Deana Brynildsen was shocked to read in the Record that Mohammed Alsaleh, a refugee from Syria, didn’t even know five people in Canada. So she reached out to the young man and invited him over for coffee to meet her friends and a neighbour.
“When I met him, I just thought, ‘Oh my god, he’s such a nice guy,’” Brynildsen said.
Alsaleh, 26, talked about his plan to finish his health-care assistant diploma course, get a job, work really hard and save all his money so he could bring his family to Canada. Brynildsen thought that would take years, and she wondered what she could do to help.
“I just felt like he needed to be helped because he does so much for other people and he didn’t seem to be getting help,” she said.
Alsaleh came to Canada with the help of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees in November, 2014, after he was tortured for protesting Bashar Al-Assad’s regime. He now rents a single room in New Westminster and volunteers as a translator with Immigrant Services Society of B.C., the group that first helped him when he arrived.
Two of Alsaleh’s other brothers already made the perilous journey from Syria to Germany at the height of the mass migration and are now safe. His remaining two sisters, another brother and his mom also fled Syria and are now living in a Turkish town close to the Syrian border. His father died 16 years ago.
Brynildsen looked into private sponsorship and put together a Go Fund Me page to raise the $30,000 needed to cover Alsaleh’s family. So far, the page has raised more than $3,000 in just a few days, mostly from Brynildsen’s social network.
“I’m blown away by the generosity of people and my friends,” she said, choking up. “I get really emotional about it.”
Brynildsen is a retired foreign affairs secretary who’s lived around the world, including the Middle East and Bosnia.
“I’ve also seen what a war does to people,” she said. “The effects of it have never gone away.”
Alsaleh was at the Vancouver International Airport last week, helping translate for a Syrian father from Burnaby who was reunited with his sons after 15 years. Alsaleh kept thinking of his own family’s arrival.
“I’m so excited. I really want this to happen. You can’t imagine how happy I will feel when this happens,” he said. “When I was helping that family in YVR, I couldn’t help but think of my family arriving here. I was crying … it would be a dream come true. It would really mean the world to me.”
The crowdfunding campaign has already given something back to Alsaleh – hope.
“I feel I have hope again, hope that I lost when I first came. I thought I would never see my family, or I thought it would be years,” he said. “Now I feel I have hope again.”
Brynildsen thinks the family will do well in Canada.
“I think his particular family will never be a burden on Canada, knowing him and how he is and how driven he is to be successful,” Brynildsen said. “They are not people who are going to come here and be a drain on society. They are going to be good Canadians, and that’s what we need.”
To donate online and help reunite Alsaleh’s family, or to learn more about his siblings and mother, go to https://www.gofundme.com/SyrianFamilyRescue or make a donation through any Vancity to the “Mohammed Alsaleh in trust” fund, account 925545-59.
