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Kurdi family reunited in Coquitlam Sarah Payne The Tri-CiTy News
Tired but smiling after flights from Istanbul to Germany and, finally, to Vancouver, Mohammad Kurdi and his family woke up in his sister Tima Kurdi’s Coquitlam home Tuesday morning to begin their first full day in Canada. It was a moment the family of seven had waited three years for after fleeing Syria in 2012. And while they expressed relief, gratitude and immense happiness, their arrival is overshadowed by those who were missing: brother Abdullah Kurdi, whose wife and two sons drowned in the Mediterranean Sea as they attempted to travel from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos in September. The heartbreaking image of three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s lifeless body, washed up on a Turkish beach, seized the world’s attention and catapulted the Kurdi family into the spotlight as symbols of the millions of Syrian refugees risking their lives in a desperate attempt to reach safer shores. But to the Kurdi family he is simply Alan, a beloved child lost to the sea with his brother, Galip, and their mother, Rehan. Sitting in her aunt’s living room Heveen Kurdi, 16, was keen to test her English but, as with the rest of her family, relied on Tima to help translate.
“I am very happy to be here but at the same time I am really sad,” she said. “We used to live beside each other and we would see them almost every day in Turkey. I miss them a lot, they are always on my mind.” Three years ago her parents travelled from Damascus to Kobani, thinking it would be far enough from the uprising. The conditions were much worse than they thought, however, and after seven months the family moved again, this time to Turkey. Two years later they are finally in Canada, one family among thousands destined to arrive here by February. As they sit on sofas and dining room chairs lined up against the wall — Tima’s home went from three residents to eight overnight — the children watching cartoons, the scene is a surreal one after the family’s harrowing journey. “It was very dangerous to all the family in Syria,” said Ghouson, Mohammad’s wife. “In 2012 there was lots of protesting, lots of bombs everywhere. When the kids went to school we were unsure if they would come back.” There was a day when Shergo, now 14, witnessed a classmate shot in the head; terrified, he ran to his father’s hair salon for safety. see ‘HOW CAN,’ page 9
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Hundreds pledge rooms to unknown refugees / $3.5B Massey Bridge to be tolled
NEW YEAR’S EVE 2015 Your community. Your stories.
TRI-CITY
NEWS TOP 10 bad 911 Calls Of 2015 Jeff nagel BlaCk Press
SARAH PAYNE/tHE tRi-citY NEwS
Coquitlam’s Tima Kurdi stands with her nephew, eight-year-old Rezan Kurdi, shortly after he arrived with his parents and four siblings at Vancouver International Airport on Monday. The reunion was a bittersweet one as the family mourns the loss of brother Abdullah Kurdi’s wife and two sons, who drowned in an attempt to get to Greece in September.
A basketball up a tree or a coffee shop that won’t refill your cup are not emergencies. But that didn’t stop hundreds of Lower Mainland residents from inappropriately dialling 911 in 2015 to report similar crises, according to a top 10 list of most outrageous calls released by E-Comm, southwest B.C.’s emergency communications centre. Other ridiculous calls that had 911 dispatchers scratching their heads were “My roommate used my toothbrush” and “My son won’t put his seatbelt on.” E-Comm spokesperson Jody Robertson said too many people can’t be bothered to look up the phone number they really need — be that a police non-emergency line or in the case of the top bozo call of 2015, the number for a local tire dealership. Robertson said such calls come in “every single day” and take up the time of 911 call takers, creating the potential for delays in responding to real life-and-death emergencies. see ‘sON WON’t,’ page 11
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