By Angela Brown

Local parish bringing Syrian family to North Battleford

Jun 13, 2017 | 1:55 PM

North Battleford will be welcoming a new Syrian family next month with a sponsorship from St. Joseph Calasanctius Catholic Parish.

Ken Loehndorf and his wife Yvonne are co-chairs on the refugee sponsorship committee for the church, within the parish’s social justice committee, to prepare for the new settlers.

“We’ve been really happy to be involved in this project,” Ken Loehndorf said.  

 The family of six is expected to arrive in the first week of July.

 “We’re in the process of finalizing housing for them,” Loehndorf said. “It’s not been confirmed but we have a tentative arrangement.” 

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 The family made up of the parents and their four children, ranging in age from six to 15, are currently living in a refugee camp in Jordan after leaving Syria about three years ago.

The parish committee is currently planning a welcoming event for the family.

“We’ve just found out last week they are coming so we have our committees in place and will be making plans for that within the next month prior to them coming. We’ll be picking them up at the Saskatoon Airport,” said Loehndorf.

The parents both know some English so that should make it a little easier for them to adapt to their new home, Loehndorf said. They both plan to look for work after they arrive.

Loehndorf said the father has a range of work experience, which will be an asset when he is seeking employment.

The committee has been working on the project since around August of last year to bring the family here once they were selected.

“Our committee and our whole parish are really excited about this,” Loehndorf said. “We’ve been anxious to get them here as soon as possible. We did get confirmation a little earlier than we thought and we are really pleased with that.”

“We have been communicating with them via email, FaceTime and Facebook for the past year, but we’re really anxious to meet them in person.”   

The church refugee committee will help the family settle in and get the children registered in school for next fall.

Fundraising efforts

The parishioners and the parish have together raised close to $40,000 for the family to cover their first year of living expenses in N.B.

“Fortunately, we have the support of our parish with the strong support from our entire parish. We have actually pretty much reached our goal in fundraising and we are in a position to be able to provide support to the family for about a year,” Loehndorf said. “We’ve been fundraising for the last year. Basically, it’s just personal donations from the people within our parish. The parish has provided some funds as well for support.”

Organizers now hope to continue to raise more money to reach about $50,000 also to help cover the family’s traveling costs to come to Canada.  

The committee co-chair said if anyone from the community wishes to make a donation to help the family they can contact the parish directly.

Loehndorf said helping bring the refugee family to Canada is part of the parish’s social justice committee’s mandate.

“To me, it’s very clear this is part of our mandate and our Catholic social teachings, to support where we can,” he said. “We are really excited about this opportunity because obviously these folks have had it very difficult for the last number of years. We’ll be looking forward to trying to get them a much more stable life here in Canada and Saskatchewan.”

angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsNOW