This film is a documentary of the lives of two refugee teenagers that sought and received asylum in Canada, and the struggle they go through during this whole process. Watching this movie invoked a lot of emotions for me and it starts with sympathy for Joyce and Sallieu. Sympathy based on the fact that I experienced a lot of the hardships they did growing up. For context I grew up in Toronto so all the images in the film I am familiar with from the opening scene in the airport to the highway and CN tower shot. I grew up with my Mom and 4 brothers and sisters in the north end of Toronto about 7 minutes from the airport and the neighborhood I grew up in had a lot of poverty. Growing up we very rarely went without necessities till my mom lost her job, she was laid of from the law firm she worked at for as long as I could remember and that’s when I was introduced to our broken system. I was in gr 7 when things started to go south for us my mom tried her best to find other jobs that would allow her to support us but there was very little she could find. We had to cut back a lot even on the basic necessities our diet consisted of a cheese sandwich for breakfast a cheese sandwich for lunch and spaghetti for dinner and if you were still hungry you had to go to sleep because there was nothing else to eat. The worst year for us was when I was gr 9, that year we were still living in a house and my mom was out of a job and collecting welfare the problem was that she could not afford to pay for the heat in the house with the amount of money she was being given so she had to make a choice. We ended up having to all sleep in the same room that winter to stay warm with this little electric heater in the room. Every morning she would wake up put pots of water on the stove to boil so we could take warm baths and get ready for school we would eat our cheese sandwiches and I would very rarely see my mom eat anything because it was more important for her to make sure we were fed than that she was fed.
This story has a lot more to it that I wont get into right now but the point I am trying to make is this and I am sorry if this is selfish, how are we as a country supposed to help refugees if we can not even take care of our own citizens. My mom has lived in Canada since she was 7 has full citizenship went to York University, repaid her student loans, pays her taxes worked in a hospital for over 10 years than worked in a law firm for another 7, and when it cam time for the government services that she had been paying into to help her support her and her family we ended up sleeping in the same room and she ended up hungry. There are countless other Canadians who are suffering the same thing and much worse. The homelessness in our province is growing as well as the unemployment rate. I don’t believe it is possible for us to help refugees the way we want to because we have failed so miserably and helping our own citizens. The main problem I have about speaking about this subject is that I have no solution. I am a very solution oriented person and I hate to be negative but watching this film and watching the news and reading about the public outcry about donating to help refugees from this place and the next when those refugees that we are all worried about granting asylum we forget about when they are here and end up falling victim to the system. We as Canadians need to do a better job of fixing our country before we try to fix the world and that is the only way real change can happen, yes there will never be zero homeless people but that’s what we should strive for. We should put more time and effort into taking care of government housing and making entry-level jobs more accessible. Changing laws about making food available for people that need it and making those centers priorities with not just food from donations but the amount of restaurants that have food near expiration or that they cant re serve the next day can be donated for hungry people to eat but I am pretty sure there are laws against that. The bottom line is that to often as a society we are worried about what is happening in other places of the world and how we can help someone else when we have so many people that we see on a daily basis that we just walk by and don’t acknowledge that are just as much in need as the people we see on TV and read about online, they just are not getting the publicity they deserve.
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