By Isaiah Ritzmann
Published December 2023
This November we marked one year of community and hospitality at the Louisa Street Hospitality House. Over the past twelve months we’ve welcomed fifteen individuals from eight different countries seeking protection, asylum, and safety here in Canada. With diverse backgrounds and experiences, our guests and community members at the house have come to this country at a time when refugee claim processes are taking longer and longer and rents are climbing higher and higher. Many of our guests have had to wait many months to even get their work permits. After getting their work permits, and finally securing work, they are often up against not only unaffordable, competitive rental markets but unfair practices as well. Some guests, for example, were denied an apartment simply because of their country of origin.
The Louisa Street Hospitality House is set up to offer short-to-medium hospitality stays for newly arrived refugee claimants in Waterloo Region. Coming without status and with little money, claimants often end up in our shelter system. There the growing opioid and mental health crisis interact in toxic ways with trauma claimants carry with them from back home. Our hospitality house offers them a warm, safe, welcoming alternative. Here they can stay for anywhere from a few weeks to a few months (our average has been 5 month stays) as they settle in Canada, orient themselves to a new culture and community, and begin setting down roots.
Our purpose is simple – to offer housing and friendship. Our hospitality house exists within a wider web of village-like supports, both at The Working Centre and beyond. At The Working Centre places like Recycle Cycles, the Job Search Resource Centre, and Worth A Second Look offer affordable bikes, employment and financial supports, and affordable second-hand goods respectively. Beyond that, agencies such as the Multicultural Centre and Compass Refugee Centre walk with our guests along the long and difficult road of making a refugee claim; supporting them with paperwork, connecting them to settlement services, and helping them prepare for their hearings. Beyond these more formalized support networks, an invisible but deep network of informal supports exists and continues to grow in our region. Community members and volunteers have stepped up to offer all kinds of practical and relational support to newcomers.
Community life in the house can be both a delight and a challenge. Together we’ve played card games, carved pumpkins, shared in community potlucks, and gone bowling to celebrate birthdays. Joyfully we have found ways to care for each other, and found ways to communicate across cultural and linguistic differences. The house is most of the time a place of peace and refuge. But not always. We are human beings living together and like all humans living together in close proximity, sharing space can be challenging. We can get on each other’s nerves. Some people’s jokes don’t land well with others. Sometimes (although rarely) tensions can bubble up and become fights – and in those cases it is really delicate conflict resolution and hospitality work to make sure everyone has their needs for housing and safety met.
The Hospitality House was launched this year amidst an emerging housing crisis for refugee claimants in Canada. The numbers of people coming to Canada seeking asylum grew considerably as the world began to return to a pre-pandemic normal. In July of this year the city of Toronto’s shelters were full, and claimants began sleeping on the streets. By early August, 10% of the Region’s emergency shelter beds were dedicated to refugee claimants. At a more personal level, I feel this greater volume of need every time I receive a referral for someone to stay at the house. As host of the Louisa Street Hospitality House I probably get between 5-6 referrals a month of claimants needing a place to stay. While I am grateful for our ability to welcome the fifteen individuals we have welcomed this past year, it’s heart-wrenching to have to continually tell people that we have no more room. It’s a spiritual discipline to live into the tragic gap between what we can offer and the much greater need.
And yet I celebrate that the Louisa Street house is not alone. Our hospitality house is not the only supplier of home-based hospitality for refugee claimants in Waterloo Region. In the seven years before moving into and starting the Louisa Street house I was part of the Open Homes community in Kitchener-Waterloo. The Open Homes community is a grass-roots network of families and others in Waterloo Region who offer medium-term housing (from 4-6 months) for refugee claimants. Families and others (“the hosts”) open up their homes and live in community with refugees, offering a place of safety, warmth, and relationship for people newly arrived in Canada (“the guests”). I have learned much from this community, and was able to host, on a much smaller scale, over the several years before moving into Louisa Street. Open Homes, in turn, is always looking for new host families. If practicing personal, home-based hospitality for refugee claimants – or volunteering with the Louisa Street house – is something that interests you, please get in touch with me for more information ([email protected]).
As I write this article I am recovering from a moderate back injury the first week of November. The day of my re-injury was painful, and my mobility was severely restricted. And then something amazing happened. Many of the guests who had moved in during the summer stepped up. At the very beginning of my injury they helped me walk, as I could not stand up on my own. They would check-in on me, concerned about my well-being. They helped accompany each other to appointments in ways I was temporarily unable to do. What began with me opening up my home and my life to strangers became real relationships, real care, real reciprocal support. The fact that all of this happened on the evening of our one year anniversary is a serendipity, if not more than that. I cannot claim that beautiful things always emerge when you take the risk of hospitality. But, then again, they sometimes do.
