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any barriers that people face when they move to a new country are obvious: a new language, a new job, a new culture. But some barriers aren’t obvious until you live them.
“When I came to Canada, I started volunteering with Edmonton Immigrant
Social Services Association, and I asked the coordinator where to get the bus to my house,” says Chand Gul. “He told me where, but I didn’t know which side of the road I had to be on, so [my kids and] I took the opposite side and ended up on the opposite end of the city.”
Gul was born and raised in rural Pakistan, and immigrated to Canada with her young family
in 2012. Before she left, she became a clinical psychologist and did her best to help her community, especially women, most of whom she says don’t have many options in life. She worked for the United Nations where she prepared workshops focused on settlement, employment and self-growth, in order to give back to her rural community.
“Giving positivity to the community, for me, is community development,” she says.
Gul laughs about her bus mishap now, but it’s
never far from her mind in her new home, where
she spread positivity almost immediately after
landing by volunteering for various organizations. She’s since mentored hundreds of new immigrants shortly after they’ve arrived in Canada. “I’m a
natural people person,” she says, “and I love to excel integration, specifically immigrant women, to aid their assimilation into the Canadian fabric.”
Today, Gul is the Program Manager for the Canadian Zalmi Society (Zalmi means “youth” in
the Pashto language). The charitable organization started in 2018 and helps newcomers do what Gul’s helped them do since she arrived: integrate into their new homes. “Research shows [it] will take five to 15 years, but when we provide the right resources and the opportunity, the assimilation and the integration time can be much shorter,” Gul says.
The society started small, focusing on computer literacy programs for newcomers, but has since expanded to over 100 volunteers providing nearly 1,000 newcomers with over 100,000 pounds of food and household items, along with classes on mental and physical health.
The society builds community alongside other organizations, and received funding from Edmonton Community Foundation, which provided a small grant to support the Canadian Zalmi Society’s Parenting Workshops for Afghan Newcomers in Canada.
The workshops — originally slated to host 36 participants but expanded to 55 due to demand — provided positive discipline strategies, and discussed family dynamics and child development based on
the Canadian cultural norms and curriculum, as
well as parental and child rights and responsibilities. From June 2023 to March 2024, the society ran three phases of workshops. Each phase included four classes in which instructors explained the Canadian law system and how that system affects the participants. They instruct in the participants’ own language and cultural communication style, which is something that, looking back once again on her own arrival experience, Gul knows is key.
She tells a story of meeting her coordinator’s friend, who struck her as a nice person. “So I complimented [my coordinator], saying, ‘Oh, your friend is very simple.’ And she smiled because she knows me, and she asked, ‘Can you explain the word ‘simple’?’ And I said he’s nice, he’s genuine. And she said, ‘You are right, but in Canada, don’t use the word simple.’ Simple was a compliment in Pakistan, but in Canada, I found that it’s not.”
Gul further explains that these Afghan refugees who fled to Canada came from “a suppressed culture” and a social-political situation that is the “opposite”
of Canada’s. And that while a family may arrive together, they don’t necessarily integrate concurrently. A father may find work, while a child goes to school, where both become immersed in the new culture. “But the mom, they are sitting at home and they’re lost — they’ve lost the language, they’ve lost their communication with their kids. This is making a gap between families, so we are trying to fill those [gaps] so they can assimilate together.”
Gul is obviously grateful for the opportunity her new home provides, but knows that if newcomers don’t reach out to even newer newcomers, that opportunity can be wasted. “We need to share the resources, the support to uplift each other. Uplifting each other is most important in any community, anywhere in the world. And to bring peace in the world, to empower — that is my dream.”
18 LEGACY IN ACTION