Almost 15 months after arriving in Salmon Arm, Mustafa Zakreet emphatically calls the city his home.
Last week he shared his experiences as this community’s first Syrian refugee at a B.C. Syrian refugee provincial meeting hosted in Vancouver by AMSSA, the Affiliation of Multicultural Societies and Service Agencies.
AMSSA is the umbrella organization for all of the province’s settlement service organizations, says Gudrun Malmqvist, executive director of Immigrant Services Shuswap.
“The idea was to bring together agencies and settlement services throughout B.C. to say what they’d been doing for the past year,” she said, noting representatives from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, AMSSA member agencies and provincial reps attended the March 2 meeting.
She says Zakreet expressed a willingness to be part of a panel to talk briefly about his experiences and participate in a question-and-answer session.
“He did such a fantastic job, he was very articulate and his presentation was very well-received,” Malmqvist says. “It was quite funny because when he was extolling the virtues of Salmon Arm, a government-assisted refugee, who lived in a Vancouver hotel for quite some time, leaned over and said ‘could I move to Salmon Arm?’”
She says every member of the panel had stories about what a stumbling block a lack of English had been and all told fun stories about navigating buses in downtown Vancouver.
Zakreet, who arrived from a refugee camp in Lebanon, had taken a college-level English course before coming to Salmon Arm, attended ESL courses here and is very conversant now.
“I explained how wonderful the community is and how generous,” he says, noting most of the other Salmon Arm refugees had no English and many are still struggling. “I was welcomed with an Arabic sign and also got services and help from the community; they (private sponsors) took me to the bank, opened an account – one of things I had no idea about, took me to Service BC for a learner’s licence and showed me around town and more.”
So much more, that in one month, Zakreet’s sponsors had put him back on track to earning a degree in civil engineering.
“They encouraged me to work so hard,” says the Okanagan College student, who next year will further his studies in a two-year program in Kelowna before going to UBC.
Part way into his engineering degree in Syria, Zakreet’s courses were not accepted in Canada. But that does not bother him one bit.
“After losing hope for three years and then I get another chance, I don’t feel bad for not having the credits,” says the engaging 25-year-old, who is employed part-time at the Shuswap Pie Company.
With four hours at his disposal following the meeting, Zakreet got a drive to the nearest Sky Train and set out to explore Vancouver on his own.
He laughingly explains that while walking, he spied a Turkish restaurant and went in for lunch. After his meal and further down the street, he spied a Syrian restaurant – and enjoyed another lunch.
More content now that his father, brother, sister-in-law and niece are now in Salmon Arm, Zakreet and his father worry about his oldest brother, who remains in a camp in Lebanon.
And while he would like to go back to help educate children when the war is over, and plans to re-visit “the most beautiful Vancouver,”
Salmon Arm holds his heart.
“They have given me everything I need,” he says of his sponsors and others. “People who speak my language did nothing; I got everything from the community here. What kind of person needs more than that?”