Layla Rahmeh came to Canada almost four years ago with her daughter.
First, she was a visitor, expecting to return to her home in Syria just weeks later, but as an activisit and mother, she soon realized she couldn’t return and sought asylum in Saint John.
“If I knew at the moment that I left that I’m not coming back,” she says. “I would have maybe done something different, but I didn’t think.”
Speaking to a room full of university students on Thursday, Rahmeh shared her story and her thoughts on what’s been happening in wartorn Syria.
“It’s just like, it’s torturing,” she adds. “It’s a different type of torture. It feels like my heart is breaking at every moment.”
Rahmeh has been helping with the refugee effort in New Brunswick.
She’s still working on getting her permanent residency and says she would like to, someday, return to Syria, but likely just to visit.
“I don’t know if I would be able to go back and live here, because I don’t know what it looks like now.”
She says she feels helpless.
But students in the classroom said Rahmeh helped them better understand the reality of what that region is going through.
“We are so privileged to live in a society where the only way to see that is through a screen,” says university student Lucas Gutierrez-Robert. “It makes it hard for us to actually empathize on such a profound level when we’re still worried about things like, my hair, or finals.”
Rahmeh says what Syrian refugees need once they’re in Canada is to feel welcomed.
“They need to feel that they are safe,” she says. “In a safe place and that people are accepting them.”
She says the families she’s spoken with have felt that acceptance.
With files from CTV Atlantic’s Laura Brown.
