The New York Times
TORONTO — As soon as Bayan Mohammad, a 10-year-old Syrian refugee, arrived here last winter, she began her transformation. In her first hour of ice-skating, she managed to glide on her own. She made fast friends with girls different from any she had ever known. New to competitive sports, she propelled herself down the school track so fast that she was soon collecting ribbons.
Bayan glued herself to the movie “Annie,” the ballet “Cinderella” and episodes of “Wheel of Fortune,” all stories of metamorphosis. As her English went from halting to chatty, she ticked off everything she hungered to do: An overnight school trip. Gymnastics lessons. Building a snowman — no, a snow-woman.
“I just want to be Canadian,” she said.
The volunteers resettling her family — a group of teachers, pediatricians and other friends and neighbors spurred by devastating images of young refugees and casualties of war — watched Bayan with wonder. Her parents, Abdullah and Eman Mohammad, a former grocery store owner and a nurse from a rural village, felt both pride and alarm.
Coming to Canada with their four children, they had braced themselves for the hostility that so many refugees were encountering around the world, including just across the border, where Donald J. Trump warned of the threat posed by Syrian refugees. Instead, they found a national movement to aid them.
As Syria shattered, everyday citizens, called private sponsors, were adopting the newcomers, donating their time and thousands of dollars to help guide them through their first year. The volunteers attended to the family’s every need: an apartment, doctors, tips on finding a mosque and halal food. The sponsors even applied to bring other family members to Canada — and still they wanted to know what more they could do.
The Mohammads were astonished and grateful. But over 10 months, the relationship was reshaping the family, rewriting roles and rules they had always followed. Abdullah and Eman found their marriage on new ground, the fundamental compact between them shifting. Bayan, their oldest child, was going from girl to adolescent, Middle Eastern to North American all at the same time. She was the one most likely to remember their now-obliterated life in Syria. On some days, her parents believed that she could meld her old and new identities; on others, they feared her Syrianness was being erased.
Bayan was eager to embrace the regular pastimes of Canadian youth, like ice-skating. Within her first hour, Bayan was gliding on her own, “arms outstretched and a smile as wide to match,” said one of her sponsors, Yolanda Mak. Credit Cole Burston for The New York Times
If the family had landed in Munich or Minneapolis, they would have encountered new cultural dilemmas, too. But Canada’s unusual private sponsorship system made them especially acute, because it was so intimate. The Canadians and Syrians were in and out of one another’s homes for tutoring, computer lessons or celebrations. They shared parental tasks like communication with teachers, since the Mohammads spoke little English. “What they gave us, a brother wouldn’t even give to his own brother,” Mr. Mohammad said.
Still, when one sponsor took the children to a ballet performance, Bayan twirled her way home and then begged for lessons — which would involve revealing outfits that would make her parents uncomfortable. The sponsors invited the children to make gingerbread houses and sing carols. Did saying yes mean that the strict Muslim family would be celebrating a Christian holiday?
The Mohammads had left Syria and then Jordan to safeguard their children — but once they arrived here, they were bewildered by what they found. Why were teenagers here allowed to stay out past midnight? Did children move away from home at 18 and never look back? How much control did parents even have?
“Every day I have this dilemma,” Mrs. Mohammad said. “Am I letting the kids do the right thing?”
In October, Bayan craved one item above all on her wish list: to join her school’s overnight trip. For three days at the end of the month, the whole fifth grade would travel to an island in Toronto’s harbor, exploring, conducting science experiments and sleeping in dorms.
“I want to go but my dad said no,” Bayan said over a family lunch of chicken and stuffed cabbage rolls.
Her parents felt their children belonged at home; they had never been on a sleepover.
“I want to go!” Bayan repeated. “I’m sad because my best friends are going.” By Canadian or American standards, she was being polite: no eye-rolling or accusations.
Kerry McLorg, center, the organizer of group of sponsors helping to resettle the Mohammad family in Canada, showed the children and their mother how to make gingerbread houses last month. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
But in Syria, children are bound to respect the authority of their parents, even in adulthood. The rule had governed the Mohammad family for generations, backed up by relatives, friends, an entire culture. Within months of arriving in Canada, Bayan shocked her parents by beginning to question their decisions out loud.
“She’s stronger now, here, and she tries to express herself more than in Syria,” her mother explained.
Bayan knew she had a quiet ally at the lunch table that day: Kerry McLorg, the organizer of the sponsor group. Meticulous and restrained, Ms. McLorg never wanted to push the Mohammads, and when they asked for her advice, she tended to answer with clinical distance, lest her own preferences show.
But she knew Bayan yearned for the adventure. She and the other sponsors saw it as another step in the girl’s integration into Canada. Her two children had gone on the trip years ago and still talked about the traditions — visiting a lighthouse, telling ghost stories.
“Every kid in Toronto does this,” Ms. McLorg had told Bayan’s parents when they had asked. “Academically, it’s not important. But socially, it is very important.”
Mr. Mohammad told Bayan again: No trip. He was not an immigrant who set out to adapt to a new world; he was a refugee trying to hold on to what had been ripped from him. “We’re forced to be here,” Mr. Mohammad said later. “We’re happy, but we’re forced to be here.”
He still had a shot at preserving the identity he wanted for Bayan, but he and his wife would have to be vigilant, willing to deny their daughter some of what she wanted.
“I will do this for her,” he said. “God help us.”
Abdullah Mohammad looked at images of his village near Daraa, Syria, on Google Earth as the rest of the family was making gingerbread houses. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Shifting Family Dynamics
Only one thing about Canada seemed to disconcert Bayan: its types of families she had never seen or even imagined. She was troubled by the concept of divorce, by classmates whose parents lived in separate homes. “My mom and dad, they will not do that,” she declared.
The Mohammads were from a particularly conservative village in Daraa Province. Their union was arranged by their families and governed by clear tenets. Back home, Eman Mohammad, 36, did not leave the house without asking her husband’s permission. She did not socialize with men who were not relatives. Women in the village did not drive. Against the odds, and Abdullah’s initial reluctance, she had worked as a nurse, one of only a few women in her circle to be employed outside the home after having children.
Now she was far more at home in Canada than he was. She attended her first modern dance performance, thrilled by the surprise and emotion. When her husband, 36, turned down a supermarket job this summer, unsure of what kind of work he wanted, she joked that she would take it. She was determined to get certified as a nurse again, even though that would require years of language instruction and coursework.
Meanwhile, she found new purpose: helping lead a therapy group for Syrian women coping with trauma and displacement. Standing in front of a whiteboard, she peppered her presentations with motivational statements: “Nothing is impossible.” “When we work, we are helping society around us, not ourselves alone.” She earned about 70 Canadian dollars for each weekly session.
Being in Canada “opened new doors for me that I didn’t even know existed,” Mrs. Mohammad said.
Her husband, however, was having difficulty. In Syria, he co-owned a grocery store and two butcher shops, and had been the unquestioned head of the household. Now the sponsors were helping support his family, along with government subsidies. While his wife went to one of the therapy groups, he took care of Bayan and the younger children, and he had been helping in the kitchen.
“Sometimes I feel weak doing these things,” he said. “It’s a woman’s job.” He told himself that spending more time with his children would draw them closer.
Bayan had ambitions for her father: to learn to swim, to drive, to buy a car with six seats. “I dream, like, all the time we have a big house and a pool,” she said.
But Mr. Mohammad was nowhere near finding work that could support a family of six in an expensive city, and he felt torn about whether he should continue to study English full time or just get the best job he could. “I feel lost,” he had said. Because his wife’s language skills were better, he sometimes was left out of conversations. (The Mohammads asked not to be identified by their full surnames, because they feared reprisals against relatives still in Syria. This article uses part of their family name.)
If Syria heals, Mr. Mohammad said, he definitely wants to go back.
His wife countered: “My future and my kids’ future is in this country.”
We have been reporting on Canada's unusual welcome of Syrian refugees for nearly a year, paying frequent visits to the Mohammad family, the volunteers helping them, and other Syrians and Canadians involved in private sponsorship.
Then they laughed. The marriages of many Syrians who had come to Canada were far more strained, they knew, the traditional arrangements difficult to replant on new soil. Mrs. Mohammad’s counseling groups were filled with women whose husbands had turned bitter at the changed circumstances. Some wives were finally reporting years of domestic abuse.
The Mohammads tried to mitigate their differences with kindness. She found ways to telegraph respect for her husband’s authority — before buying a new dress, she texted him a photo and the price for approval. For fortitude with child care duties, he turned to Islamic teachings about the value of helping one’s wife. The two had long conversations about a new favorite word, “flexibility.”
Even as Eman Mohammad craved opportunities for herself, she was not sure how much freedom she wanted for Bayan. In Syria, the path was restrictive but clear. If the war had never happened, she would already be wearing a head scarf and attending a girls’ school. Most girls in her village married at 14 or 15, though the Mohammads would have waited until at least 18. Even if she pursued university there, she would not go on unsupervised dates, get offered a beer at a party, or live alone.
Now that she was in Canada, her mother felt, there was no longer a map for her daughter’s life. “I want to try everything here,” Bayan said.
“What is the meaning of Halloween?” Mrs. Mohammad asked. The holiday was four days away.
Bayan burst with answers. It was about being frightened in a fun way, she said, dressing as skeletons and ghosts. “It has to be something scary,” she explained. She wanted to wear a devil costume.
One of the sponsors had already arranged to take them trick-or-treating. But what Mrs. Mohammad had heard about the holiday made her dubious. Her children would celebrate death and horror, after they had escaped the real thing? Should she worry that her daughter wanted to dress as a symbol of evil? Did Canadians really believe in people coming back from the dead?
Just then, Ms. McLorg arrived at the family’s apartment with a giant pumpkin for the children to carve. Bayan had asked Ms. McLorg to join them for the coming trick-or-treat date, but the sponsor did not realize how Mrs. Mohammad felt.
Ms. McLorg was trying to introduce Canadian customs without imposing on the family’s own. “They should not have to change their essence in order to become Canadian,” Ms. McLorg said later. In fact, the country officially encourages new arrivals to maintain their own culture.
In the end, they all celebrated Halloween. Another sponsor hosted them for dinner and cookies: long slivers of shortbread with red icing and almond nails, meant to look like bloody fingers. Ms. McLorg arrived in a pink bunny suit. On the costume question, Bayan and her mother had reached a middle ground: a zombie princess.
Abdullah Mohammad headed home early; Bayan pleaded to stay later. Her mother surveyed the spiderwebs and chains lacing the street, watching her children merge into the flowing highway of trick-or-treaters.
Bayan studying the Quran at the school on a recent Sunday when the rest of the family were at a Santa parade, which Bayan was disappointed to miss. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
Memories of Home
Two weeks later, Mrs. Mohammad and her two daughters were propelled into a local Walmart by Bayan’s sheer force of will. She longed for a pair of sparkly purple sneakers, and begged, nagged and nearly cried until her mother agreed.
As they navigated the aisles, mother and daughters looked like members of two different families. Mrs. Mohammad wore her head scarf, neck-to-toe gown and shawl, while the girls were in leggings and skinny jeans.
The question about when Bayan would start covering her head loomed over her and her parents. As they were in Canada, her mother was willing to postpone it until seventh grade.
“No!” Bayan yelled when she overheard her mother talking about it. She looked ugly with her head covered, she thought. “When I’m in grade nine — maybe,” she said.
But the next day, Bayan and her mother slipped inside a building a few blocks from their apartment, where the 10-year-old kicked off the brand-new sneakers and knelt. Her mother draped a thin scarf over her daughter’s head, expertly folding, tucking and pinning until it covered her hair without a strand showing.
Eman Mohammad helped her daughter Bayan put on a head scarf before she attended the Islamic school at a local mosque. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times
This was Islamic school at the mosque, a new fixture of Bayan’s Sundays. For several hours, she studied written Arabic, verses of the Quran and Islamic values with other children. It was the only activity of hers that the sponsors had not been involved in planning; that day, they were taking the rest of the family to a Santa parade, which Bayan was disappointed to miss.
Sunday mornings were a compromise between Bayan and her parents: the single time each week, for now, that she would cover her head.
For the main lesson that day, the teacher, Maimoonah Ali, an 18-year-old whose parents came to Canada as refugees from Eritrea, passed out colored Popsicle sticks and instructed the students to snap them. The sound of splintering wood filled the room. “Sometimes there are tests in life,” she told the children. “And sometimes they break us.”
Then she collected the remaining sticks into a tight bundle. One by one, the students strained and failed to break them. “It’s really, really difficult to break things when they’re all together, right?” Ms. Ali asked. “And that’s exactly like us.”
But it was not clear how much the class was going to do to help secure Bayan’s Syrian identity. In English, she could read at “Cat in the Hat” level, but her Arabic reading was worse, because the war had interrupted her schooling. Bayan was supposed to repeat the verses that a classmate was saying that day, but her partner did not speak Arabic, and Bayan could barely understand her. She was the only Syrian in the school.
Other classmates’ parents came from Algeria, Bangladesh, Ethiopia and Mali. Half the population of Toronto is foreign-born, a reflection of Canada’s openness to immigrants. In her apartment building, Bayan has friends whose families are from Israel and China.
When her father picked her up, she could not take off her hijab fast enough. During lunch at home, as she chatted in English, he interjected: “Arabic!” She continued in a mix of both.
When she talked about the stick exercise, her father gave a look of recognition. “I was Bayan’s age when they told me the same story,” he said.
Their childhoods seemed so disconnected from one another’s. The family left Syria when Bayan was 7 or 8 — they had foundered in Jordan before coming to Canada — and her memories of the home where her family had lived for three generations were dimming.
She could picture playing hide-and-seek with her cousins by the fountain and grapevines in the courtyard, and recall the way an adjacent garden produced enough mint for the whole neighborhood. But Bayan and her sister could no longer agree on how many olive trees stood there: 20? 100? (Eight, their mother said.)
After the Mohammads left Syria, the house next door was shelled or bombed and collapsed on their own home. It was ruined now, the second story gone. The sponsors helped them use Google Maps to try to find what was left, but no one could quite pinpoint it.
“I love that house,” Bayan had said a few days before.
Suddenly, her confidence and determination kicked in.
“We’re going to build it,” she said. “My siblings. All of us.”