Syrian Refugee children go about their daily lives at the refugee camp in Osmaniye, Turkey. The St. Gregory Armenian Apostolic Church will welcome three Syrian refugee families on Tuesday and as many as 80 more over the next five weeks.
Photograph by: ADEM ALTAN , AFP/Getty Images
Many members of Richmond Armenian Church have close ties to those fleeing Syria
Three hundred members of a tiny church in Richmond are helping to settle 92 Syrian refugees, but much sooner than they planned.
Members of the St. Gregory Armenian Apostolic Church have already helped settle three families and had committed financially to take 27 more families through private sponsorships over the next 15 months, according to Father Hrant Tahanian.
Instead, 80 people will be arriving in the next five weeks, thanks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s recent pledge to fast track 10,000 of the 25,000 refugees that Canada had offered to settle.
“Our (refugee) families were already in the application process — some had gone through security screening, some had been interviewed — so it was easy for them to speed them through,” said Tahanian. “Some of our members have sponsored two families and they thought they would come many months apart.”
Three families will arrive to a warm welcome at Vancouver International Airport Tuesday and another 70 people will be here by the end of January.
“We aren’t complaining, but the speed of the influx was unexpected,” Tahanian said.
Because the refugees are privately sponsored, they are not eligible to share in the $1-million fund set up by the provincial government to assist government-sponsored refugees, he said.
The revised timing of their arrival has strained the resources of the sponsoring families and the church, which has set up a fundraising page to help pay for bedding, school supplies and groceries.
Families at St. Gregory that came to Canada from Syria’s Armenian minority began by applying to sponsor extended family members and friends of church members displaced when the war forced them from their homes. Many of the refugees initially sponsored by church members were ethnic Armenians, descendants of the thousands that fled genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Empire 100 years ago.
“The Armenian community in Syria is very important to us,” said Tahanian, whose great grandparents fled Armenia as refugees. “Muslim nations like Syria took us in and we were able to rebuild our lives, but now the minority in Syria is caught between many swords and our people were suffering there.”
As the situation worsened in Syria, St. Gregory congregants extended their efforts to sponsor ethnic Syrians as well, Tahanian said.
“We were hearing firsthand what was happening — more than what you hear on the news — and it really affected us,” he said.
The church, as a sponsoring organization, had applied to take four families that had no existing support network in B.C. before the prime minister’s announcement.