Walking together: Healing and hope for Colombian refugees

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Many Colombian refugee families agreed that a strong sense of family unity is definitely an asset for
families in their process of adapting to and succeeding in their new life in Canada.
Remembering together: Some families choose to try to forget their past, while others find it helpful to
talk, as a family, about what they experienced:
“When people ask my children if Juan is their dad, they have to say he is their step dad. One day my daughter’s
professor asked her how her father died, and she couldn’t contain herself when she remembered - her teacher
said ‘it’s ok, it’s ok.’ The children have many memories, and me too. I don’t know if it’s good to remember
them or not....On several occasions I have remembered the past - speaking with my children sometimes we
make comparisons: ‘here it is like living in a paradise, here you sleep like a queen - in Colombia we all slept
together, I woke up all bruised from being kicked in the night; thinking about food - what a quantity we
have now and the hunger that we experienced before.’ In Colombia people didn’t want to rent to me because
I had so many children, while here the people don’t complain, the administrator says we are a nice family
and he likes us.” - Adriana
“There are moments when we think about our memories, but we always try not to remember them because
now we are in a new situation. We try not to talk about them with the children. But there are moments
when we think about how nice it would be to visit our land, but we know we can’t. My son said the other
day ‘how great it would be to go visit the farm,’ but we can’t do that. That is all part of our past now, it stays
behind. We are fighting to create something new here. We are located in the present.” - Nidia
The last quote perfectly illustrates a common yet unhealthy coping strategy - trying not to remember.
Avoiding remembering can actually exacerbate trauma cycles. The following section will go into more
details on how the church community can encourage the family to remember their past in ways that
promotes restoration and healing.
Support from sponsoring church: Colombian refugee families are aware of the impact that trauma and
witnessing the violence has had on them as a family. They yearn for and appreciate accompaniment from
the church to help them build strong and united families and overcome or avoid family breakdown:
“The church should be accessible for spiritual support. You go to the Sunday morning service but no one
asks you about what problems you have, you have to take the initiative to tell them. The church could
provide orientation for families. If you come from a country where violence is constantly present, daily,
then you come with that burden. There are people who carry that violence in their minds - they fight with
each other in their families. It seems like that kind of orientation - spiritual orientation, family counselling
- is missing. We have everything we need to eat, drink, dress and pay our rent thanks to the church. They
come to visit and bring us things, but they haven’t asked what is missing in the sense of these other kinds
of orientations. I’ve distanced myself a bit from the church because they didn’t offer me what I needed -
friendships, accompaniment, listening. I found company in other people. What I mean by orientations
is spaces where I could talk about my past, about difficult situations that I have lived, where I could get
counselling and advice about maintaining ourselves united and strong as a family in a new country and