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PAGE 26
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TUESDAY, MARCH 8, 2016
VOL. 27, NO. 86
City welcomes governmentsponsored refugees
Gender-neutral washrooms help open discussion
BY NICHOLAS PESCOD
MORE UNDERSTOOD about transitioning students than when issue first arose in Nanaimo.
I
THE NEWS BULLETIN
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Let’s start in the washroom because it is a place to which we all can relate. A private place. A vulnerable place. A place where most people like things to be just-so. Many of us have gone far out of our way at some point in our lives to find a washroom we are comfortable in. Imagine being a boy forced to spend six hours a day in a workplace where the only place you could go to relieve yourself was a women’s communal washroom. Welcome to what was, until very recently, a daily fact of life for Vancouver Island transgender students. Washroom accessibility is a relatively minor item in the litany of barriers people like Alec Hauser face while growing up. A first-year Vancouver Island University student, he was born female, but has transitioned to male. High school in Campbell River was a lonely, hard experience. “It was very difficult. It was very much a closed-minded community,” he said. “I was around 14 when I started to question my identity. It was very difficult to transition.” Hauser says the more he tried to express who he was and how he was feeling, the more the community pressed back. He felt like he was something outside his school’s experience and many people were ill-prepared on how to react. He lost friends. Some classmates and school staff members questioned his behaviour. Again and again the people around him said he was being obstinate, or going through a phase, or making a spectacle of himself.
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Now
CHRIS BUSH/THE NEWS BULLETIN
Mohammed Halahab steps off the bus with his wife and three children at the Travelodge in Nanaimo on Terminal Avenue. Halahab, who was a transit driver in Damascus, Syria, was among 38 refugees who arrived Thursday.
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BLACK PRESS
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reporter2@nanaimobulletin.com
BY JOHN McKINLEY
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Rain may have been falling, but it didn’t dampen the spirit or the mood of the dozens of government-sponsored refugees who arrived in the Harbour City Thursday afternoon. Greeted by an enthusiastic crowd of supporters, 38 Syrian refugees filed off a coach bus and into the Terminal Avenue Travelodge. “Everything is beautiful, the trees, the water. I have never seen the ocean before,” Abdul Hamid, 14, said through a translator. Hamid, originally from Homs, arrived in Canada from Jordan more than a week ago. After stops in Toronto and Victoria, he and his family boarded the bus and made the nearly twohour drive north to their new home. “There are no words,” he said. Mohammed Halahab, a transit driver originally from Damascus, arrived with his wife and three children. Through a translator, Halahab said he was so happy to be in Nanaimo and that he wanted to thank the Canadian people for their generosity. “I was almost crying from the happiness,” he said. The refugees are part of the 25,000 government-sponsored refugees that the Trudeau government promised to settle.
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