Walking together: Healing and hope for Colombian refugees

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FOREWORD
Ed Wiebe, MCC Canada Refugee Program Director
Over the past decade or more MCC, through it’s various parts and partners, has been successful in the
area of refugee protection and resettlement in the Colombian context. As an organization, MCC is now
planning programs more strategically, intersecting and interacting with each other. Our collective work is
evermore in partnership and community.
This resource, which is specifically focused to help groups in Canada better serve refugee newcomers,
allowing newcomers to be better understood and welcomed in their newly adopted homeland of
Canada, is a good example of how the many strengths inherent in the support communities who
accompany displaced Colombians can work together toward more successful outcomes for those who
have been displaced.
It starts with a local church in Colombia such as Teusaquillo Mennonite and the programs that other
local churches and organization there support and run, including entities such as the Justice and Peace
Committee and Justapaz and the wider peace, justice and rights organizations that MCC Colombia works
with. It continues with the MCC Canada Refugee Program which links the local groups in Colombia to
the sponsoring churches in Canada through the local Provincial MCC offices. Networked across Colombia
and Canada, these church organizations and individuals all work together to protect those displaced by
the on-going armed conflict in Colombia.
Every year the Justice and Peace Committee in Bogota works with dozens of seriously affected displaced
families, providing safety and serving their immediate needs. If it is impossible to keep them safe, the
families are documented for interviews with the Canadian embassy through the sponsorship mechanism
of MCC Canada and its constituent churches, who actually sign the papers. So the linkage extends
from local church in Colombia, through various organizational links, through the government hoops,
with the final link being a local church in Canada. Every year about a dozen families arrive to safety in
Canada through this avenue, while a larger number are afforded appropriate local solutions in Colombia,
without needing to leave the country. The following pages of this resource are rich with the experience
all parties have gleaned along the way and are intended to aid new groups who are embarking on
sponsorship. This entails signing on as the primary support group for a particular newcomer family from
Colombia. While this manual is country-specific, there is also much that can be learned and used in the
broader context of trauma healing borne out of conflict situations. I congratulate all who have contributed
time, energy and expertise to this project, your efforts together enrich and extend what might have been
done individually.