Jesse Winter, Centretown News
Michelle Manks manages the World University Service of Canada’s student refugee program.Students at Carleton University come from a wide range of places, but for some, Carleton offers security as they escape war and poverty through the help of the World University Service of Canada.
This fall, two students – one who was born in genocide-ridden Rwanda, and the other originally from Syria, and affected by ISIS terrorism – got opportunities to leave their refugee camps for safety and education in Canada.
These students will remain nameless due to the WUSC policy to keep them out of the media until they themselves are willing.
“The student that came from Malawi is originally from Rwanda and he was living in a refugee camp. He left (Rwanda) because of the genocide in the 1990s.
He . . . [grew up] in refugee camps and didn’t have the chance of pursuing his higher education in Malawi,” says Berhe, co-chair of WUSC Carleton.
The second student came from Jordan having earlier fled the fighting in Syria. “He is actually a political activist, and it would have been risky for him to stay in Syria. In Jordan, they didn’t have a lot of opportunity to pursue higher education nor did they have the income even if they were legally allowed,” says Berhe.
The students are living in Centretown, which has a history of welcoming refugees to safety such as in the case of the Vietnamese Boat people represented in the statue by Pham the Trung at the corner of Preston and Somerset.
WUSC is a non-governmental organization that runs a student-to-student refugee resettlement program to help students raise funds through levies at their local campuses, allowing them to bring refugee students. This sponsorship allows them to become permanent residents in Canada, giving them choices they never would have had as refugees.
WUSC sponsors students from 37 countries and sponsored 86 student refugees this fall, who are now settled across Canada.
“I think it is important to remember that our students and refugees in particular, all come from different backgrounds and they don’t choose to be displaced,” says Michelle Manks, manager of the student refugee program at WUSC.
Before the conflict in Syria, WUSC worked within the country with refugees in the Middle East, but they were forced to set up locations in Jordan and Lebanon.
“Our goal is to see sponsoring institutions increase the number of students that they bring,” says Manks.
“Some campuses have committed to doubling the amount of students that they bring. The Middle East has been on our radar since before the Syrian crisis even happened.”
Potential WUSC sponsored students must be 18-25, have completed secondary schooling, be a recognized refugee in a country of asylum meeting the UN Refugee Agency convention, express the need to be resettled, be single, self-reliant and be proficient in English or French.
“The current situation for refugees is that their lives are in limbo,” says Manks. “They can’t move forward, they can’t go back to their countries of origin and their lives are put on hold until either they are allowed to integrate into the country that they fled to, which in a lot of cases is not possible, or they receive opportunities for resettlement.”
David Kenyi, 24, a former South Sudanese refugee who was sponsored by WUSC Carleton in 2013, says the Canadian NGO gave him hope for a better future. “It is not easy, to say being a refugee
or . . . not having access to education while your peers on the other side of the world are getting an education and enjoying life,” says Kenyi, who is studying math and statistics at Carleton.
Before his sponsorship, Kenyi had lived in South Sudan, which was ridden with civil war, but at a young age he moved to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to continue the education he was unable to obtain in his home country.
“For those who have no idea what life is in a refugee situation, it is not easy,” says Kenyi. “Some people, when they move out of there, they don’t even want to think about that life anymore because they will not feel proud about what they have gone through.”
WUSC hopes to bring more students from refugee situations as soon as January.