Community support helps refugee family find home amidst Canada’s housing crisis
Alyanna Denise Chua, Broadview
Ana P* was desperate. She was sexually violated by her employer’s brother, who eventually became the father of her child. He didn’t want their son to be born—she was a low-income Black woman in Southern Africa, he was a wealthy white businessman—so he threatened to kill both of them.
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In 2019, a local church helped Ana and her son—then seven years old— fly to Canada. But when they got to Toronto, Ana and her son became two of the thousands of refugees who struggled to find beds in the city’s shelter system. Demand for space only grew from there.
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Tsering Lhamo, the associate director of settlement at FCJ Refugee Centre, said her organization sees 75 to 90 refugee claimants seeking shelter on intake days, but their four transition houses are always full. “Having a waiting list is just not possible anymore,” she said. “We even started letting people stay in the living rooms in emergency cases.”
Ana and her son got lucky. When they looked for beds at FCJ Refugee Centre in 2019, Lhamo was able to give them a bedroom in one of the centre’s transition houses for women and children
Two months later, Lhamo found a one-year transition house for them: in the basement of Alejandro Paz’s house.
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