Mohamad Rabee Tabanjat has recently obtained his driver’s license, giving his family more independence. With him are his daughter Fatima and son Samer. (Richard McGuire photo)
The Syrian refugee family, who came to Osoyoos in January with community sponsorship, will be saying goodbye early in the new year.
Mohamad Rabee Tabanjat has confirmed that his family hopes to move to Surrey, where there is a larger Syrian immigrant community and where there is a better chance of him finding work in his trade as a stone carver.
The Tabanjat Karbouj family arrived in Penticton 11 months ago on Jan. 15 speaking almost no English.
Since then, Mohamad and his wife Aya Khantoumani have been working intensively with teachers and tutors to become proficient in the language.
And their two children, daughter Fatima and son Samer, have been attending Osoyoos Elementary School where they’ve picked up English while playing with other students.
Last Friday, Mohamad spoke English without any interpretation during a 20-minute, one-to-one interview with the Osoyoos Times.
He recently obtained his driver’s license after his second road test and managed to drive to Surrey with his family to look into opportunities. A couple times when he got lost, he was able to ask for directions and understand the answer.
For former Osoyoos town councillor Michael Ryan and his wife Vera, who spearheaded the community-based effort to bring the family to Osoyoos and help them adapt, the news is bittersweet.
It’s not unlike the feeling parents have when after raising children, they set off to be independent.
Initially they worried about whether Surrey is the right place to go, whether winter was the right time to move and what opportunities, housing and support services the family would find.
“You have mixed feelings,” admitted Vera. “You know it’s important for them to stand on their own two feet, but you don’t want them to run into problems. So, it is like a child leaving the nest.”
Michael admitted his initial response was emotional as he worried about practicalities the family would face relocating and whether it would be better for the children to finish their school year here.
“We very quickly came around,” he said, adding that he discussed the move with a representative of their Catholic diocese who looks after the blended visa program.
“They said, you know this is a really big success story,” Michael recounts. “You’ve got them to the point where they feel they can go out on their own. We thought about that and said, you know he’s right.”
Mohamad brought in some income over the past year doing odd jobs and then found part-time work cleaning dishes at the Diamond Steakhouse on Main Street in Osoyoos.
But he yearns for a steady income using his skills with stonework – something he’s been unable to find in the South Okanagan.
On his trip to Surrey, he found an opportunity, but because the work shuts down in the winter months, they decided to delay the family’s move until spring.
But more than that, the family has found it difficult not to have others around from a similar background, despite forming friendships with newly arrived Syrian families in Oliver and Cawston.
Being devout Muslims has also been a challenge in Osoyoos where the nearest mosque is two hours away in Kelowna and finding Halal foods has usually meant a trip to Penticton.
Mohamad says he prays at home every day and has only been to the mosque in Kelowna once.
He also wants his children to be able to study in Arabic, learn their religion and be both Canadian and Syrian.
“I worry for my children maybe they forget reading and writing Arabic,” he said. “I’m not worried for English because my children learn English so fast.”
While he marvels at the plethora of restaurants offering foods of different nationalities in Canada, he said his family sticks with Arabic foods.
Vera and Michael admit that they didn’t fully understand the Muslim dietary restrictions when the family arrived. It’s not as simple as just avoiding pork.
Halal meats must be sourced, killed and processed according to strict criteria. Nor is eating of foods that might contain certain ingredients such as lard or gelatin permissible.
“There were some awkward incidents at first,” said Vera, adding that the language barrier made it hard for the family to ask what certain foods contained. “Aya would wonder what’s in it and at first she couldn’t ask, so she was afraid to have anything. It took us a while to figure all this out.”
The family hopes to be joined soon, perhaps in a couple months, by Mohamad’s mother and sister, who were recently interviewed by Canadian immigration officials in Lebanon.
But a bigger worry is Aya’s brother’s family, currently trapped in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo which is being continually bombed by the Syrian government and their Russian allies.
“It’s very, very bad,” said Mohamad, explaining that sometimes they’ve been able to communicate with the family by cellphone and internet, but other times all communication is broken and the family doesn’t even have water.
It was from Aleppo that the Tabanjat Karbouj family themselves fled, fearing sniper fire, after the city became engulfed in the civil war in the summer of 2012.
Mohamad said they constantly worry about Aya’s brother and his wife, boy and girl.
Despite the challenges of their first 10 months in Osoyoos, it is thanks to the generosity of people in this community that the family has achieved independence.
Vera points to the dedicated teachers and tutors who have helped the family not only to learn a new language, but also a new writing system.
Mohamad’s driving lessons and the donation of a car also were the result of local generosity. Other volunteers helped them find employment, or regularly took them shopping or on other errands before Mohamad could drive.
Mohamad said the family has made Canadian friends in their time here. And the children’s teachers have done much to help them communicate and fit in.
“Thank you so much for Osoyoos people,” he said.
Richard McGuire
Osoyoos Times
