Brockville-based refugee Nasro Adan Mohamed reunites with loved ones in Ottawa

Brockville Recorder and Times
Friday March 10, 2023

 

Nasro Adan Mohamed, a Somali refugee founded in Brockville, has been making an attempt since pre-pandemic to convey her husband and younger daughter to Canada however they’ve been caught in transit in Uganda. Nasro poses for a photograph along with her husband Liiban Ahmed Khadiye and daughter Afnaan Liiban Ahmed on the Ottawa airport Wednesday. PHOTO BY TONY CALDWELL /POSTMEDIA

After virtually three-and-a-half years, Nasro Adan Mohamed lastly bought to hug her husband and little woman.

The Brockville-based Somali refugee was reunited along with her loved ones on the Ottawa International Airport Wednesday afternoon, a comfortable ending to a story of separation worsened by procedural delays and a worldwide pandemic.

“(I was thinking) is it real?” she recalled the subsequent day of lastly seeing her husband, Liiban, and daughter, Afnaan, in individual.

On Thursday afternoon, Nasro, 28, Liiban Ahmed Khadiye, 26, and Afnaan, who turned 4 in January, loved a sunny however chilly stroll on the Brockville riverfront, exhausted however comfortable.

“It’s really amazing, and when I recall yesterday it was a happy moment,” Liiban added.

While he and his daughter had been nonetheless adjusting to the late-winter bloodless, there was nowhere else he needed to be.

“It’s a very beautiful place and it’s one of my dreams to see Canada and to come here,” he reported. “Really I love it.”

Nasro Mohamed’s refugee ordeal started at age 18, when she fled the violence of Somalia’s capital, Mogadishu. Both her father and brother had been killed in a bombing in that troubled town in 2013. She fled to Uganda, the place she ended up marrying Liiban whilst component to the prolonged refugee procedure.

She has been residing in Canada since late October 2019, the start off of a frustratingly lengthy procedure to convey the remainder of her loved ones the following, made even longer by the COVID-19 pandemic. She has been speaking along with her husband and daughter by way of cellphone calls, Zoom and WhatsApp.

The Brockville Freedom Connection, a neighborhood refugee sponsorship group, has been working in partnership with First Presbyterian to reunify and settle the loved ones the following. The Rural Refugee Rights Network, a loosely-knit group of refugee advocates, had additionally taken up Mohamed’s trigger.

Nasro Adan Mohamed, a Somali refugee founded in Brockville, has been making an attempt since pre-pandemic to convey her husband and younger daughter to Canada however they’ve been caught in transit in Uganda. Nasro poses for a photograph along with her husband Liiban Ahmed Khadiye and daughter Afnaan Liiban Ahmed on the Ottawa airport Wednesday. PHOTO BY TONY CALDWELL /Postmedia

They lately bought the excellent news about Liiban and Afnaan’s arrival, and a few 10 of those supporters had been gathered on the Ottawa airport, waving welcome signals.

“It was a very exciting time for us all; we were all feeling a bit teary,” reported Rev. Marianne Emig Carr, of First Presbyterian Church in Brockville, component to the loved ones’s neighborhood sponsor group.

“I’ve never seen her beaming like that.”

The reception can have left the opposite humans coming down the escalator thinking if a celeb was of their midst.

“It wasn’t a celebrity, but we were celebrating anyway,” added Carr.

“It was quite the moment; it really made it all worthwhile.”

It was probably relevant that Nasro, who confirmed power and endurance all the way through her lengthy ordeal, had her covet granted on International Women’s Day, reported Carr.

Nasro’s supporters are actually turning to the process of integrating Brockville’s latest entire loved ones.

The settlement group was working to get the newcomers social insurance coverage numbers and an even bigger house.

As a everlasting resident, Liiban is competent to search for work. The locals are additionally hoping to get him enrolled on the TR Leger college, for English instruction, even though he can get by in English.

Nasro at the moment works 4 days per week at The Score in Brockville.

Child care might be a further consideration. Afnaan just isn’t solely a charmer, however packed with power, leaping up and down excitedly on the airport, whilst on Thursday a minor argument came about when her mom and dad defined she couldn’t take a dip inside the water.

“We call her Nanny,” reported Carr.