Project Abraham is successfully supporting the growing Yazidi community in the GTA and helping them adapt to living in Canada. With our growing network of committed volunteers, we are providing clothes and furniture, helping find jobs and housing, and working with the community to ensure their needs are being met.

We are also committed to helping the community with the ongoing effort to bring their family members to Canada. This is a huge commitment for us. It requires hundreds of hours of volunteer work to complete applications, lobbying the government to allow more refugees to come to Canada, and raising the funds required.

As we have become a source of hope for the Yazidis, and have become to understand the breadth of the genocide that has forced them from their homeland, we now see the true lack of significant help that governments and the UN have given, despite their acknowledgment of the Yazidi genocide.

Project Abraham is working with other human rights organizations such as One Free World International (OFWI) and the Yezidi Human Rights Organization – International to address the failure of the Canadian government to do more than a token effort to bring Yazidis to Canada. We are a small voice, but have achieved so much in the last two years, and are continuing to fight on behalf of the Yazidi people.

Despite the lack of significant government support for family reunification, the Yazidi community is thankful that the people of Canada has taken them in. They are learning English, going to school, taking jobs, and are celebrating their religious holidays, births, and upcoming marriages, in freedom. They are a people who have suffered yet know the real meaning of family, community, working hard, and moving forward to become good Canadians in every sense.

With all the sadness and hardship, the Yazidis are a positive and joyful people who show appreciation and have welcomed all the Project Abraham volunteers into their community. We are all better for knowing them, a people who have every right to be bitter, but instead are open hearted and inclusive, full of life and love. It is a tragedy of immense proportions that the world cannot see that the Yazidis live like all of us should and don’t. It is a blindness that reflects a lack of true compassion, and an unwillingness to act based on our values. We can learn so much from the Yazidis, but first we need to open our eyes.