Walking together: Healing and hope for Colombian refugees

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w a l k i n g t o g e t h e r 89 FAMILY STRENGTHENING Understanding that the refugee family you sponsor has experienced and will continue to experience major stress as a family unit is an important starting place for planning how to support and strengthen them as a family once they arrive to your community. Family struggles within the refugee family is an area where the church has the opportunity to play a critical role, offering counsel, guidance and encouragement to the family. As you think about this topic, it may be helpful to refer to the section Effects of Refugee Trauma on the Family. Some questions to guide you as you think about how you can support the family to stay strong. Some ideas: 1. Is there anyone in your church or community that specializes in family counselling? What about a counsellor that speaks their language and is culturally sensitive? Could you go to them if the family needed specialized guidance? Ask your local MCC Refugee Coordinator about possibilities for provincial funding for this kind of counselling in your area. 2. Who will take responsibility for talking openly to the family about their needs, challenges and struggles as a family and for connecting them to appropriate resources in the church and community? 3. What are some laws related to the family that the Colombian family might not know? How can you organize a time to talk to them about family-related laws in Canada? 4. What activities are there in your church for each of the refugee family’s members? Kid’s clubs or DVBS? Youth group? College and Careers group? Men’s groups? Women’s groups? How will you ensure that the members of the family are not only invited, but intentionally and genuinely included in these spaces? 5. What will you do to ensure that the family does not feel “all alone,” especially at first. How will you coordinate responsibilities for organizing social events or leisure outings with the family? 6. If there is evidence of domestic violence, how will you prepare to handle it while causing the least damage to the family at the same time? 1. Remember to check in with the family regularly during the year - not just at the beginning - regarding family struggles. Different issues will come up over the course of the year as the family adapts and as members take on new roles, meet new friends, and as children mature. 2. Talking about family issues doesn’t need to be awkward of difficult. Just as all the families in your church and community face challenges, so does the refugee family. When you talk to the refugee family about their challenges, remind them that they are
90 w a l k i n g t o g e t h e r normal challenges for refugee families to face, and that the church has resources to help or will help them find the resources they need in the community. 3. Mutual vulnerability is key to trust building. Sharing the struggles of Canadian families, perhaps even your own family, with the refugee family will normalize their experiences, equalize imbalances and allow the refugee family to take risks in sharing because they feel safe and know that you also have similar challenges at times. 4. Could you organize families from the committee or church community to take the refugee family on outings, aside from the “essential” outings for shopping, registering for documents or school etc? Find ways to ensure that they get out of their house and spend time with people other than themselves, especially at first, since it will take time for them to build their own social network. SERVING OTHERS - IDENTITY BUILDING & HEALING Many of the Colombian refugees interviewed for this guide mentioned how meaningful it would be to be involved in some kind of social service or voluntary activity. Service to others can play a role in helping refugees construct a new positive identity and self image as well as in their own trauma healing. Being needed by others helps reinforce their value as people and members of a community. This section is intended to help you brainstorm ways that your church could help connect members of the refugee families to areas of service or voluntary activities. It may be helpful to refer to the sections Identity Changes: Loss and Reconstruction and Reconnection as well as the section on helping others in Reconnection as you think about this topic. Some questions to get you started: 1. What areas of service or ministries does your church have? Which of these take volunteers? 2. Are there any volunteer activities that wouldn’t need a high level of English at first?
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Walking together: Healing and hope for Colombian refugees

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