Canada: Community garden in Alberta helps immigrants heal, and grow their future

Zandinen and three of her children were among 288 Yazidis that the CCIS welcomed to Calgary in 2017.

By Quinton Amundson,
Canadian Catholic News
June 7, 2020

Excerpt:

Two or three times a week during spring and summer, she gardens at the Land of Dreams, a long-gestating initiative launched 11 months ago by the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society (CCIS).

“Since we have begun to plant on this land in Canada, I feel physically, mentally and emotionally better than before,” says Zandinen through translator Kheirya Khidir, a settlement counsellor for the CCIS.

Profound devastation was inflicted upon Zandinen, her family and the Yazidi people of Sinjar starting on Aug. 3, 2014 when ISIL forces invaded the northern Iraq town in the Nineveh governorate — an area with a long history of being the homeland to Iraq’s minority populations.

A study published by PLOS Medicine estimated that over the course of a month between 2,000 and 5,500 Yazidis were killed and over 6,000 Yazidis — primarily women and children — were kidnapped. About a half million Yazidis were displaced, many fleeing to the nearby Mount Sinjar.

Read the complete article here.