"the refugee profile in Europe"

 I have been completely puzzled and shocked by the EU's taking in of thousands of people from Africa and Arab countries. The best I can tell from watching dozens of videos about the situation is:

-the current influx by vast majority are arab and african men in their 20's and 30's
-they are desperate and determined to reach the most prosperous countries with the deepest pockets in terms of social programs to pay for them staying. They are well aware of which countries have the best services.
-there is also some much smaller influx of families and others escaping wars who are real refugees seeking asylum
-the political class and media seem to be arranging these people coming in and suppressing these facts.
-from just recent policies the EU is also now packed with intolerant and aggressive muslims who live in enclaves where police fire and ambulance people are attacked for simply entering these areas to help people. The muslims in particular are determined to change the country rather than assimilate.
-these now entrenched muslims when interviewed say they intend to force sharia law on Europe, the US and the entire world- and everyday europeans are being attacked and accused of intolerance for even saying there is a problem and yet the problems of these "refugees" are everywhere
-these african and arab men are lawless and feel entitled to attack and rape 'uncovered' EU women as they wish because the koran encourages them to among other despicable acts. Many young women in Sweden for instance are dying their hair black to avoid being attacked. The koran tells them to lie, cheat, steal from 'non-believers' and that it is their duty to oppress the world with islam.
-Western native europeans are beginning to see they are being attacked by these incoming people and are only just starting to resist the organized importing of these muslim and african people. There is beginning to be a common consensus that these people need to be expelled from their countries or they will lose their way of life.
-the math of all of these muslims having children and the EU's low birthrate make this a certainty they will lose their countries to these muslims in only a few years.
-there is a consistently estimated range of around 15 to 25 percent of muslims support terrorism without reservation!

Until I watched numerous videos on YouTube about the crisis I had ZERO idea what was happening from the media and I was SURE the problems I did hear about were overblown by anti-immigration types and bigots. Educate your self and be prepared to be shocked as I was to learn about these people, their behaviour and their goals.

One example of this crisis for the westerners:

Germans protest over wave of sexual assaults on women in Cologne

also:

BBC gentle but revealing documentary on muslim intolerance:

tscout's picture

       Just a big clash of ,,,and waste of energy on the street. Isn't it funny that the British cops appear to actually be protecting the muslims.It kind of reinforces the idea that the US instigated this influx of refugees to disrupt Europe. It could be a really good diversion to something even bigger going on in the EU, the takedown of the EU. Then, the whole thing would make sense to me..

garydgreer's picture

Or it could be that Islam is trouble and everyone ignoring that will not make it go away.

onesong's picture

To say Islam is trouble is like saying all of any group-white, black, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, (you name the group because almost anyone could be in this place) or otherwise is trouble.  No group of people can be lumped into one bunch and stereotyped like that regardless of how they are portrayed by media, mainstream or otherwise. Take a good look at the atrocities that have occurred in human history if you need an example.

Every side has a story, and every side has a reason for perceiving the world the way that they do. I am not saying there aren't problems and trouble created from a clash of cultures, there obviously are, but until we begin to really see each other there can be nothing less than this very great divide. 

I'm not closing my eyes to radical Islam, but I also do not agree that every Muslim views the world in the way that an extremist Muslim does. I live within miles of the largest Middle Eastern community in North America, so this isn't some distant issue to me. It's in my own backyard. 

Do we look any less troublesome from the perspective of the world as we watch a Trump rally and attack each other? Or as we move into countries that have their own laws and customs, some of which are many centuries older than ours (whether we agree with them or not) and wage wars for reasons that may or may not be in anyone's best interests?  Usually the real interests involved are motivated by oil, money, greed, hatred and fear.  

We've got alot of collective karma to correct on all sides. We've all got a boatload of sh*t to un-learn.  Again, imo.   Peace be.                                        kristyne 

I have heard some things about this situation that make a lot of sense. Its not verifiable in the MSM but seems to explain everything. Additional information that anybody can supply or contradict would be helpful.

There is a world civil war going on. Just about every conflict that we see in the news is part of it. Syria and ISIS is just one of the theaters. The evacuation of Syria was ordered and we need to understand why.

Eastern Ukrainians are not who they appear to be. They are publicly known as “Russian Separatists”, but they are neither Russian or Ukrainians. They invaded eastern Ukraine and killed all the original Eastern Ukrainian men, women, and children inhabitants and took over their homes and were supposedly going to fight on the side of Russia in the Ukrainian-Russian conflict. Russia didn't know who they were and didn't have anything to do with this.

The same thing was suppose to happen to Syria: They were all going to be killed and their houses taken over. A hasty evacuation of Syria was ordered just in front of their arrival. A whole lot of lives were saved! The attackers entered Syria to a mostly uninhabited country. Some of the attackers are following the refugees into Europe with this mass refugee evacuation.

These attackers are very dangerous, yet they are easy to detect as they stick out. They grew up in isolated conditions and don't know how to interact with the normal human population. They think they own the people of the world and exhibit an attitude that reflects this. They think they can rape/kill anyone they want. The attackers all exhibit this P { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }A:link { }Dark Triad personality (narcissistic, psychopathic, machiavellianistic)

of what Maria Konnikova talks about on this Real Time episode that Chris showed us.

These attackers pose as Muslims but are not really Muslims and are easy to distinguish from the true Syrian refugees who basically are normal people in crisis.

Most of these attackers in Syria have been rounded up. The attackers who infiltrated and migrated to Europe are being rounded up. This is an ongoing process. The rounding up process is a slow but for-sure, routine thing using specially trained forces. The general population should not attempt fighting them since they may have secret advanced super powerful weapons available to them.

Some of the well-behaved Syrian refugees are being moved to other countries to take some of the pressure of Europe. This is also an ongoing process.

It is easy to tell the difference between these two groups. The attackers really don't know how  to blend in.

The European leaders were asked to help with this Syrian evacuation. The Europeans are very humanitarian people. A complication was these attackers infiltrating this process. These attackers would try anybody's patience and was an unfortunate complication.

The good Syrian people shouldn't have to have their reputations destroyed by these creepy attackers. Same for Muslims in general.

This refugee crisis is temporary as eventually the Syrians will be returned to their homeland. There are secret, cloaked forces there now making sure there is no looting.

Brian's picture

Yeah. Gary, that video you posted gets right to the heart of the muslim attitude of superiority and entitlement. They attack the culture they have injected into and intend to make it submit to their will.

I have heard people defend them as "just another of many waves of immigration" with the "usual messy process" of them coming to assimilate gradually. I think not. I don't think Irish,Italian, Chinese, Russian, Polish or any other group ever came here (to the US) and acted like this before.They WANTED to assimilate-to take part in the society they were joining.

These people are an occupation. They need to be sent back where they came from before they destroy our civilization.

Brian's picture

I hope this theme of EU using discernment to separate the bad guys out is A) real and B) works! That would be such a wonderful resolution to the problem. Oy!

I think the thing to remember with this refugee crisis is that it was created by america and the west. It is all part of the plan.... There would not be all these refugees if their homes werent being destroyed. Go look at videos of Syria, the place is completely destroyed. I would run and I would hate and so would you....

The moderate rebels we support have used chemical weapons but are still supported by the west. We don't care if they hurt each other, we get them to do it. It makes them weaker and us stronger.

America couldn't control Bashir....so America wanted a change in syria, to get it they payed, trained and armed people to attack the Syrian  government. The people have had to leave or die, they didn't choose this. America and the west have been destabilizing africa and the middle east for over 60 years. We create this, we destroy them set up weak leaders that will give us contracts to rebuild and control the resources etc.....then we put in draconian laws at home because of this threat to us from them...

We attack the muslim world and they are the terrorists. Yes there are "bad" refugees who want to hurt us, yes they are in among the "good" ones but who's fault is it. Are you bad for fighting back? Our leaders want that to justify their big brother agendas.

Muslims are not all bad and werent the ones who started the trouble. The west wants to make everyone like us, have our ways and laws, they want everyone to follow corporate rule....they want control of everything and they will attack on all fronts to get it.

Iraq was stable, had free education, cheap health care and was the most liberal towards women in the middle east..it wasn't breeding terrorists.......... By destroying it we fan the flames of extremism, we destroy moderate self respecting muslims because they won't give us everything that is theirs...we take all they have and then say look at them, they are bad people...people say that they want what we have got.....look at the reality of it.....we attacked them, we wanted what they had!...we want them to be like us.....

They werent "bad" till we started screwing with them....we and our western governments are in control of it all.....so go and hate all muslim and be a part of big brothers plan.....

 

onesong's picture

Jeremy's post speaks to exactly what I mean when discussing the collective karma surrounding events we are currently witnessing and even helping escalate it in many ways. Thanks for speaking it. How many of our dollars are supporting this? How much is it enlarged by this world agenda we see playing out? It's not my agenda. I doubt many of us think of ourselves as also responsible for it but we are in many ways big and small.

At what point do we decide to not be part and party to it? When choosing to be Peace, we choose to see people differently-without fear. I know we don't stop war, terrorism and destruction by continuing to teach other countries how to build their military forces, or provide weapons, funding and troops. My God, how much could be done with the trillions of dollars wasted on wasting entire populations?

Hating doesn't hurt the one it's aimed at as much as it hurts the one doing the hating but so many of us haven't figured that out yet. Killing doesn't end it, it proliferates societies that make more war. What we do to another, we do to ourselves multiplied many times. We have to start teaching something different and expecting more of ourselves, our electorate, our businesses, our religions...we have to stop this with peace not war.

Sons and daughters (Christian, Muslim or otherwise) should not be marching off to war and being taught to want to kill each other for agendas that are hidden and twisted. Nor should any child anywhere know before they are old enough to read what bombs going off and communities laid to waste for profit feels like.   How can children raised like this not want to destroy others?

My heart bleeds for a world of children that don't feel safe in their own shoes (if they even have them), in their own homes (if they even have one) and for parents that cannot give their children even the most basic things like food, clean water and shelter (if they even have parents). 

God help us-so far we don't know how to do it ourselves. 

Brian's picture

1.2 billion Muslims are good. Except for the 15 to 25% who want to kill me and you. I have sworn enemies. Huh.

And that's asymmetrical warfare by a radical, ammoral group roughly the population of the US, dedicated to the destruction of all Western civilization

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Muslims are not all bad and werent the ones who started the trouble."

"We" -The West- (because of leaders like Dick Cheney-a gutless mass murdering psychopath)created the crisis-no argument-"we" attacked and have apparently destabilized the middle East for years. OK. We. I sure as F--k voted against those bastards.

"Hating doesn't hurt the one it's aimed at as much as it hurts the one doing the hating..."

 Many people do not hate people. This didn't stop the rise of Hitler and the peaceful were not anti-causal, they were irrelevent.  WWII wasn't an elective. It was forced upon innocent and peaceful people. Millions of decent and non-violent people were murdered by the trainloads. Millions of peaceful people were forced to fight and die to bring peace back for their children's sake.

Islam is a religion of peace-if you cherry pick your way around stoning, fathers honor-killing their own daughters who were gang raped (if there is a Heaven, I hope there is a special place in it for those girls)/ beheading, hanging gays, children's hands cut off for stealing etc etc. Barbaric societies have arisen from this religion. Europeans used to do this-it was called the Inquisition.

Fact: There is an agenda and a massive coordinated effort behind the mass migration of Muslims to Europe and even here. It is NOT the will of the Western societies that are being over run.

Q. The Western populations MUST defend their cultures- HOW?

Q. Since it is a hidden and large asymmetrical threat, why isn't it rational and prudent to repel all new Muslims since you cannot predict their behaviour? There is no litmus test for trust with followers of the Koran. How about cooly facing this existential threat NOW instead of being forced to another World War to beat them back? Can you imagine the internment camps we would erect if we went to war? Is it really wrong to deport someone sworn to violence and subjugation?

Q Krystine. Would you like these people to come here and steer our society to be tolerent of honor killings, wife beating, child molestation, rape and other everyday crimes practiced at will by men in Islamic societies? It is their frequently and openly stated goal to convert us to an Islamic state with sharia laws and that is hatred. A deep self-hatred that projects ones own self loathing into a grotesque society of self-reinforcing violence and bigotry.

"I sure as F--k voted against those bastards"......lol.....unforunately it wasnt enough....

I go back to a speech by Henry Kisinger, back in 1971, I think, where he says that the only way to get the resources from other countires is to establish a program to get rid of the native populations....while people are there you can't have total control.....

Australia has the worlds largest muslim population right next door, Indonesia with 250 million.......we, 24 million, have had 2 small unofficial wars with them over a place called papua new guinea.....papua is rich in natural gas.....we hold half of the island and get the resources.....for the most part indonesians are fine and not the type you describe with their laws. A couple of small islands have moved to Sharia law tho in recent years...but I would argue fueled by people who have been schooled in the wars in the middle east.

The worst Muslims nation for human rights, right up there with ISIS, Saudi Arabia.....who are of course, great friends of America's and the west......and yes they have the stuff you spoke of, beheadings, women have zero rights, stonings, chopping hands off....on and on.....but America supports them?...how does that work?....

This is all organized......I saw a thing recntly by an illuminati dude in the mid 1800's....he predicted on the nose ww1, ww2, spoke of what they were about, rise of communism, establishment of the jewish state etc....he was spot on and he says ww3 will be the next war and that it will be the birth of one world government and essentially the power elite win there 1000 year old war, they will have complete control over the whole world.....

My argument is that this is all planned, staged.....and I won't play along to their game....people are essentially good and I will never judge the many by the actions of the few.......but i don't disagree that big shit is coming......

 

You made no difference with Cheney and you won't change anything here by fearing muslims, well to the outside world that is,  we all know it is about what is inside us and that you can change that....hate "can" poison and blind us...........general statement, not saying that has happenned to you.....

 

some say this is bullshit but who knows, makes a lot of sense f you do believe in the illuminati...Albert Pike, 1871

The First World War must be brought about in order to permit the Illuminati to overthrow the power of the Czars in Russia and of making that country a fortress of atheistic Communism. The divergences caused by the “agentur” (agents) of the Illuminati between the British and Germanic Empires will be used to foment this war. At the end of the war, Communism will be built and used in order to destroy the other governments and in order to weaken the religions.

The Second World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences between the Fascists and the political Zionists. This war must be brought about so that Nazism is destroyed and that the political Zionism be strong enough to institute a sovereign state of Israel in Palestine. During the Second World War, International Communism must become strong enough in order to balance Christendom, which would be then restrained and held in check until the time when we would need it for the final social cataclysm.

The Third World War must be fomented by taking advantage of the differences caused by the “agentur” of the “Illuminati” between the political Zionists and the leaders of Islamic World. The war must be conducted in such a way that Islam (the Moslem Arabic World) and political Zionism (the State of Israel) mutually destroy each other.

Meanwhile the other nations, once more divided on this issue will be constrained to fight to the point of complete physical, moral, spiritual and economical exhaustion… We shall unleash the Nihilists and the atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil.

Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with christianity, whose deistic spirits will from that moment be without compass or direction, anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the true light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view.

This manifestation will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time.

Wendy's picture

This is a false flag like everything else that makes the Muslims look bad!!!!!!

I posted earlier an article that lots of these"immigrants" are undercover cops.

9/11 was an inside job, not a Muslim job. This is another Gladio operation. Social control via the intelligence agencies. How many ways can I say it?

The Muslim culture is the ONLY culture that rejects interest banking and who is at the top of the all seeing eye??? It certainly isn't the Muslims.

tscout's picture

      I was fascinated by the quote from Albert Pike,and his name sounded familiar, so I went and searched him. It is amazing how interesting , and constantly changing lives were back "in them days". This guy did so many different things!  Strangely enough , he spent portions of his life in my hometown,New Orleans, and in Taos, where I spent 15 years. He was born in Boston,,I was born in Hartford.

    Anyways, he didn't join the Masons until quite some time after the civil war, but got heavily involved from the start, and supposedly had a lot to do with establishing their rituals and ceremonies. This is scary, because on another site, one that also posts the quote above, they say that the Jesuits infiltrated the masons and turned their doctrine 180 degrees. And Albert Pike was at the head of it ,,,supposedly turning the masons to Lucifer. So, it is easier to see where that vision was coming from.

   To those who find his predictions unbelievable, you have to stop and realize who these people were,and are. They have extremely high levels of integrated thinking. They don't think about morals, or values, or anything else except the end results of their tactics. They build giant jigsaw puzzles, and steer the world in  whatever direction they choose by knowing the short and long term effects of every piece they add to the puzzle. So,,looking ahead is not as farfetched as it might seem. Integrated thinking on that level is a powerful tool that we all are capable of, but hardly get to develop during the struggle for survival. And they do everything they can to slow us down as we develop this same trait, because it will be their doom. They are so close to their target now, they will stop at nothing, so shit just gets crazier and crazier by the day! It's alla game to them,a Big game, with big stakes, and it's in the home stretch!

 

 

 

onesong's picture

Dear Brian,

To answer your question...

Would you like these people to come here and steer our society to be tolerent of honor killings, wife beating, child molestation, rape and other everyday crimes practiced at will by men in Islamic societies? It is their frequently and openly stated goal to convert us to an Islamic state with sharia laws and that is hatred. A deep self-hatred that projects ones own self loathing into a grotesque society of self-reinforcing violence and bigotry.

Many have come here, many have destroyed societies in the name of the beliefs they held.  Look at the Native American as a prime example.  But that isn't really what I want to address. Whatever I am faced with now or in the future and how I respond to it (rather than re-act) isn't based on external forces.  What and how I respond is based on internal ones, learned through looking deep within myself.  Please take a look at what you've written in bold type. That's where we disagree Brian-look closely around and decide whether the Muslim is the only one 'that projects one's own self loathing into a grotesque society of self reinforcing violence and bigotry'. 

I choose Love.  I choose Peace. If it means that I might come face to face with a destroyer in the future, I will still choose Love and Peace even if that means I lose my physical life for it. 

Where is the deep self reinforcing violence coming from? Certainly not from me.   The one big difference in my life is that I've faced death before.  My experience left me unafraid.  There is nothing any human can do that makes me any less than what I am.  Here or on the other side.

We've tried for centuries, maybe even eons, to crush what is different than 'us'.  I choose to believe there is a better way and a Power greater than any being wielded by men who think they 'know' what power is.

Something's got to change, and since I can't change anything but myself, that's the path I choose to take.

Brian's picture

"....hate "can" poison and blind us...........general statement, not saying that has happenned to you....."

yeah you did. and you're correct. I'm full of it

"I choose Love.  I choose Peace. If it means that I might come face to face with a destroyer in the future, I will still choose Love and Peace even if that means I lose my physical life for it."

barring a similar brush with death as you maybe , I assume I will continue to return to fear again and again. It is so automatic I doubt of ever getting past it.

Thanks for the feedback. There used to be this funny TV commercial  "Thanks...I needed that"

Brian's picture

Wendy-I believe the attacks on New Years were 'genuine' crimes. But whichever is correct, these young men often have cell phones and have been seen using debit cards at ATMs. Arab Spring protests were often orchestrated with cell phone apps. They're everywhere.

onesong's picture

I don't believe you're full of it, I believe it can be easy to be mislead and confused by what we see portrayed all around us-some of it real, some of it total bullshit all having some sort of effect on us - if we allow it. 

That's what I'm gently trying to say...we allow it.  Don't allow it to eat at you Brian, don't allow anything external to you eat away at the peace that lives deep down inside you when you are the controller of your own level of consciousness. That's where self reflection and looking honestly at what we're afraid of is helpful even when it's difficult. 

I've been raped, I've been made to feel 'the victim' and it brought me to a place where I learned to take back my own power and to know I will not give that away again. I don't have to. Nothing my physical body can go through diminishes my Spiritual body and the power I am. 

I don't want to make you feel 'less', I want you to feel more. To feel how powerful we all are when our power isn't based on a need to take anything away from anyone else. When we can see through the physical shit playing out around us and see into our deepest places and accept that we can overcome anything when we learn and accept that we can do that. 

Rest well in the safety and space of your own Divinity.  Don't let it be diminished by doubt. kristyne

That was an enlightening post about Albert Pike Jez. I knew that he had engineered the major wars of the 20th century but had become fuzzy about the details of the World War three plans. When you look at these plans it is quite clear that this Muslim hatred is engineered by a third party – as Wendy says False Flag stuff. This is sort of like sheep herding where a shepard puts his sheep into two groups and gets them to fight each other. If I HAVE to hate I want to do my own hating and not do hating for somebody else.

I doubt that any “Muslims” living in the west with non-western values are really Muslims. I would first look for evidence that they are radicalized, dark-side, machiavellian, non-Muslim infiltrators first before undertaking any challenge to them. Most Muslims knowledgeable about the western values are NOT into Sharia Law. If any Muslim promotes Sharia Law they are probably not real Muslims but radicalized, dark-side, machiavellian infiltrators.

While we are on the subject of hatred and Albert Pike, did you know that he founded the Klu Klux Klan? And now, the side he is on: the dark-side, machiavellian Illuminati, also control the Free Masons, Black Panthers, Klu Klux Klan and a few other secret societies.

The significance that Albert Pike has with the Free Masons is that he took them over for the Dark Side. Before Pike the Free Masons were a resistance-type secret society – secret only to keep from being rounded up by imperialist authorities. They believed that “all men are created equal”. After significant infiltration, Pike was able to turn them around and bring them in to the dark-side machiavellians. These guys no longer believe that “all men are created equal” but, instead, that “some men are more equal”. The original Free Masons created the United States. Some of these new Free Masons are now told that the United States doesn't exist anymore.

Yes we can go into the fact the first-draft author of the Declaration of Independence (“all men are created equal”), Thomas Jefferson,  was a slave owner. But Jefferson was an Illuminati Spy and needed to own slaves to look like an Illuminati. His slaves were never hurt, lived in a kind of utopia, and were very well educated. Their knowledge was supplemented with highly advanced enlightened knowledge. If they insisted on asking for their freedom they were always granted it. The descendants of these “slaves” have always had a positive effect on the African American community and America ever since.

I am with Kristyne about choosing Love and Peace. These machiavellians do NOT HAVE ABSOLUTE POWER and are on their way out! It will just be a generation or so once we get rid of radicalization and all forms of “domestic abuse”  then everybody will be into Love and Peace and there will be no risk involved in being that way.

Cool mark, thanks for the info....he was a super interesting guy....

Cool mark, thanks for the info....he was a super interesting guy....

Cool mark, thanks for the info....he was a super interesting guy....

onesong's picture

This morning we are confronted with challenges to our beliefs, our faith in fellowman, our feelings about ISIS, Muslims, terrorists, covert operations, conspiracy,safety and security....you name it.  The bombing of innocent citizens and travellers in Belgium (and everywhere else in the world now on alert) surely gives pause to us all.  So the challenge becomes how do we act/re-act/respond when world events like this occur. 

During and immediately after 9/11, we saw people from all over in fear, in anger and hatred, our politics changed, our freedoms changed, our attitudes about whole groups of people became muddied by activities of a few. But we also saw love, compassion, common concern for all those lost and their families by people from many countries and walks of life...

I understand it may be natural to want to harm those that perpetrate events and activities like this that cause death and destruction and more fear-I am not saying justice should be not be meted out to those that can do this to others.  I am saying that we need to be vigilant of our own thoughts as we watch what we're seeing in the media and what we're being told.  We are only given the information that a chosen few want us to see.  

So I ask you to please amp yourself up energetically in whatever ways you do for the purpose of positivity-Love, Light, Peace, mutual respect for Life.  Whether you meditate, pray, drum, write, dance, chant, sing...raise your vibration in any way possible to love and peace and send it on wings everywhere.  Where you fear, find a way to release it as best you can so that we do not add to the energy field of negativity and hate. That's where their power lies.  In changing the world to a place of fear, war and hate we do what these factions want us to do...we do not support life either. 

Scream first if you must, beat your hands against your chest and get the pain out of the way, feel what you have to, but then release it and change it.  One thought and one person at a time we can change it and spread a better message and vibration.  In light of the events in both the recent past and imminent present we can't let dark forces and agendas lead us into the same darkness. Please.

I'm attaching a link that has nothing to do with people, but to me speaks of change bigger than we know or understand.  Forces greater than us working in ways we don't expect.  The 2nd link is to Amplifield, another meditation room that links us globally-maybe not a bad idea this morning.

http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/how-wolves-change-rivers/ 

http://www.Amplifield.com  

my intention this morning is.... 

Seeing and Being Light where there is darkness; expanding Peace where there is fear and hatred; breathing Sacred Breathe to all areas of the world that turmoil shall end and All Encompassing, Life giving understanding shall reign eternal.

 

 

ChrisBowers's picture

Right on point Kristyne.  This is so sobering and dire that it sends me straight past gratuitous hatemongering and into the protective arms of Love. The link for how wolves change rivers didn't work, so here is another one to try to get there.

How Wolves Change Rivers

onesong's picture

Thanks for re-posting Chris.  As I watched this again (because I find it full of inspiration and I get a different message each time), this viewing the thoughts that popped in are...

Does it take the demise of we humans to re-generate Mother Earth? Does Nature already know what we are so unable to see? Did dinosaurs go the way of extinction because the planet could no longer sustain the damage they were doing? How do we stop the damage we humans are doing to the planet and to each other? Things to ponder. I hope our legacy is different than our behavior has been.

John Muir's quote seems fitting.

"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe."

 

ChrisBowers's picture

Mother Earth and her other innocent inhabitants are most definitely a more important consideration than one species that acts like a destructive all-consuming virus that fancies itself god's favorite.

we can either get with the cooperative program or die off.  the sad part is that we have already taken so many other species with us prior to our own demise and act like its nothing 'cause we are, after all, us.

yuk

tscout's picture

   But, I don't think the long term change of the river was recognized yet. Basically,, the aspen forests of yellowstone had been dying off for decades,and none of the tree exterts could figure out why,,,,because they were tree experts. Aspen saplings are supposedly the favorite food of the elk. If you've ever grown aspens, you know how pesky all those saplings are that pop up where their not wanted. I could grow a whole aspen forest in a few years with a dozen trees, and did it in New Mexico, just by spreading them out in a low area that would hold runoff from the roof . Oh yeah,And the beaver were practically gone. I think the red willow which borders all the streams and rivers is also a favorite of the  elk. So,,,enter the wolf,,,and they knew instinctively to stakeout the aspen forests, so the change was evident quite fast on that front, and with the red willow. That brought the beaver swarming back. Then all the indirect changes followed. It was such a great lesson, they made a documentary about it! But still, the cattle ranchers fought the reintroduction for years,  and shoot the wolves every chance they get. And the buffalo! Sorry, had to throw that in, I see that mentality here on a smaller level, the cattle industry just makes me sick...

Brian's picture

"Seeing and Being Light where there is darkness; expanding Peace where there is fear and hatred; breathing Sacred Breathe to all areas of the world that turmoil shall end and All Encompassing, Life giving understanding shall reign eternal"

I forget that we create it. Nice prayer/intention K

onesong's picture

I know holding the intention of Love and Light when all around us seems to be in chaos; when the pictures on the nightly news are what they are; when sometimes our initial feelings are to want to hurt someone is not easy. 

These are our challenges, our tests of our humanity, the lessons collectively we need to learn. When we are able to move to a higher perspective, we begin to be able to lift all of us to the point where we can respond to our challenges peaceably and change how we treat each other. 

for women interested in promoting understanding...       www.peacexpeace.org

 

Brian's picture

I have a 20 something nephew and his wife living in-of all places-Brussels, Belgium which leaves the family a bit nervous. They are fine but they do travel a lot so scary(airport). They don't say "deport 'em all" kinds of things to anyone thus far though I haven't asked either. They both have or are working in International relations -whatever that is, but they are lovely, trusting, well-traveled people who trust in the inherent goodness of most people. My nephew has taken trips alone to other countries and just thrown himself into situations where he makes life-long friendships with people he can hardly speak with. One of those rare individuals I wish I was more like. If I speak with them I'll report back on their impressions and opinions.

something admittedly soft pedaled by BBC:

How Belgians feel about the attacks, in five words  (hope it loads)

garydgreer's picture

Consider this scenario: 

There are two groups of refugees entering Europe: true Muslims and fake Muslims.

Gernerally the true Muslims show genuine gratitude and  can be trusted.

The fake Muslims were brought up in isolated conditions, and can't help but stick out.  All have the same great great great grandfather. (Insert fewer or more greats depending on the generation). They act like they were told they own the world and have very little respect for the rest of humanity. Their behavior exhibits the dark triad personality type.
These fake Muslims are dangerous and need to be apprehended using special techniques.
The fake Muslims may attempt to take over entire towns. Such a takeover could mean controlling the local police station. It is important for them to control information flow. They may handle the responses to 911 calls.

Nobody should attempt rounding these people up themselves. Specially trained personnel need to handle this. Here are some, but not necessarily all of the pit falls one might encounter:
They feign submissiveness if they perceive they don't have the advantage in a situation, yet all the time looking for a weak point in their adversaries. Once they see one they will immediately try to exploit it, turn the tables and then kill their apprehenders. They do a convincing rendition of submissiveness. Nobody should attempt to negotiate with them. They will have no intention of keeping their word in a situation like this.

They may employ lethal electro-gravitic weapons. The only defense against these weapons is thick lead shielding. Victims of such an attack my exhibit blood coming from the eyes and nose.
The resistance alliance has secretly substituted weaker, more harmless versions of these weapons but they still may have possession of some of the strong lethal ones.

They can don special electrified clothing that can electrocute anybody that touches them.
They can wear a suicide bomb belt and blow their attackers up once they are approached. A cousin of these types of people, one of the perpetrators in the Paris Bombings, strapped a suicide belt to a woman and blew her up as police entered the building. Some of the police officers were quite seriously injured in this incident.

There are many more tricks that these tricksters employ that one would need to be careful of. Don't attempt this unless you are specially trained to handle them.

There are also other immigrants coming over to Europe from other continents such as Africa. Here you have Europe stretched to the hilt, overwhelmed with these immigrants and all of a sudden others feel the need to immigrate to Europe? Consider that they may have a political ulterior motives, possibly some reinforcement capacity. I have heard that they have been radicalized and could potentially be unsafe and Europe should not let them in. I have been told that they will make it an issue of race but in this particular situation it is not about their race but their true political motives.

tscout's picture

     I find that so interesting Marc. It doesn't explain why the special forces are  treating people like that German family so bad, unless they are being forced to act that way. That would make the plan pretty much unstoppable. That woman mentioned that the press is not reporting on all the local cases as well.So ifthe media is in on it, the cops are in  on it, and whoever actually sent the "fake muslims" I would say Europe will explode soon.         https://youtu.be/YUxflaPVNEU       I am posting this link here because there is an unusual story in here. The subject in the interview as a whole is wide  ranged, all related to current events. I listened to a Ben Fullford report as I was running around the house this morning, and this Steve Quale interview followed it. I only got about 30 minutes in and had to leave. It is funny that so many hotshots were down in Antarctica for some private talks last week, supposedly regarding the funding for the new world currency. All the destabilization going on fits right in with this.I  am not suggesting you listen to the 2 hour talk,,,but I am gonna check the rest of it out.  I have never heard of a connection between the nazis and the muslims before, but Quale goes into it in part of this interview. It is funny that the nazis are kind of Back in the news again, and,,according to him, it's because they never really went away.This is wild stuff, with a lot of religion and devil worship mixed in, and if he's right, it's all about to pop! So,,most of this is indirectly related to this post, but it sure would make some sense of the craziness over there right now...

Wendy's picture

Hi Todd,

That Youtube link came up "404 not found" on my end. I search for Steve Quale but he has a lotof videos.

tscout's picture

   I will try again,,,it's a long video...   https://youtu.be/YUxflaPVNEU      it usually works if I just paste the link here. I listened to the rest of the interview last night. He believes that he has finally put all the pieces together. I hope it works this time..

tscout's picture

  I just tried it again, and it didn't work...  <iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YUxflaPVNEU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

tscout's picture

   I had to use the embed code as the link. Man, everything comes up in that talk,huh? Even Trump made it in there,right at the end. I also found hismention of the "vimanas" interesting.I think i have the spelling wrong,,they are the ancient flying ships according to the Indians. He claims that India announced to the world that they fond one intact, with the operators manual a few years ago, and the US gov laughed at them. There are some ancient stories in India about a great battle , fighting flying ships that destroyed one of their legendary cities. There was a great hero(deity) that fought them to the end.

   I have aquestion regarding his talk, but I can't seem to formulate it properly yet,,haha!  He has tied so many things together now, I have this question in the back of my mind regarding creation, based on our belief systems,patterns,etc. . If he is right about where we are now,and this thing playing out like this, we are in for a hell of a year,,,no pun intended...........    One thing for sure,,he sure does his homework!

esrw02's picture

  Critical Thinking !

Wendy's picture

Todd, good for you for wading through that Steve Quale. I just couldn't deal with the heavy (sorry but it felt very fake to me) Christian talk. I like some of his work, like the research about Giants but he seemed very off for this video - too much fake Christian talk like trying to toot his own horn about how he predicted this and that coming and then in the next sentence trying to cover himself, saying it was all the good Lord putting him in the right place and time. There might be some good truths burried under the BS there but I wasn't willing to dig that far.

tscout's picture

    I just let that part go right by me,,,,he is just hard to keep up with, but makes interesting cross references. I think he connects a lot of dots

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/americas/canada-syrian-refugees....

ORONTO — One frigid day in February, Kerry McLorg drove to an airport hotel here to pick up a family of Syrian refugees. She was cautious by nature, with a job poring over insurance data, but she had never even spoken to the people who were about to move into her basement.

“I don’t know if they even know we exist,” she said.

At the hotel, Abdullah Mohammad’s room phone rang, and an interpreter told him to go downstairs. His children’s only belongings were in pink plastic bags, and the family’s documents lay in a white paper bag printed with a Canadian flag. His sponsors had come, he was told. He had no idea what that meant.

Across Canada, ordinary citizens, distressed by news reports of drowning children and the shunning of desperate migrants, are intervening in one of the world’s most pressing problems. Their country allows them a rare power and responsibility: They can band together in small groups and personally resettle — essentially adopt — a refugee family. In Toronto alone, hockey moms, dog-walking friends, book club members, poker buddies and lawyers have formed circles to take in Syrian families. The Canadian government says sponsors officially number in the thousands, but the groups have many more extended members.

When Ms. McLorg walked into the hotel lobby to meet Mr. Mohammad and his wife, Eman, she had a letter to explain how sponsorship worked: For one year, Ms. McLorg and her group would provide financial and practical support, from subsidizing food and rent to supplying clothes to helping them learn English and find work. She and her partners had already raised more than 40,000 Canadian dollars (about $30,700), selected an apartment, talked to the local school and found a nearby mosque.

Ms. McLorg, the mother of two teenagers, made her way through the crowded lobby, a kind of purgatory for newly arrived Syrians. Another member of the group clutched a welcome sign she had written in Arabic but then realized she could not tell if the words faced up or down. When the Mohammads appeared, Ms. McLorg asked their permission to shake hands and took in the people standing before her, no longer just names on a form. Mr. Mohammad looked older than his 35 years. His wife was unreadable, wearing a flowing niqab that obscured her face except for a narrow slot for her eyes. Their four children, all under 10, wore donated parkas with the tags still on.
Photo
Susan Stewart, an artist, is a sponsor of Eman Mohammad and her family. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

For the Mohammads, who had been in Canada less than 48 hours, the signals were even harder to read. In Syria, Abdullah had worked in his family’s grocery stores and Eman had been a nurse, but after three years of barely hanging on in Jordan, they were not used to being wanted or welcomed. “You mean we’re leaving the hotel?” Abdullah asked. To himself, he was wondering, “What do these people want in return?”

Much of the world is reacting to the refugee crisis — 21 million displaced from their countries, nearly five million of them Syrian — with hesitation or hostility. Greece shipped desperate migrants back to Turkey; Denmark confiscated their valuables; and even Germany, which has accepted more than half a million refugees, is struggling with growing resistance to them. Broader anxiety about immigration and borders helped motivate Britons to take the extraordinary step last week of voting to leave the European Union.

In the United States, even before the Orlando massacre spawned new dread about “lone wolf” terrorism, a majority of American governors said they wanted to block Syrian refugees because some could be dangerous. Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called for temporary bans on all Muslims from entering the country and recently warned that Syrian refugees would cause “big problems in the future.” The Obama administration promised to take in 10,000 Syrians by Sept. 30 but has so far admitted about half that many.

Just across the border, however, the Canadian government can barely keep up with the demand to welcome them. Many volunteers felt called to action by the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose body washed up last fall on a Turkish beach. He had only a slight connection to Canada — his aunt lived near Vancouver — but his death caused recrimination so strong it helped elect an idealistic, refugee-friendly prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

The Toronto Star greeted the first planeload by splashing “Welcome to Canada” in English and Arabic across its front page. Eager sponsors toured local Middle Eastern supermarkets to learn what to buy and cook and used a toll-free hotline for instant Arabic translation. Impatient would-be sponsors — “an angry mob of do-gooders,” The Star called them — have been seeking more families. The new government committed to taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees and then raised the total by tens of thousands.

“I can’t provide refugees fast enough for all the Canadians who want to sponsor them,” John McCallum, the country’s immigration minister, said in an interview.

In the ideal version of private sponsorship, the groups become concierges and surrogate family members who help integrate the outsiders, called “New Canadians.” The hope is that the Syrians will form bonds with those unlike them, from openly gay sponsors to business owners who will help them find jobs to lifelong residents who will take them skating and canoeing. Ms. McLorg’s group of neighbors and friends includes doctors, economists, a lawyer, an artist, teachers and a bookkeeper.

Advocates for sponsorship believe that private citizens can achieve more than the government alone, raising the number of refugees admitted, guiding newcomers more effectively and potentially helping solve the puzzle of how best to resettle Muslims in Western countries. Some advocates even talk about extending the Canadian system across the globe. (Slightly fewer than half of the Syrian refugees who recently arrived in Canada have private sponsors, including some deemed particularly vulnerable who get additional public funds. The rest are resettled by the government.)

The fear is that all of this effort could end badly, with the Canadians looking naïve in more ways than one.

The Syrians are screened, and many sponsors and refugees take offense at the notion that they could be dangerous, saying they are often victims of terrorism themselves. But American officials point out that it is very difficult to track activity in the chaotic, multifaceted Syrian war. Several Islamic State members involved in the 2015 Paris attacks arrived on Europe’s shores from Syria posing as refugees.

Some of the refugees in Canada have middle- and upper-class backgrounds, including a businessman who started a Canadian version of his medical marketing company within a month after arriving. But many more face steep paths to integration, with no money of their own, uncertain employment prospects and huge cultural gaps. Some had never heard of Canada until shortly before coming here, and a significant number are illiterate in Arabic, which makes learning English — or reading a street sign or sending an email in any language — a titanic task. No one knows how refugees will navigate the currents of longing, trauma, dependence or resentment they may feel.

And volunteers cannot fully anticipate what they may confront — clashing expectations of whether Syrian women should work, tensions over how money is spent, families that are still dependent when the year is up, disagreements within sponsor groups.

Still, by mid-April, only eight weeks after their first encounter with Ms. McLorg, the Mohammads had a downtown apartment with a pristine kitchen, bikes for the children to zip around the courtyard, and a Canadian flag taped to their window. The sponsors knew the children’s shoe sizes; Abdullah and Eman still had keys to Ms. McLorg’s house. He studied the neighborhood’s supermarkets, and his wife took a counseling course so she could help others who had experienced dislocation and loss. When the male sponsors visited, she sat at the dining room table with them instead of eating in the kitchen — as she would have done back home — as long as her husband was around, too.
Photo
Ariaana Eva Soto-Mak, left, and Paige Escoffery-Stewart with two of the Mohammad children, Batoul, 9, and Bayan, 10. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

Mr. Mohammad searched for the right words to describe what the sponsors had done for him. “It’s like I’ve been on fire, and now I’m safe in the water,” he said.
Continue reading the main story
Related Coverage

TORONTO JOURNAL
In Toronto, a Neighborhood in Despair Transforms Into a Model of Inclusion FEB. 28, 2016
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Canada’s Warm Embrace of Refugees DEC. 11, 2015
Syrian Refugees Greeted by Justin Trudeau in Canada DEC. 11, 2015
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Why Is It So Difficult for Syrian Refugees to Get Into the U.S.? JAN. 20, 2016
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M.R. Khan July 1, 2016

Canada may not be perfect, but it is and has been a far more civilized country than the genocidal, warmongering, and slave owning USA. God...
MTNC July 1, 2016

I hope they are doing heavy duty screening of these (Muslim) immigrants, otherwise, I wonder if and when this open-door policy will come...
Savannah July 1, 2016

There is nothing stopping Americans from replicating this approach, except the will to make it happen.

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But he and other new arrivals were beginning to confront fresh questions: How were they supposed to work with these enthusiastic strangers? What would it mean to reinvent their lives under their watch?
Job Description: Be Ready for Anything

As sponsors sign the paperwork that commits them, no one really explains the potential range of their unofficial duties: showing a newcomer to spit in a dentist’s sink by miming the motions, rushing over late at night to calm a war-rattled family terrified by a garage door blown open by the wind, or using Google Translate to tell children who lived through war and exile that they are supposed to wear pink at school for anti-bullying day.

One April morning, Liz Stark, the grandmother in chief of another sponsor group, could not find Mouhamad Ahmed, the father in the family. She tried his phone and waited in vain outside their new apartment. This was a problem: Wissam, his wife, was in labor with their fifth child.

The pregnancy had been anxious because the couple had lost even more than their old life in Syria, where Mr. Ahmed used to farm wheat, cotton and cumin. They had spent years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, their three children never attending school because tuition was too expensive. Ms. Ahmed became pregnant there with their fourth child, but labor was troubled and the girl lived only six hours. They named her Amira, which means princess.

“I was thinking maybe the same thing will happen to me here as well,” Ms. Ahmed said.

As Ms. Stark hunted for Mr. Ahmed, Peggy Karas, another sponsor, stayed at the hospital massaging Ms. Ahmed’s hand during contractions. Like other such pairs, the two women had come together through opaque, bureaucratic machinery. A United Nations agency referred Ms. Ahmed and her family to Canadian officials who interviewed and screened them, then passed their file to a new nonprofit dedicated to matching Syrians with private sponsors, who had 24 hours to say yes or no based on the barest of details.

Ms. Stark and many of her co-sponsors were retired teachers, bossy and doting, and they had become hellbent on bringing this new child into the world safely. They had introduced Ms. Ahmed to the vitamins she would take, the machines that would monitor her, the hospital ward where she would deliver. The older women had repeated the doctors’ reassurances that all would go smoothly this time. They had helped her pick out tiny outfits and baby gear, but she was too superstitious to take them home, so they formed a small mountain in a sponsor’s living room.

Ms. Stark had recruited another newly arrived Syrian refugee to serve as an interpreter during labor. When she finally found Mr. Ahmed, who had been playing soccer, unaware of what was happening, she ushered him to the hospital room, where he took over holding his wife’s hand.

Suddenly a medical team rushed her away, saying the umbilical cord was in a dangerous position and she needed an emergency cesarean section. Ms. Ahmed, terrified, asked her husband to take care of their children if she did not survive. As Mr. Ahmed collapsed, sobbing, the sponsors asked his permission to pray.

When a nurse finally appeared to say the newborn was healthy, whisked off to intensive care for observation, Ms. Ahmed said she would not believe it until she held the baby, but Mr. Ahmed was jubilant. He called his father in Syria and let him choose a name: Julia, the family’s first Canadian citizen.
Photo
Mouhamad and Wissam Ahmed with their newborn daughter, Julia, and Liz Stark, who helped Ms. Ahmed through her pregnancy. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

Once the infant was home, she went from being the Ahmed family member the sponsors worried about most to the one they fretted about least. She would grow up hearing English, going to Canadian preschool and beyond. For her siblings — 10-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and an 8-year-old brother — the sponsors found a program for children who had never been to school. Their father, who had gone through only second grade, worked on learning enough English to find a job.

Ms. Ahmed worried about her children. “What if my kids don’t adjust, don’t settle in school very well?” she asked.

Everyone was on a deadline: After one year, the sponsors’ obligation ends, and the families are expected to become self-sufficient. Toronto rents are high, and the Ahmeds may not be able to stay in the relatively inexpensive apartment the sponsors found for them — the monthly rent is 1,400 Canadian dollars, or about $1,100 — even if Mr. Ahmed finds a job.

Ms. Stark was optimistic because she had lived through other versions of this story. Almost four decades ago, as a young geography teacher, she joined in the first mass wave of Canadian private sponsorship, in which citizens resettled tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Hmong. She helped sponsor three Vietnamese brothers and a Cambodian family, later attending their weddings, celebrating the births of their children and watching them find their places in Toronto, a city so diverse that half the population is foreign-born. Now some former Southeast Asian refugees are completing the cycle by sponsoring Syrians.

Like many sponsors, Ms. Stark believes that her country is especially suited to resettling refugees, with its vast size, strong social welfare system, and a government that emphasizes multiculturalism. Canada has not endured acts of terrorism like the Sept. 11 hijackings or the Paris attacks, or even an assault on the scale of the Orlando nightclub killings. And with only one land border, little illegal immigration and a tenth of the population of the United States, Canada is hungry for migrants. Officials around the country have clamored to bring Syrian refugees to their provinces.

“We are an accident of geography and history,” said Ratna Omidvar, who co-founded Lifeline Syria, a group that matches Syrians with sponsors.

Opposition to the influx has been relatively muted. The Conservative Party argues that the country is taking in more refugees than it can provide for, but supports accepting Syrians. Some Canadians complain that the country should take care of its own first, and new chapters of the Soldiers of Odin, a European anti-immigrant group, have cropped up in recent months. A few incidents targeting Syrians — graffiti reading “Syrians go home and die” at a Calgary school, a pepper spray attack at an event welcoming refugees — drew widespread condemnation.
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One May evening, three weeks after Julia’s birth, Ms. Stark stopped by the Ahmeds’ apartment with a plastic table for the balcony and cradled the baby. She had a new grandchild, but she had spent more time with Julia. The cookie-baking retirees were planning a party to welcome her the Syrian way, by feasting on a newly slaughtered lamb on her 40th day. Meanwhile, Mr. Ahmed had adopted a new custom: He sometimes brought his wife breakfast in bed and got the children ready. “When I came here, I saw men just doing everything that women do in Syria,” he said. “And I thought, yeah, of course, I will do the same.”

That night, Ms. Ahmed handed Ms. Stark a form from the twins’ school, unsure what it was about. “What? You’re going to the Blue Jays game?” she crowed to the boy, Majed, who grinned back under his dark curls. Then she turned to his parents. “This costs money, but your sponsors will pay for it because this is important.”

The Ahmeds were so frugal that their benefactors sometimes worried whether they were buying enough to eat. Ms. Ahmed said they wanted to purchase no more than the family needed. “The sponsors worked for the money they are giving us, and we’re not just going to throw it in the garbage,” she explained later.

Before leaving, Ms. Stark explained the proper Tylenol dosage for the couple’s daughter, Zahiya, who had a fever. She and her twin now spent their school bus rides exchanging language lessons with a pair of Chinese brothers, pointing to objects and naming them. One day when their parents tried to bring them home after a dentist appointment, the Syrian children refused, insisting on returning to school for the time remaining.

English words were starting to emerge from the older children’s mouths, but the sponsors and the adult refugees could barely understand one another without help, often relying on mimed gestures or balky translation apps. Even when the groups use interpreters, they often get stuck in roundelays of Canadian and Syrian courtesy, so reluctant to impose that they do not say what they mean. Ms. Ahmed, who had a first-grade education and was not attending English classes because she was home with a newborn, said that not being able to communicate was painful.
Continue reading the main story
Photo
Sawsan and Muaz Ballani, standing at center, with their Canadian sponsors. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

“Sometimes I feel like I am losing my mind,” she said, because she felt so close to the sponsors but could not even tell them little things about the baby.

Still, some groups faced greater challenges. Some Syrians have backed out before traveling to Canada, intimidated by the geographic and cultural leap. Sam Nammoura, a refugee advocate in Calgary, said he was tracking dozens of cases in which Syrian-Canadians sponsored friends and relatives and then left them destitute. Other pairings have turned out to be mismatches of expectations; one formerly well-off Syrian family expressed disappointment that its apartment was a second-floor walk-up and lacked a washing machine. Others were shocked to discover that their sponsors were posting Facebook messages and blog entries about them that strangers could read.

Even when sponsors and refugees become enmeshed in one another’s lives, they do not fully know one another. Not every family is open about its history, and many sponsors would like to know the worst but do not want to ask. (The Ahmeds and the Mohammads asked not to be identified by their full surnames, and were reluctant to publicly share details of their experiences in Syria because they feared reprisals against relatives still there. Most of the refugees in this article left Syria around 2013, during fighting between the Assad regime and rebels.)

The sponsors do not share everything about themselves, either. Emma Waverman, the leader of another cluster, was telling her co-sponsors about the stirring bar mitzvah speech her son had written about the Syrians they were aiding when another woman stopped her.

“Do they know we’re Jewish?” she asked.
Nurturing Without Nagging

Few issues are as delicate as how hard the sponsors should push and when the refugees can say no. Should the Syrians live close to downtown sponsors or in outer-ring neighborhoods with more Middle Easterners — and is it right for sponsors to decide without consulting them? The Canadians raise tens of thousands of dollars for each newcomer family; who controls how it is spent?

Some worry that sponsors are overpowering the refugees with the force of their enthusiasm. Kamal Al-Solaylee, a journalism professor at Ryerson University who is originally from Yemen, said he had noticed a patronizing tone, as when some sponsors highlighted their volunteering on social media. “The white savior narrative comes into play,” he said.

When Muaz and Sawsan Ballani and their 2-year-old son arrived here in February, they seemed so disoriented and alone that their sponsors became especially eager to nurture them. Mr. Ballani, 26, had once worked in his father’s clothing store, which was run out of their home. Now he introduced himself to his sponsors by showing them a picture of his oldest brother: not a smiling snapshot, but an image of the young man lying dead back home, blood streaming from his body. (Mr. Ballani believed that his brother had been caught in fighting between the regime and the opposition, but in the chaos of the conflict, he said, he could not learn more.)

Sawsan wed Muaz when she was 16 in an arranged marriage, rushed because of bombings and failing electricity; a month later, they fled. Now 20, she had not seen her family since.

The couple had been languishing in Jordan, sleeping in a house crammed with too many people, not enough beds or blankets, and ants that crawled over their son, named Abdulrahman, after Mr. Ballani’s dead brother, and nicknamed Aboudi. One of Mr. Ballani’s brothers was still stuck in the house in Jordan, he said, and his brother’s widow was living in a park in Syria with her three children, foraging for food.
Photo
Ahmad Mohammad, a son of Abdullah and Eman Mohammad, with Mark Blumberg. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

“If we hadn’t come here, we would have died,” he said.

The family’s sponsors started as mostly strangers to one another — a few former colleagues, a friend of a friend. Helga Breier, a market research consultant and one of the organizers, was drawn into sponsorship last summer, when she felt haunted during her Mediterranean vacation by the suffering across the water.

The Ballanis became their galvanizing cause. Together they found a bright apartment near their homes and countered the bareness — the family had few belongings — with cheery posters and tags labeling everything in English: lamp, cupboard, wall, door. The couple spoke almost no English, so to teach Mr. Ballani to get where he needed to go, the sponsors helped him photograph the route. When Aboudi threw tantrums in day care, they sat with him so his mother could stay in language class. The couple cooked elaborate Middle Eastern thank-you meals for the sponsors and mostly welcomed their interventions. Mr. Ballani donned a Toronto Maple Leafs hat that he wore day after day, and his wife gamely hopped on a toboggan.

Sometimes the sponsors barely hid their views of how the Ballanis should adjust. At a spring potluck dinner, Ms. Ballani described how she had recently traveled by subway on her own, a trip she could not have imagined taking just a few weeks before. The sponsors around the table, firm feminists, asked what else she might like to do herself.

She turned to her husband. “I’m going to ask you an honest question,” she said. “Would you let me work here?” As they waited for the answer, the Canadian women held their breath.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t have let you work back” in Jordan, he said, adding that even women who behaved traditionally there were often harassed and that those who appeared too independent faced worse. Ms. Ballani pressed forward: She wanted to attend university and have a career of her own, she said, a daunting set of goals for a woman with only a seventh-grade education. The Canadians beamed; two high-fived each other.

At the same time, the sponsors worried that they were becoming helicopter parents, as Ms. Breier put it. When the Syrians skipped English lessons (Aboudi sometimes kept them awake at night) or missed an appointment for donated dental services (a misunderstanding), the sponsors agonized over what to say, debating on the messaging app Slack. Should they show up every morning at the Ballanis’ apartment to make sure they got to class? Aboudi did not nap regularly and seemed to consume a lot of sugar — he drank soda, sometimes for breakfast — so should they offer advice?

Mr. Nammoura, the refugee advocate in Calgary, said he saw a pattern among the cases. The Canadians, who feel responsible for the refugees’ success, want to give them as much help and direction as possible. But many Syrians, finally safe after years of war and flight, want to exhale before launching into language regimens and job searches, and sometimes feel that sponsors are meddling.

When the Ballani sponsors sought advice from an Arab community center caseworker and an older Syrian mother, they were told to be harsher — to threaten fines or loss of sponsorship if the couple did not accept their guidance. Instead, the sponsors tried to strike a balance, being insistent on issues like health and education but easing off in other areas.
Photo
Muaz Ballani, center, with two of his sponsors, David Dennis and David Dennis Jr., said, “If we hadn’t come here, we would have died.” Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

A few weeks before Ramadan, the Ballanis raised the prospect of missing school during the month of long fasts. “It’s really hard because we have to fast 16 or 18 hours,” Muaz Ballani told the sponsors.

Ms. Breier and her partners dismissed the idea, saying they feared that the couple would lose their slots if they missed too many classes. The Ballanis quickly relented. It was not clear how much freedom they felt to express disagreement to outsiders; they seemed reluctant to acknowledge anything but gratitude.

That morning, Ms. Ballani said she and her husband never had different opinions from the sponsors. “We’ve never felt like they were telling us what to do,” she added.

Another weekend, the extended group gathered for a picnic, the first birthday party anyone had thrown for Mr. Ballani. He was deeply moved by the gesture. “A human life has value here,” he had said in an interview. “You can feel it everywhere.”

But the conversation at the party turned to his relatives in Syria, and he seemed distant as the Canadians presented his cake. Like many of the newcomers, he regularly receives calls and texts from family members, some in harrowing straits, as news reports describe starvation back home and mass drownings in the Mediterranean.

“I am really thankful to them; I don’t want them to misunderstand,” he said later about the sponsors. “It’s like I’m two people at the same time, one happy and one unhappy,” because of his family’s continued suffering.

The sponsors had been working on that, too, helping match Mr. Ballani’s brother in Jordan with another Toronto sponsor group and laboring over the paperwork. By late spring they had news: His relatives could arrive by year’s end.

Mr. Ballani, overjoyed, started planning what he would show his relatives in the city that had taken him in. This time, he would be the guide.

“Now it’s my turn to help,” he said.
Navigating Their Own Way

Three months after the Mohammads’ awkward first meeting with Kerry McLorg and the other sponsors at the airport hotel, they had clicked into a productive rhythm, settling into Canada faster than anyone had expected.

They went on a picnic to Niagara Falls and danced around a maypole at a spring festival. The girls won student-of-the-month honors. Bayan, the eldest, who had whipped past the boys she raced on Jordanian streets, was now beating runners from schools across the city. When the sponsors came to give informal language lessons, Ahmad, the 4-year-old, liked to try new phrases in English, such as “Good job!”

Still, there was some culture shock. When Abdullah Mohammad took the children to a community pool, he encountered a woman in a string bikini. “I ran away,” he said later. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

Ms. McLorg, measured and methodical, had organized the sponsor group, but the most energetic member was an artist named Susan Stewart, with a seemingly endless list of activities for the family and long email exchanges with the children’s teachers. During her turn to give English lessons, she brought flashcards down to the courtyard, telling the children to alternate between loops on their bicycles and new words. She was sweetly relentless, which was partly why the family had made so much progress, the other sponsors said.

When Mr. Mohammad voiced interest in working, Ms. Stewart became consumed with helping him find a job. Of all the tests for the family — and, by extension, the sponsors — this was perhaps the most crucial. So Ms. Stewart found an Arabic-speaking settlement counselor to advise Mr. Mohammad and drove him to a job fair for refugees, where they struck up a conversation with a Syrian supermarket owner. After he invited Mr. Mohammad for an interview, Ms. Stewart fashioned a résumé from a questionnaire she had helped him fill out.
Photo
Kerry McLorg with the Mohammad family’s older son, Mohammad. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

“I am keen to learn all aspects of the trade from stocking and organizing shelves to marketing strategies and Canadian shopping habits,” she wrote. Describing his work experience — doing odd jobs during his three years in Jordan — she wrote, “As a refugee I had to be resourceful and find work wherever I could.” Even though the interview would be in Arabic, she drilled him in English phrases like “I can stock shelves.”

“Ten more times!” she told him as they drove to the interview.

When he was offered the part-time position, the sponsors were thrilled. But a few days later, he called the Canadians to say he would turn it down. He struggled with taking money from the sponsors — back home, others had come to his family for help, and it was “really hard to be on the receiving end,” he said. But he wanted to consider options, such as becoming a mechanic. In Syria or Jordan, he had never had freedom to choose his work. “It’s always what you have to do to earn a living rather than what you really want to do,” he said later.

And he did not want to take a job until he improved his English, he said, because he did not want any more favors or charity. At the supermarket, unable to answer basic questions from customers, “I would be a burden to my employer,” he added. He had been annoyed at Ms. Stewart for pressing so hard, he said later, but mostly he was embarrassed to pass on the job after she had done so much.
ORONTO — One frigid day in February, Kerry McLorg drove to an airport hotel here to pick up a family of Syrian refugees. She was cautious by nature, with a job poring over insurance data, but she had never even spoken to the people who were about to move into her basement.

“I don’t know if they even know we exist,” she said.

At the hotel, Abdullah Mohammad’s room phone rang, and an interpreter told him to go downstairs. His children’s only belongings were in pink plastic bags, and the family’s documents lay in a white paper bag printed with a Canadian flag. His sponsors had come, he was told. He had no idea what that meant.
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Across Canada, ordinary citizens, distressed by news reports of drowning children and the shunning of desperate migrants, are intervening in one of the world’s most pressing problems. Their country allows them a rare power and responsibility: They can band together in small groups and personally resettle — essentially adopt — a refugee family. In Toronto alone, hockey moms, dog-walking friends, book club members, poker buddies and lawyers have formed circles to take in Syrian families. The Canadian government says sponsors officially number in the thousands, but the groups have many more extended members.

When Ms. McLorg walked into the hotel lobby to meet Mr. Mohammad and his wife, Eman, she had a letter to explain how sponsorship worked: For one year, Ms. McLorg and her group would provide financial and practical support, from subsidizing food and rent to supplying clothes to helping them learn English and find work. She and her partners had already raised more than 40,000 Canadian dollars (about $30,700), selected an apartment, talked to the local school and found a nearby mosque.

Ms. McLorg, the mother of two teenagers, made her way through the crowded lobby, a kind of purgatory for newly arrived Syrians. Another member of the group clutched a welcome sign she had written in Arabic but then realized she could not tell if the words faced up or down. When the Mohammads appeared, Ms. McLorg asked their permission to shake hands and took in the people standing before her, no longer just names on a form. Mr. Mohammad looked older than his 35 years. His wife was unreadable, wearing a flowing niqab that obscured her face except for a narrow slot for her eyes. Their four children, all under 10, wore donated parkas with the tags still on.
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Susan Stewart, an artist, is a sponsor of Eman Mohammad and her family. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

For the Mohammads, who had been in Canada less than 48 hours, the signals were even harder to read. In Syria, Abdullah had worked in his family’s grocery stores and Eman had been a nurse, but after three years of barely hanging on in Jordan, they were not used to being wanted or welcomed. “You mean we’re leaving the hotel?” Abdullah asked. To himself, he was wondering, “What do these people want in return?”

Much of the world is reacting to the refugee crisis — 21 million displaced from their countries, nearly five million of them Syrian — with hesitation or hostility. Greece shipped desperate migrants back to Turkey; Denmark confiscated their valuables; and even Germany, which has accepted more than half a million refugees, is struggling with growing resistance to them. Broader anxiety about immigration and borders helped motivate Britons to take the extraordinary step last week of voting to leave the European Union.

In the United States, even before the Orlando massacre spawned new dread about “lone wolf” terrorism, a majority of American governors said they wanted to block Syrian refugees because some could be dangerous. Donald J. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, has called for temporary bans on all Muslims from entering the country and recently warned that Syrian refugees would cause “big problems in the future.” The Obama administration promised to take in 10,000 Syrians by Sept. 30 but has so far admitted about half that many.

Just across the border, however, the Canadian government can barely keep up with the demand to welcome them. Many volunteers felt called to action by the photograph of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian toddler whose body washed up last fall on a Turkish beach. He had only a slight connection to Canada — his aunt lived near Vancouver — but his death caused recrimination so strong it helped elect an idealistic, refugee-friendly prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

The Toronto Star greeted the first planeload by splashing “Welcome to Canada” in English and Arabic across its front page. Eager sponsors toured local Middle Eastern supermarkets to learn what to buy and cook and used a toll-free hotline for instant Arabic translation. Impatient would-be sponsors — “an angry mob of do-gooders,” The Star called them — have been seeking more families. The new government committed to taking in 25,000 Syrian refugees and then raised the total by tens of thousands.

“I can’t provide refugees fast enough for all the Canadians who want to sponsor them,” John McCallum, the country’s immigration minister, said in an interview.

In the ideal version of private sponsorship, the groups become concierges and surrogate family members who help integrate the outsiders, called “New Canadians.” The hope is that the Syrians will form bonds with those unlike them, from openly gay sponsors to business owners who will help them find jobs to lifelong residents who will take them skating and canoeing. Ms. McLorg’s group of neighbors and friends includes doctors, economists, a lawyer, an artist, teachers and a bookkeeper.

Advocates for sponsorship believe that private citizens can achieve more than the government alone, raising the number of refugees admitted, guiding newcomers more effectively and potentially helping solve the puzzle of how best to resettle Muslims in Western countries. Some advocates even talk about extending the Canadian system across the globe. (Slightly fewer than half of the Syrian refugees who recently arrived in Canada have private sponsors, including some deemed particularly vulnerable who get additional public funds. The rest are resettled by the government.)

The fear is that all of this effort could end badly, with the Canadians looking naïve in more ways than one.

The Syrians are screened, and many sponsors and refugees take offense at the notion that they could be dangerous, saying they are often victims of terrorism themselves. But American officials point out that it is very difficult to track activity in the chaotic, multifaceted Syrian war. Several Islamic State members involved in the 2015 Paris attacks arrived on Europe’s shores from Syria posing as refugees.

Some of the refugees in Canada have middle- and upper-class backgrounds, including a businessman who started a Canadian version of his medical marketing company within a month after arriving. But many more face steep paths to integration, with no money of their own, uncertain employment prospects and huge cultural gaps. Some had never heard of Canada until shortly before coming here, and a significant number are illiterate in Arabic, which makes learning English — or reading a street sign or sending an email in any language — a titanic task. No one knows how refugees will navigate the currents of longing, trauma, dependence or resentment they may feel.

And volunteers cannot fully anticipate what they may confront — clashing expectations of whether Syrian women should work, tensions over how money is spent, families that are still dependent when the year is up, disagreements within sponsor groups.

Still, by mid-April, only eight weeks after their first encounter with Ms. McLorg, the Mohammads had a downtown apartment with a pristine kitchen, bikes for the children to zip around the courtyard, and a Canadian flag taped to their window. The sponsors knew the children’s shoe sizes; Abdullah and Eman still had keys to Ms. McLorg’s house. He studied the neighborhood’s supermarkets, and his wife took a counseling course so she could help others who had experienced dislocation and loss. When the male sponsors visited, she sat at the dining room table with them instead of eating in the kitchen — as she would have done back home — as long as her husband was around, too.
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Ariaana Eva Soto-Mak, left, and Paige Escoffery-Stewart with two of the Mohammad children, Batoul, 9, and Bayan, 10. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

Mr. Mohammad searched for the right words to describe what the sponsors had done for him. “It’s like I’ve been on fire, and now I’m safe in the water,” he said.
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M.R. Khan July 1, 2016

Canada may not be perfect, but it is and has been a far more civilized country than the genocidal, warmongering, and slave owning USA. God...
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I hope they are doing heavy duty screening of these (Muslim) immigrants, otherwise, I wonder if and when this open-door policy will come...
Savannah July 1, 2016

There is nothing stopping Americans from replicating this approach, except the will to make it happen.

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But he and other new arrivals were beginning to confront fresh questions: How were they supposed to work with these enthusiastic strangers? What would it mean to reinvent their lives under their watch?
Job Description: Be Ready for Anything

As sponsors sign the paperwork that commits them, no one really explains the potential range of their unofficial duties: showing a newcomer to spit in a dentist’s sink by miming the motions, rushing over late at night to calm a war-rattled family terrified by a garage door blown open by the wind, or using Google Translate to tell children who lived through war and exile that they are supposed to wear pink at school for anti-bullying day.

One April morning, Liz Stark, the grandmother in chief of another sponsor group, could not find Mouhamad Ahmed, the father in the family. She tried his phone and waited in vain outside their new apartment. This was a problem: Wissam, his wife, was in labor with their fifth child.

The pregnancy had been anxious because the couple had lost even more than their old life in Syria, where Mr. Ahmed used to farm wheat, cotton and cumin. They had spent years in a refugee camp in Lebanon, their three children never attending school because tuition was too expensive. Ms. Ahmed became pregnant there with their fourth child, but labor was troubled and the girl lived only six hours. They named her Amira, which means princess.

“I was thinking maybe the same thing will happen to me here as well,” Ms. Ahmed said.

As Ms. Stark hunted for Mr. Ahmed, Peggy Karas, another sponsor, stayed at the hospital massaging Ms. Ahmed’s hand during contractions. Like other such pairs, the two women had come together through opaque, bureaucratic machinery. A United Nations agency referred Ms. Ahmed and her family to Canadian officials who interviewed and screened them, then passed their file to a new nonprofit dedicated to matching Syrians with private sponsors, who had 24 hours to say yes or no based on the barest of details.

Ms. Stark and many of her co-sponsors were retired teachers, bossy and doting, and they had become hellbent on bringing this new child into the world safely. They had introduced Ms. Ahmed to the vitamins she would take, the machines that would monitor her, the hospital ward where she would deliver. The older women had repeated the doctors’ reassurances that all would go smoothly this time. They had helped her pick out tiny outfits and baby gear, but she was too superstitious to take them home, so they formed a small mountain in a sponsor’s living room.

Ms. Stark had recruited another newly arrived Syrian refugee to serve as an interpreter during labor. When she finally found Mr. Ahmed, who had been playing soccer, unaware of what was happening, she ushered him to the hospital room, where he took over holding his wife’s hand.

Suddenly a medical team rushed her away, saying the umbilical cord was in a dangerous position and she needed an emergency cesarean section. Ms. Ahmed, terrified, asked her husband to take care of their children if she did not survive. As Mr. Ahmed collapsed, sobbing, the sponsors asked his permission to pray.

When a nurse finally appeared to say the newborn was healthy, whisked off to intensive care for observation, Ms. Ahmed said she would not believe it until she held the baby, but Mr. Ahmed was jubilant. He called his father in Syria and let him choose a name: Julia, the family’s first Canadian citizen.
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Mouhamad and Wissam Ahmed with their newborn daughter, Julia, and Liz Stark, who helped Ms. Ahmed through her pregnancy. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

Once the infant was home, she went from being the Ahmed family member the sponsors worried about most to the one they fretted about least. She would grow up hearing English, going to Canadian preschool and beyond. For her siblings — 10-year-old twins, a boy and a girl, and an 8-year-old brother — the sponsors found a program for children who had never been to school. Their father, who had gone through only second grade, worked on learning enough English to find a job.

Ms. Ahmed worried about her children. “What if my kids don’t adjust, don’t settle in school very well?” she asked.

Everyone was on a deadline: After one year, the sponsors’ obligation ends, and the families are expected to become self-sufficient. Toronto rents are high, and the Ahmeds may not be able to stay in the relatively inexpensive apartment the sponsors found for them — the monthly rent is 1,400 Canadian dollars, or about $1,100 — even if Mr. Ahmed finds a job.

Ms. Stark was optimistic because she had lived through other versions of this story. Almost four decades ago, as a young geography teacher, she joined in the first mass wave of Canadian private sponsorship, in which citizens resettled tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians and Hmong. She helped sponsor three Vietnamese brothers and a Cambodian family, later attending their weddings, celebrating the births of their children and watching them find their places in Toronto, a city so diverse that half the population is foreign-born. Now some former Southeast Asian refugees are completing the cycle by sponsoring Syrians.

Like many sponsors, Ms. Stark believes that her country is especially suited to resettling refugees, with its vast size, strong social welfare system, and a government that emphasizes multiculturalism. Canada has not endured acts of terrorism like the Sept. 11 hijackings or the Paris attacks, or even an assault on the scale of the Orlando nightclub killings. And with only one land border, little illegal immigration and a tenth of the population of the United States, Canada is hungry for migrants. Officials around the country have clamored to bring Syrian refugees to their provinces.

“We are an accident of geography and history,” said Ratna Omidvar, who co-founded Lifeline Syria, a group that matches Syrians with sponsors.

Opposition to the influx has been relatively muted. The Conservative Party argues that the country is taking in more refugees than it can provide for, but supports accepting Syrians. Some Canadians complain that the country should take care of its own first, and new chapters of the Soldiers of Odin, a European anti-immigrant group, have cropped up in recent months. A few incidents targeting Syrians — graffiti reading “Syrians go home and die” at a Calgary school, a pepper spray attack at an event welcoming refugees — drew widespread condemnation.
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One May evening, three weeks after Julia’s birth, Ms. Stark stopped by the Ahmeds’ apartment with a plastic table for the balcony and cradled the baby. She had a new grandchild, but she had spent more time with Julia. The cookie-baking retirees were planning a party to welcome her the Syrian way, by feasting on a newly slaughtered lamb on her 40th day. Meanwhile, Mr. Ahmed had adopted a new custom: He sometimes brought his wife breakfast in bed and got the children ready. “When I came here, I saw men just doing everything that women do in Syria,” he said. “And I thought, yeah, of course, I will do the same.”

That night, Ms. Ahmed handed Ms. Stark a form from the twins’ school, unsure what it was about. “What? You’re going to the Blue Jays game?” she crowed to the boy, Majed, who grinned back under his dark curls. Then she turned to his parents. “This costs money, but your sponsors will pay for it because this is important.”

The Ahmeds were so frugal that their benefactors sometimes worried whether they were buying enough to eat. Ms. Ahmed said they wanted to purchase no more than the family needed. “The sponsors worked for the money they are giving us, and we’re not just going to throw it in the garbage,” she explained later.

Before leaving, Ms. Stark explained the proper Tylenol dosage for the couple’s daughter, Zahiya, who had a fever. She and her twin now spent their school bus rides exchanging language lessons with a pair of Chinese brothers, pointing to objects and naming them. One day when their parents tried to bring them home after a dentist appointment, the Syrian children refused, insisting on returning to school for the time remaining.

English words were starting to emerge from the older children’s mouths, but the sponsors and the adult refugees could barely understand one another without help, often relying on mimed gestures or balky translation apps. Even when the groups use interpreters, they often get stuck in roundelays of Canadian and Syrian courtesy, so reluctant to impose that they do not say what they mean. Ms. Ahmed, who had a first-grade education and was not attending English classes because she was home with a newborn, said that not being able to communicate was painful.
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Sawsan and Muaz Ballani, standing at center, with their Canadian sponsors. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

“Sometimes I feel like I am losing my mind,” she said, because she felt so close to the sponsors but could not even tell them little things about the baby.

Still, some groups faced greater challenges. Some Syrians have backed out before traveling to Canada, intimidated by the geographic and cultural leap. Sam Nammoura, a refugee advocate in Calgary, said he was tracking dozens of cases in which Syrian-Canadians sponsored friends and relatives and then left them destitute. Other pairings have turned out to be mismatches of expectations; one formerly well-off Syrian family expressed disappointment that its apartment was a second-floor walk-up and lacked a washing machine. Others were shocked to discover that their sponsors were posting Facebook messages and blog entries about them that strangers could read.

Even when sponsors and refugees become enmeshed in one another’s lives, they do not fully know one another. Not every family is open about its history, and many sponsors would like to know the worst but do not want to ask. (The Ahmeds and the Mohammads asked not to be identified by their full surnames, and were reluctant to publicly share details of their experiences in Syria because they feared reprisals against relatives still there. Most of the refugees in this article left Syria around 2013, during fighting between the Assad regime and rebels.)

The sponsors do not share everything about themselves, either. Emma Waverman, the leader of another cluster, was telling her co-sponsors about the stirring bar mitzvah speech her son had written about the Syrians they were aiding when another woman stopped her.

“Do they know we’re Jewish?” she asked.
Nurturing Without Nagging

Few issues are as delicate as how hard the sponsors should push and when the refugees can say no. Should the Syrians live close to downtown sponsors or in outer-ring neighborhoods with more Middle Easterners — and is it right for sponsors to decide without consulting them? The Canadians raise tens of thousands of dollars for each newcomer family; who controls how it is spent?

Some worry that sponsors are overpowering the refugees with the force of their enthusiasm. Kamal Al-Solaylee, a journalism professor at Ryerson University who is originally from Yemen, said he had noticed a patronizing tone, as when some sponsors highlighted their volunteering on social media. “The white savior narrative comes into play,” he said.

When Muaz and Sawsan Ballani and their 2-year-old son arrived here in February, they seemed so disoriented and alone that their sponsors became especially eager to nurture them. Mr. Ballani, 26, had once worked in his father’s clothing store, which was run out of their home. Now he introduced himself to his sponsors by showing them a picture of his oldest brother: not a smiling snapshot, but an image of the young man lying dead back home, blood streaming from his body. (Mr. Ballani believed that his brother had been caught in fighting between the regime and the opposition, but in the chaos of the conflict, he said, he could not learn more.)

Sawsan wed Muaz when she was 16 in an arranged marriage, rushed because of bombings and failing electricity; a month later, they fled. Now 20, she had not seen her family since.

The couple had been languishing in Jordan, sleeping in a house crammed with too many people, not enough beds or blankets, and ants that crawled over their son, named Abdulrahman, after Mr. Ballani’s dead brother, and nicknamed Aboudi. One of Mr. Ballani’s brothers was still stuck in the house in Jordan, he said, and his brother’s widow was living in a park in Syria with her three children, foraging for food.
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Ahmad Mohammad, a son of Abdullah and Eman Mohammad, with Mark Blumberg. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

“If we hadn’t come here, we would have died,” he said.

The family’s sponsors started as mostly strangers to one another — a few former colleagues, a friend of a friend. Helga Breier, a market research consultant and one of the organizers, was drawn into sponsorship last summer, when she felt haunted during her Mediterranean vacation by the suffering across the water.

The Ballanis became their galvanizing cause. Together they found a bright apartment near their homes and countered the bareness — the family had few belongings — with cheery posters and tags labeling everything in English: lamp, cupboard, wall, door. The couple spoke almost no English, so to teach Mr. Ballani to get where he needed to go, the sponsors helped him photograph the route. When Aboudi threw tantrums in day care, they sat with him so his mother could stay in language class. The couple cooked elaborate Middle Eastern thank-you meals for the sponsors and mostly welcomed their interventions. Mr. Ballani donned a Toronto Maple Leafs hat that he wore day after day, and his wife gamely hopped on a toboggan.

Sometimes the sponsors barely hid their views of how the Ballanis should adjust. At a spring potluck dinner, Ms. Ballani described how she had recently traveled by subway on her own, a trip she could not have imagined taking just a few weeks before. The sponsors around the table, firm feminists, asked what else she might like to do herself.

She turned to her husband. “I’m going to ask you an honest question,” she said. “Would you let me work here?” As they waited for the answer, the Canadian women held their breath.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t have let you work back” in Jordan, he said, adding that even women who behaved traditionally there were often harassed and that those who appeared too independent faced worse. Ms. Ballani pressed forward: She wanted to attend university and have a career of her own, she said, a daunting set of goals for a woman with only a seventh-grade education. The Canadians beamed; two high-fived each other.

At the same time, the sponsors worried that they were becoming helicopter parents, as Ms. Breier put it. When the Syrians skipped English lessons (Aboudi sometimes kept them awake at night) or missed an appointment for donated dental services (a misunderstanding), the sponsors agonized over what to say, debating on the messaging app Slack. Should they show up every morning at the Ballanis’ apartment to make sure they got to class? Aboudi did not nap regularly and seemed to consume a lot of sugar — he drank soda, sometimes for breakfast — so should they offer advice?

Mr. Nammoura, the refugee advocate in Calgary, said he saw a pattern among the cases. The Canadians, who feel responsible for the refugees’ success, want to give them as much help and direction as possible. But many Syrians, finally safe after years of war and flight, want to exhale before launching into language regimens and job searches, and sometimes feel that sponsors are meddling.

When the Ballani sponsors sought advice from an Arab community center caseworker and an older Syrian mother, they were told to be harsher — to threaten fines or loss of sponsorship if the couple did not accept their guidance. Instead, the sponsors tried to strike a balance, being insistent on issues like health and education but easing off in other areas.
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Muaz Ballani, center, with two of his sponsors, David Dennis and David Dennis Jr., said, “If we hadn’t come here, we would have died.” Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

A few weeks before Ramadan, the Ballanis raised the prospect of missing school during the month of long fasts. “It’s really hard because we have to fast 16 or 18 hours,” Muaz Ballani told the sponsors.

Ms. Breier and her partners dismissed the idea, saying they feared that the couple would lose their slots if they missed too many classes. The Ballanis quickly relented. It was not clear how much freedom they felt to express disagreement to outsiders; they seemed reluctant to acknowledge anything but gratitude.

That morning, Ms. Ballani said she and her husband never had different opinions from the sponsors. “We’ve never felt like they were telling us what to do,” she added.

Another weekend, the extended group gathered for a picnic, the first birthday party anyone had thrown for Mr. Ballani. He was deeply moved by the gesture. “A human life has value here,” he had said in an interview. “You can feel it everywhere.”

But the conversation at the party turned to his relatives in Syria, and he seemed distant as the Canadians presented his cake. Like many of the newcomers, he regularly receives calls and texts from family members, some in harrowing straits, as news reports describe starvation back home and mass drownings in the Mediterranean.

“I am really thankful to them; I don’t want them to misunderstand,” he said later about the sponsors. “It’s like I’m two people at the same time, one happy and one unhappy,” because of his family’s continued suffering.

The sponsors had been working on that, too, helping match Mr. Ballani’s brother in Jordan with another Toronto sponsor group and laboring over the paperwork. By late spring they had news: His relatives could arrive by year’s end.

Mr. Ballani, overjoyed, started planning what he would show his relatives in the city that had taken him in. This time, he would be the guide.

“Now it’s my turn to help,” he said.
Navigating Their Own Way

Three months after the Mohammads’ awkward first meeting with Kerry McLorg and the other sponsors at the airport hotel, they had clicked into a productive rhythm, settling into Canada faster than anyone had expected.

They went on a picnic to Niagara Falls and danced around a maypole at a spring festival. The girls won student-of-the-month honors. Bayan, the eldest, who had whipped past the boys she raced on Jordanian streets, was now beating runners from schools across the city. When the sponsors came to give informal language lessons, Ahmad, the 4-year-old, liked to try new phrases in English, such as “Good job!”

Still, there was some culture shock. When Abdullah Mohammad took the children to a community pool, he encountered a woman in a string bikini. “I ran away,” he said later. “I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

Ms. McLorg, measured and methodical, had organized the sponsor group, but the most energetic member was an artist named Susan Stewart, with a seemingly endless list of activities for the family and long email exchanges with the children’s teachers. During her turn to give English lessons, she brought flashcards down to the courtyard, telling the children to alternate between loops on their bicycles and new words. She was sweetly relentless, which was partly why the family had made so much progress, the other sponsors said.

When Mr. Mohammad voiced interest in working, Ms. Stewart became consumed with helping him find a job. Of all the tests for the family — and, by extension, the sponsors — this was perhaps the most crucial. So Ms. Stewart found an Arabic-speaking settlement counselor to advise Mr. Mohammad and drove him to a job fair for refugees, where they struck up a conversation with a Syrian supermarket owner. After he invited Mr. Mohammad for an interview, Ms. Stewart fashioned a résumé from a questionnaire she had helped him fill out.
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Kerry McLorg with the Mohammad family’s older son, Mohammad. Credit Damon Winter/The New York Times

“I am keen to learn all aspects of the trade from stocking and organizing shelves to marketing strategies and Canadian shopping habits,” she wrote. Describing his work experience — doing odd jobs during his three years in Jordan — she wrote, “As a refugee I had to be resourceful and find work wherever I could.” Even though the interview would be in Arabic, she drilled him in English phrases like “I can stock shelves.”

“Ten more times!” she told him as they drove to the interview.

When he was offered the part-time position, the sponsors were thrilled. But a few days later, he called the Canadians to say he would turn it down. He struggled with taking money from the sponsors — back home, others had come to his family for help, and it was “really hard to be on the receiving end,” he said. But he wanted to consider options, such as becoming a mechanic. In Syria or Jordan, he had never had freedom to choose his work. “It’s always what you have to do to earn a living rather than what you really want to do,” he said later.

And he did not want to take a job until he improved his English, he said, because he did not want any more favors or charity. At the supermarket, unable to answer basic questions from customers, “I would be a burden to my employer,” he added. He had been annoyed at Ms. Stewart for pressing so hard, he said later, but mostly he was embarrassed to pass on the job after she had done so much.
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It is interesting to read these many comments.
I have been away for a long time.
I chose to focus my life on living life.
I have seen much.
My heart is full. Is your Heart Full?
I bless you all with Love.

Fairy

The Gathering Spot is a PEERS empowerment website
"Dedicated to the greatest good of all who share our beautiful world"