Another look at Hispanic immigrants contributing positively to the Canadian community.
Elvira Cordileone's article in the Toronto Star: On a frigid December day, Liliana Angarita, her husband, Mario Guilombo, and their 5-year-old daughter, Lilian, fled to Toronto from Colombia, with nothing but the summer clothes on their backs.
A gunshot had changed their lives.
In the fall of 2001, as the family walked along a street in Bogota, a bullet cut through the air and pierced their little girl’s leg.
The child’s shooting was no accident. It was a final warning to Guilombo, a lawyer working in the anti-corruption office of Colombia’s navy, to stop his investigations.
The people with secrets to protect had already made five attempts on his life — and he shows the scars to prove it. When they told him his mother would be next, Guilombo started planning their escape.
While Lilian recovered in the hospital, he got in touch with a man who had contacts in the United Nations and the International Red Cross.
Within 24 hours, a UN member nation agreed to accept them as refugees but, for the sake of security, their destination was kept secret from them until their departure a month later.
Mother and daughter fled Bogota as soon as Lilian was released from hospital, moving from city to city while Guilombo waited for their papers to be approved. They told no one of their plans, not even close relatives.
Angarita, 42, says they only learned they were headed to Canada on their way to the airport.
“December 18, 2001. Very, very cold. No appropriate for clothing,” Angarita recalls, her English hesitant.
Reliving that difficult time makes her weep, and she apologizes for the tears.
She says a Canadian immigration official met them at Pearson airport and handed them coats, jackets and boots. The woman then put the family in a taxi and sent them to a shelter in downtown Toronto, where they remained for a month.
“It was a situation of desperation, crying, and no family here,” Angarita says, shaking her head.
That sense of dislocation and loss during those dark, early days so marked her, Angarita has made it her life’s work to do everything she can for others in similar circumstances.
In the process, she has built a meaningful and rewarding new life. Angarita has been recognized for her contributions to her adopted country as one of this year’s Top 25 Canadian Immigrants.
Since they came to Canada, Angarita and Guilombo have co-founded several organizations, including Casa Latino American, now called Casa de las Americas, to help victims of violence and human rights abuses.
In 2007, they helped establish the Canadian Human Rights International Organization (CHRIO), a non-profit agency for immigrants and refugees, where they continue to work full time as volunteers.
Olga Umana, a CHRIO volunteer, nominated Angarita for the immigrant award. She worked as a lawyer in El Salvador before immigrating to Canada two years ago.
“Everything (at CHRIO) is by her hand,” Umana says. “She’s in charge, especially for community help. She’s very nice, very friendly. I don’t know how to say — very able.”
The agency operates out of two trailers at the back of the Northminster Baptist Church parking lot, on Finch Ave. near Jane St. The church lets them use the space rent free in exchange for maintaining the grounds.
“CHRIO is pretty much the last stop for people who don’t know what else to do,” says Jonathan Whiteside, a Northminster pastor and CHRIO president.
Whiteside says many of the 3,000 people they helped last year were refugee claimants who’d lost their bids to stay in Canada and were “terrified” by the prospect of going back.
“We aren’t focussed on resettlement. Nevertheless and inevitably, a lot of the work is that. So we have clothing, furniture, computers, things that come our way even though we’re not looking for them.”
Guilombo directs the legal and human rights work while Angarita manages social and community services, which includes fielding desperate calls at all hours from people needing help.
Angarita also co-ordinates the work of CHRIO’s more than 100 volunteers: Lawyers, social workers, psychologists, human-resource specialists, artists offering classes, technical people for computer help and those who keep the trailers clean and maintain the church grounds.
“I’m president but they do all the hard work,” says Whiteside, who ministers to the church’s Spanish-speaking congregants.
CHRIO provides services free of charge, says executive director Carlos Rodriguez-Tascon, a financial planner. Its annual budget is less than $4,000 per year, all of it donated.
Whiteside says most of that money comes out of the Angarita’s and Guilombo’s own pockets.
The family survives on social assistance, Guilombo says. If CHRIO’s application for charitable status gets approval, he hopes there may be room for salaries in the future.
“The money isn’t important,” Angarita says. “It’s the life (that matters).”
Until now, she has managed to keep a low profile. She confesses all the attention the immigrant award has brought makes her “a little scared.”
She’s used to attending award ceremonies. Her husband has received a fistful of them, including his own Top 25 Immigrant award in 2009.
In her spare time, Angarita studies social work and early childhood education through online courses.
Perhaps soon, the little girl who took a bullet because of her father’s work will also get her share of accolades. Lilian Guilombo, 14, who plans to study law, serves as CHRIO’s junior director of human rights. She oversees a team of 10 kids who monitor cases of rights abuses against children and advocate on their behalf.
