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Committee shows refugees Red Deer CAREs

For more than three decades, the Central Alberta Refugee Effort Committee has been welcoming seekers of a better life to Canada, and trying to make their integration into a new culture a little easier.
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Carl Hahn Volunteer Interpreter Program Coordinator and Elzbieta Sawicka Volunteer Friends Host at the Central Alberta Refugee Effort in the Red Deer office.

For more than three decades, the Central Alberta Refugee Effort Committee has been welcoming seekers of a better life to Canada, and trying to make their integration into a new culture a little easier.

“When the Canadian government told us we were going to be living in Red Deer, we looked on the map and we couldn’t find it, all that was on it was Calgary and Edmonton,” said Elzbieta Sawikca, who now operates CARE’s volunteer friends (host) program.

Sawikca and her husband spent three years and had their first child in an Italian refugee camp after fleeing the oppression of communist Poland in the early 1980s.

Sawikca’s story shares a common thread with many refugees immigrating to Canada.

They spend years under social and political duress, often having to risk their lives to escape their homelands, and those brave (and most times, fortunate) enough to get out, arrive with next to nothing, in a strange new place, where they often don’t speak the language.

“For the first time in my life I felt handicapped,” Sawikca said of the frustration she felt not being able to communicate in English. “It’s all up in your head but there’s no way to get it out.”

CARE’s downtown Red Deer facility, which operates along side Catholic Social Services, is a hub of multiculturalism.

At any given time you can overhear a half-dozen languages being spoken by its clients and staff.

“We currently have 35 languages represented by volunteers in our interpreter bank,” said Carl Hahn, CARE’s interpreter/volunteer co-ordinator.

Hahn says the language barrier is one of the first challenges a newly-landed refugee or immigrant must face when arriving in Canada.

Whenever possible, CARE provides its clients with a volunteer who speaks English as well as the person’s native language, to act as interpreter for important medical, educational, or legal meetings.

CARE also provides a community environment and essential skills training for refugees, foreign workers and newly-landed immigrants.

Its volunteers and employees act as liaisons between immigrant families and their children’s schools.

They also provide citizenship preparation classes, English as a second-language lessons, non-therapeutic counselling, and various other social services.

But often CARE also teaches its clients about things that have become second nature to people born in Canada, like dealing with the weather.

“We provide orientation sessions on how to dress for the winter in Alberta, because if you’re coming from a refugee camp in Africa, you can’t understand what -30C is like,” Sawikca says.

From its humble beginnings in 1979, when a group of Red Deerians just wanted to help out Indo-Chinese refugees fleeing the aftermath of the Vietnam war, the non-profit society continues to grow.

Most of CARE’s staff and volunteers are former clients and many lasting friendships and community connection have developed as a result of its dedication to the simple idea of being a good friend to someone who could use a helping hand.

For more information about CARE, its services and events, visit intentr.com/immigrantctr.

syoung@www.reddeeradvocate.com