This pestilence has done refugees of us all

April 15, 2020
Health Care

This mainstay is an opinion by Hassan Al-Kontar, a former Syrian interloper who now lives in Whistler, B.C. For some-more information about CBC’s Opinion section, greatfully see a FAQ.

Since a widespread of coronavirus in Canada, we have been asked for my thoughts on a pandemic.

My response: “Do we wish to hear my answer as a Syrian? Or as a permanent proprietor of Canada?”

I will immediately mark a confusion: “What’s a difference? Is there a difference?”

There is a large difference.

Today a whole universe lives in a condition of doubt and stress — a condition that became utterly informed to me during my time stranded in an airfield in Malaysia. The doubt we all live with now, that we lived with each day during a airfield in Kuala Lumpur, is this: What is a future?

Each day, refugees face distant some-more worrying concerns than we do in Canada: food shortages and miss of medical care, not to discuss a missiles and bombs raining down from warrior planes.

But now we have all entered a bizarre universe in that genocide is a moment-by-moment reality. We watch the news and a spreadsheets of numbers: numbers infected, numbers dead. We add up a numbers without meaningful their names or stories, who they are. Just numbers!

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We arise adult and go to nap on news of a tragedy.

We feel fear and insecurity.

We feel a dislocation of a isolated, distant from a families with no probability of a reunion.

The airports are banned to us, and even a airlines forestall us from boarding.

The borders are sealed in a faces, with all passports being equal — equally useless.

We feel trapped and unwelcome.

We ask a doubt that no one has a answer to: When will all this end? And when will life be normal again?

These used to be a questions usually refugees had to ask. Today they are questions we are all asking. We have all been done refugees by this virus, trapped and terrified. We are all in this together, confronting a same pandemic.

I’m 22, chronically ill — and feel discharged in a COVID-19 dialogue

But here’s a difference.

During my mother’s unconstrained calls from Syria to check on me, we find myself calming her.

I say: “Sweetheart, we live in Canada now. we no longer live in a shade of a dictatorship, where no officials will behind we up, where government’s promises aren’t even value a ink they used to write them and no one will tell we a truth.

“We have values here, rights and voices, worker insurance, puncture plans, food banks, NGOs, polite and charitable organizations. we am stable though we are not.”

Hassan Al-Kontar came to Canada as a interloper from Syria in Aug 2019. He is now a permanent proprietor vital in Whistler, B.C. (Submitted by Hassan Al-Kontar)

I’ve been examination this predicament reveal with dismay and recognition. When we saw a footage of people fighting over toilet paper, we suspicion about refugees in a camps opposite a Middle East and a rest of a universe — what they are going through, and what they are doing to survive.

If we feel a titillate to quarrel over some toilet paper, greatfully take a impulse to ask yourself this doubt to assistance put things in perspective: “What if we was vital in a interloper camp?”

Canadians should know that it could always be worse.