Eritreans in Canada: The complicated joy of being together again

A year ago, Simret Tekele stood in front of the sliding glass doors at Toronto’s international airport and took a deep breath as she stepped into Canada – the final passage of an immigration journey that had begun in 2009, when she and her husband fled their native Eritrea.

This December, she stood on the other side of those doors holding her breath until a teenager in a black hoodie walked through. She grabbed the son she hadn’t touched since he was an infant – she’d left him in the care of her mother until she could get safely to Israel. But shunned in that country, parents and son were kept apart. They missed watching him grow into a toddler, a small child, and an awkward middle schooler. Now he’s in high school.

“It felt like a dream at the airport,” says Ms. Tekele. “I was trying to process my feelings. Is this real? Am I really seeing him? I had mixed feelings. I was very happy. And, when we came home, I was very, very sad, you know? He’s my son, but I didn’t raise him.”

The Christian Science Monitor first met the family – parents, and their two boys born in Israel – in Tel Aviv in 2021. Correspondent Dina Kraft joined them as they packed up their home and said goodbye to a nation that left asylum-seeking Africans like them in a vulnerable state of limbo without refugee status. Fortunate ones, like Ms. Tekele’s family, have been able to move to Canada thanks to the mobilization of the Jewish Canadian community here, which we featured in a cover story in January.

I first met the Orthodox Christian family at Hanukkah dinner in Toronto last year. At the time, Ms. Tekele was expecting her teenage son Yuel, raised by his grandmother and an aunt, to arrive within two weeks. Then that turned to two months, and the weeks ticked on. A year to the exact date after the rest of his family entered Canada, Yuel arrived, on Dec. 1.

He got to Canada just in time for the holidays, and the family has decorated the tidy, two-bedroom apartment that their sponsors helped them secure – as part of Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program – with an artificial tree decorated with a simple string of lights. 

The holidays are a time of year when most parents around the world wish their kids would just show some gratitude. But, Ms. Tekele wishes Yuel wouldn’t.

One week after his arrival, the busy working mother made her three boys a dish of rice and meat. She could tell Yuel didn’t like it because he was pushing it around on his plate. “The other kids say, ‘Oh, this is not good, we don’t like it!’ But he doesn’t tell me. I ask him, ‘I think you don’t like the food?’ And he said, ‘It’s OK.’ I said ‘No, if you don’t like it, you don’t like it. That’s OK. You can tell me,’” she says. “It looks small, but it’s big to me. It’s very big to me,” Ms. Tekele says.

“I want him to feel very open with me. The others shout, ask for whatever they want. I want him to be like them.”

“Abnormal” but “the same”

Immigration almost always entails heartbreak, leaving a homeland because of poverty or war, and most wrenching, sometimes separating young children from their families. From Afghan teens heading to Europe alone, to Central Americans leaving children behind as they head to the U.S., it’s the kind of separation that families in wealthy nations cannot begin to fathom.

At the airport, Ms. Tekele saw a family holding a sign reading, “Mom, we missed you.” She asked them how long it had been since they had last seen her. “A month, a month!” she says, bursting into laughter. “I told them I haven’t seen my son in 13 years.”

Because of their precarious immigration status, they couldn’t leave Israel or bring Yuel to them. Then his exit visa was delayed because of war in Ethiopia, where he had moved to await resettlement in Canada. “It’s abnormal. It’s abnormal but when I share with my community my story, it’s the same. Thousands and thousands of people are in the same situation.”

Family reunification can provoke complicated emotions. Yuel agrees to talk, with his mother translating, but he tells her not to exaggerate. He says he misses everything about Ethiopia. Even the pizza is better there, he says, making his mother laugh (which he does easily).

But when he leaves the table, she turns more serious. “It was my mom and my sister that showed him the way, taught him, I was not in this process. Now he’s a teenager. Now I’m just trying to understand what I have to say, what I don’t have to say. I’m very careful until I know him,” she says.

“On his side, he wants to understand who we are. He’s discovering.”

Her other two boys have adapted well to life in Canada, finding a place for themselves in their area school, at the local swimming pool, and on various soccer teams. The middle one, who was the big brother for the first 10 years of his life, grumbles about his older brother now being “the boss.” When pizza arrives, Yuel tells him to “be patient.” But they’ve accepted a new brother who now shares a room with them.

As we talk, Ms. Tekele brews strong Eritrean coffee on a little stove set up in the middle of their living room, the three boys sprawled out after school in front of the television.

“When I see them all sitting together, I feel that the family’s whole now,” she says. They are watching English Premier League soccer and then start to argue – in Tigrinya and some Hebrew. Many parents might be annoyed to have their children fighting in front of a guest.

Ms. Tekele simply beams.