The Dalaa family at St. Joseph's College in Edmonton, Alberta. The newly arrived refugees are being sponsored by a group through St. Josephs. Left to right is Karima Dalaa, 3, Iwan Dalaa, Ayat Dalaa, 1, and Zamzam Dalaa.Amber Bracken/The Globe and Mail
Before they got on the flight that would finally take them on a two-day journey from Beirut to Edmonton, the Dalaa family spent many days and evenings encouraging each other not to let anxiety stop them from eating and sleeping.
"I cried a lot, all the time," said Zamzam Dalaa, 24.
The family of four – refugees from Syria – had first expected to leave Beirut on Dec. 9, but after being turned away not once, but three times, they were losing hope. With the help of a United Nations refugee worker who supervised the needed paperwork, their fourth trip to the airport finally proved successful.
"I cannot explain in words the feeling of arriving here," Ms. Dalaa said.
Seeing Edmonton from the airplane window, the barren brown tree tops a hint of the -12 degree temperature outside, did not even give them a moment's pause.
"It was beautiful," said her husband, 30-year-old Iwan Dalaa, the first time the couple has talked about their arrival here on Christmas Eve.
In Edmonton, the family – Zamzam, Iwan and their two daughters, three-year-old Karima and one-year-old Ayat – have now been welcomed by the private sponsorship group at St. Joseph's College, a college affiliated with the University of Alberta, which has also sponsored two other families.
The Dalaas are among the first wave of an expected 25,000 refugees from Syria the government has pledged to bring to Canada by the end of February. To reach that target, hundreds of applications are being processed daily in Jordan and Lebanon. But as the Dalaa family's difficulties show, a lot of government agencies and procedures have to line up in order to make the last part of the journey to Canada a success.
If there is any consolation to the enormous anxiety the family has felt for the last month, it's that the delay allowed their sponsorship group to find them a permanent home close to campus.
The simple fact of separate bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom are a far cry from the one room the four shared in a relative's apartment outside Beirut.
"The kids don't want to leave the apartment because they love it. It's home. When they think about where they were living before, they never want to go back," Ms. Dalaa said, speaking through a translator.
Ayat, who is almost 2, has had a fever and slept with her mom. She has some medical issues that will be addressed by a specialist in the new year.
So Karima has had the bedroom she will eventually share with her sister all to herself. As her parents talk from an office at St. Joseph's, her playing and laughing in the hallway travels over the phone line.
"The girls can finally rest because they are settled," Mr. Dalaa said.
After the initial few weeks of getting used to Canada, the hard work of learning English will begin. Then life will be rebuilt with jobs, schooling for the children and a home. Mr. Dalaa was a carpenter in Syria, and even in recessionary Alberta, his skills are likely to be in high demand.
"This is my trade and I don't want to change it," he said.
In the meantime, there are simpler pleasures. One of the few possessions they brought with them was a mankara, a kitchen utensil used to hollow out and stuff zucchini, and Ms. Dalaa plans to use it soon to make dishes from home.
Growing up in Idlib, a city 60 kilometres southwest of Aleppo, neither of them ever thought their hometown would be engulfed in a civil-war conflict. Ms. Dalaa remembers a childhood lived in a fertile countryside.
She interrupts her husband's textbook explanations of the region's economy to remind him of what it was like to be there.
"They called it the green Idlib," Ms. Dalaa said of abundant harvests of olives, figs, almonds and tomatoes.
"I would love to show the children where we were born and raised," she added.
Leaving Idlib almost five years ago, they went to Lebanon and eventually made it onto a list of privately sponsored refugees accepted by Canada.
Yet their trip almost did not happen. In early December, they watched hundreds of other Syrians board planes while they were turned away and forced to sleep on the floor of a mosque in the airport, trying to understand why their paperwork was not in order.
A second departure day was also scuttled. No one in the sponsorship group or the family knows why. The third attempt would have been successful but for the bureaucratic absurdity of their exit visas expiring while they were trying to sort out their initial problems.
Now they are looking forward to their first year in Canada and invite a reporter to share a meal with the family when next in Edmonton. They hope it's one of many times they can return the hospitality with which they've been welcomed here.