Fawzia Haji

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Helping newcomers to the country is old hat to Fawzia Haji
(Posted Date: Monday, May 5, 2003)

By Preeti Gill

Fawzia Haji, 31, is a doormat.

She allows newcomers to Toronto to use her as a resource for any question or issue they encounter while adjusting to their new lives in Canada.

She prefers the term "diving board" than "doormat" to describe her role as a settlement worker.

***

"Have you been waiting long?" Fawzia Haji asks, short of breath, while cradling her cellphone to her ear.

She turns off her phone and opens the door to her office at Valley Park Middle School, located in the Thorncliffe Park neighbourhood. Haji's barren office is adorned with an ordinary oak desk and a few chairs.

On top of her desk sits a tidy, black inbox tray housing yellow file folders with confidential information about clients, past and present. All visits need to be carefully documented. The federal government eventually uses information gathered by settlement workers to compile data on newcomers, in part, to serve future ones better.

"When newcomers (arrive), this is one of the first places they come - to schools to register their kids," Haji says while arranging brochures about various community services on her desk.

Haji, more than other settlement workers in Toronto, is a mini-expert on the wide range of community and government programs and services that are available for residents. Her boss, Ahmad Hossin, Settlement and Education Partnership in Toronto (SEPT)'s co-ordinator, insisted Haji be interviewed about the nature of settlement work since she is one of the program's longest-serving employees. She has spent three years providing settlement services at Valley Park in the program's four-year-old life. Haji helps parents through the process of registering their children in appropriate schools. She distributes OHIP card applications to ensure new residents have access to Canada's health care system. Haji directs immigrants to employment agencies in East York. She passes on phone numbers of ESL instructors who help them learn to speak and write English. She even refers newcomers who are abused by their partners or spouses to lawyers. Her goal is to ease the difficult transition many of them face.

Valley Park is the largest middle school in Canada, with more than 1,000 students enrolled in Grades 6-8. Eighty-one per cent speak a primary language other than English, according to 2002 statistics compiled by the Toronto District School Board (TDSB).

"We have a large Muslim population here. There is a lot these students are not permitted to do by their parents, according to their religion," Haji says.

She works closely with the school's teachers to resolve sensitive cultural issues, as they arise.

Part of Haji's job is to stay connected, what she calls "outreach," with all the community service agencies, and the services and programs they offer, which are constantly evolving. She collects any information she can about them, usually in the form of multi-lingual pamphlets, and passes them onto her clients. Haji spends four days of her workweek at Valley Park and one day at East York Collegiate Institute.

***

A tall Muslim woman with light brown curly locks, a round face and nurturing demeanour, Fawzia Haji has provided settlement services to newcomers for more than a decade. When she turned 18, Haji volunteered her time and energy for the Aga Khan Education Department and Settlement in Toronto, providing the kind of help she now gets paid to do under SEPT. She speaks Gujarati, Hindi, Irdu and Katchi fluently.

"Don't ask how I learned all those languages," she says with a laugh. She studied global development at York University and taught for a couple of years before joining SEPT.

Haji can place herself in the shoes of any newcomer she has encountered over the last 13 years. She is an immigrant herself. Haji, who was born in east Africa, arrived in Canada as an eight-year-old girl with her parents. Her father, who was a bookkeeper in the trade sector, and her mother, a dressmaker, both found factory jobs as soon as they arrived in Toronto, to stay afloat financially.

"There was no net that supported newcomers," Haji remembers. "No one told my father, 'why don't you get your bookkeeping qualifications assessed, you'll be more successful and continue to do what you loved back home.'

"My father felt he had to go out and get (any) job right away, so he could support us.

"That's what drives me," Haji says. She is passionate about providing the kind of "net" her parents didn't have access to, in the early-1980s.

Today, one of the "nets" available for newcomer families is SEPT, a partnership between the TDSB, Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC) and community agencies. School settlement workers help build bridges between parents, students, schools and their communities, according to SEPT's mandate. Although CIC funds the partnership, the school board provides office space for settlement workers in participatory schools to assist newcomer families. When school's out for summer, Haji and others set up shop at public libraries and community centres throughout the city.

"There's a misunderstanding about newcomers," Haji muses thoughtfully, while sitting behind her tidy desk. "They need to do manual labour because it's what they did back home. That's not true. I've met men with PhD degrees."

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Two south Asian ladies, with wavy chestnut tresses, cut cloth for customers at the Fabrik Den. A few doors down, a young Muslim woman, wearing a red uniform and a black headdress, rings up the till at one of the counters at Zellers. In front of the store, two middle-aged eastern-European men gab quietly over coffee at the Second Cup kiosk. A group of Filipino women in their 20s huddle together at a table across from the men. They chat while waiting for shopping mates to return.

It's a bustling late Saturday afternoon at the East York Town Centre in the heart of Thorncliffe Park. The sky is overcast, encouraging residents to stay indoors to run errands, shop and meet with friends.

"Fawzia! Fawzia!"

Haji stops and looks around on her way into the Fabrik Den. An older Pakistani woman walks toward her.

"Oh, I'll never forget you because you're the first person I talked to when I came to Canada. You really helped me get out there," the woman tells her.

"That's satisfaction. Knowing that I've made a difference in someone's life," Haji says.

The names of Fawzia Haji's clients have been changed since they're confidential.

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[alinizar313]

Can u provide me E-mail address of Fawzia as she used to be a good friend of mine. I left Toronto about four year ago and I am not in touch with her.
If she is looking at the forum then she can note my address

[email protected]