Yohannes Zewed, 12, and his
mom Selam Ayele in Canada.
[Sharon Tiffin/News staff]
A Victoria mother has been reunited with her Ethiopian son after immigration delays kept an ocean between the two for more than nine years.
Backlogs at Immigration Canada mean many applications aren’t processed in their average timeframe. It took seven-and-a-half years for Selam Ayele to become a landed immigrant, and another two-and-a-half years for her to be allowed to bring her son over. She had no idea it would take so long.
“It’s like I’ve spent half my life just trying to live here,” said Ayele, who was 21 when she moved to Victoria, away from her son Yohannes Zewed who was three at the time.
Now almost a teenager, Zewed, 12, is shy around his mother who he knew only as the voice who phoned him every second day when he lived with his father, attending English schools in Ethiopia.
“It feels like I have a life again,” said Zewed. “I was dead in Ethiopia. Here I am alive.”
Before moving to Victoria, Ayele said, she could count the times she didn’t have her baby boy with her.
“I couldn’t be away from him,” she said. “I was a first-time mother; he meant everything to me.”
And while she didn’t want to share the specifics of why she left Ethiopia, she said a marriage turned nasty and lack of education and job prospects played a major role.
“No mother would leave a son behind for nothing. It was bad there,” she said.
But immigration wasn’t easy, either. For the first two years she suffered from anxiety and needed sleeping pills at night.
She wanted to be a nurse, but visa restrictions prevented her from even taking a job cleaning the hospitals and she couldn’t study full-time until she was a landed immigrant.
“It was so frustrating,” said Ayele. “All the time I had to go in (to the Immigration office) and be questioned like a criminal … I lived here. I worked sometimes two or three jobs.
“And I’d do things for the community – there was no daycare, so I got a certificate (through part-time studies) and opened a daycare. It was a lot. I felt like I had to prove I was here to work.”
The day after becoming a landed immigrant, Ayele signed up for nursing classes and now works in hospitals as a nursing assistant.
“I see how understaffed they are and think there wouldn’t be the problem if immigration wasn’t so hard.”
But, that wasn’t even the worst of it. When Ayele tried to bring her son over, she had to work with the Canadian Embassy in Nairobi, which was the nearest one to Ethiopia.
While in Canada your case got a tracking number to follow its progress online, in Nairobi they just tell people to wait. And wait.
Mail only goes between the countries once a week. It wasn’t unusual for letters to arrive in Canada asking for a document within a 30 day deadline that had already passed. Documents sent repeatedly were lost and required medical exams would expire before they were processed.
When Canada Immigration passed its average processing time on her son’s application, Ayele went to the office of Victoria MP Denise Savoie, for help. Constituency assistant Kelly Newhook said she sees cases like this all the time. She began sending daily e-mails to Nairobi and making calls to Ottawa to help push the case.
On July 3, Savoie spoke in the House of Commons about the family’s struggle. The next day Zewed was finally granted a visa. He’s been in Victoria with his mother for just over a week.
Ayele said it’s hard to see the boy, now taller than her, as the same baby she carried in Ethiopia.
“It’s going to take awhile to get used to saying, ‘that’s my son,’” she said.
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(
EEJ) —
Badr International is an Ethiopian Muslims umbrella made up of sub-organizations around the globe. It gathers once a year these organizations as well as well know activists and scholars for a wide range programs.
From 24th of July the 8th annual conference would open in Toronto and would continue until 27the of July. The theme selected for the theme is “”Ethiopian Muslims’ Challenges and Opportunities“
Here is a brief introduction of the theme as posted on their website
Ethiopia has contributed alot for Islam since its birth throughout history. This contribution has not been recognized for many generations and centuries. The reason is that many of its citizens, includiong Muslims have not been taught effectively about their Islamic identity and they are lacking historical background on the Islamic link to their country. Even at this moment a few people know that the majority of the Ethiopian pupolation are Muslims. This year’s theme has been selected to commemorate our Islamic history and learn more.
We felt that it’s a historical obligation for us to maintain and protect our Islamic history!
There are prominent Muslim scholars, historians and many other activists who would deliver their speech at the conference The participants are from all the continents, with some guests from Ethiopia and the number is expected to be in thousands. Mufti Sh. Omer, Mufti Sh. SIraj, Prof. Husein Ahmed, Dr Lapiso D. are some among many (check the list ).
It is our wish and prayer that the convention succeeds .It succeeds so that it would be a door of opportunity for the Ethiopian Muslims to get into a new era. An era which ends the abuse, ensure equity and justice.
Ethiopian Muslims are facing daunting challenges and this makes the duty of the organization also challenging. As long as it succeeded in gathering all the stake holders under one roof, it is half way through. Now it is time to use this opportunity. Every minute should have a unique value to address the challenges, and bring up the opportunities it made a theme.
To be specific, the speeches and the discussion should be in the context of the objective of the organization and the reality of Ethiopian Muslims. Muslimｖscholars should bring Islamic way of breakthrough of how to overcome the challenges . Muslims scholars should give Ethiopian context, and one example might be of the challenges that Ethiopian Muslim students are facing. They are facing a hard choice, which is apparently between their religion and academy. Nothing is new about this tactic as previous regimes alienated the Muslims in their own system. The outcome is uneducated, backward Muslim regions with no political power what so ever, and we are paying the price today. Therefore, Muslims scholars should give a wider context to the issue and examine the short and long run impact in their search for Islamic solution. This is just a typical example of the iceberg, and it holds true for the historians as well as other activists.
Perhaps it is too late and too little to write this as the conference is about to start. Yet, we should acknowledge Badr`s effort to arrange this great conference with limited sources.
We should expect a real change once every Ethiopian Muslim feels that he/she has a role to play in the ongoing effort. It should not be a kind of “Badr should do this and that” rather “we should do this and that” we are the organizations and the organization is us, and none can go forward without the other.
ADDIS ABABA (AFP) — African Union commission chief Jean Ping expressed his hope Sunday that Zimbabwe’s ruling party and the opposition would sign a deal within 24 hours to begin fully-fledged talks.
Ping met President Robert Mugabe, opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) chief Morgan Tsvangirai and a separate MDC faction on Saturday to prop up efforts to solve the country’s political crisis, an AU commission spokesman told AFP.
“He (Ping) is hopeful that a memorundum of understanding, which will outline the talks agenda and ground rules, will be signed tomorrow (Monday) with the MDC being part of it. Tsvangirai has given assurance of this,” said Elghassim Wane.
The memorandum of understanding was to be signed last Wednesday, but Tsvangirai backed out as he pushed for other players to be brought into a mediation process led by South African President Thabo Mbeki.
The MDC and Mugabe’s ZANU-PF began preliminary talks last week aimed at establishing a framework for substantive negotiations.
“Progress is definitely being made towards a resolution of the crisis in Zimbabwe…,” an AU official said on condition of anonymity.
Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga on Sunday told the BBC that Tsvangirai was willing to meet Mugabe in South Africa.
“He told me that his team will be going to Pretoria for these preliminary talks. Depending on how they progress, he’s ready and willing to meet with Mr Mugabe out there in Pretoria.”
Zimbabwe’s political crisis deepened last month when Mugabe defied international calls to postpone a presidential run-off marred by widespread violence, and was predictably re-elected by a landslide.
