.” Mair estimates they’ve raised more than $400,000. Today, there are just four Lutheran churches and one United church involved.

“It’s not been easy,” said Mair. They’ve kept going for 30 years thanks in part to the refugees they’ve sponsored who are volunteering. “They now are passing it forward and helping out like they were helped out when they came,” he said.

Mair said team volunteers don’t have to belong to one of the five churches.

“Anybody can join who’s interested in helping refugees,” said Mair, who with his wife has volunteered with the team for nearly 20 years and been part of many caregiver teams. “We’ve made lifelong friends and gotten way more out of it than we’ve given. We know people from all over the world,” Mair said.

“Once you get doing it and see these families, you become addicted,” said Kunkel. “They look like they’ve seen terrible things, they’re at the end of their rope, then they blossom and get jobs. They go to school and go to university and get degrees. One or two have crumbled, but most just need an opportunity,” she said.

Koffi Sedzro knows what it’s like to be welcomed by the team.

“It’s very caring, very nurturing,” said Sedzro who arrived in Canada with his wife and three children in 2004. The teacher fled the dictatorship in Togo for political reasons. They spent four years in a refugee camp in Ghana not knowing if any country would take them or what, if anything, their future held.

“Every day you get up, you’re stressed,” said Sedzro, who speaks French, German, English and his mother tongue Ewe. When he learned he and his family had been privately sponsored by the team and were on their way to Canada, it was “thrilling,” he said.

“If somebody is welcoming you and offering you different opportunities, you have to embrace it,” he said. “It’s a good feeling,” said Sedzro, who worked in an industrial supply warehouse his first year in Winnipeg and went back to school to get his teaching credentials recognized. His first teaching job was in Thompson. Now he’s back in Winnipeg teaching, and he and his wife had two more kids. He’s grateful to the team, he said.

“People find a decent life here.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca