Wanted: One large van

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This article was published 11/07/2011 (4671 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Three years ago, Winnipeg high-school teacher Paul Kambaja started giving up his summers to help new refugee kids at loose ends get ready for school in the fall.

Now, there are 117 young people in the Summer Transitional School for Immigrants in St. Boniface, and he needs a bigger vehicle to get them there.

“That’s our big challenge,” said Kambaja. He and a couple of friends used their own minivans to collect the kids starting at 7 a.m., he said. “Now we’re down to two. It’s going to take a lot of time to pick up all the kids.” The program began Monday at 9:30 a.m. and runs to Aug. 19 five days a week until 4 p.m.

“We’re trying to encourage parents to bring their kids, but there are only one or two who can,” he said. The school is run out of Collège Louis-Riel. The newcomers range in age from six to 19 years old and most live too far to walk, said Kambaja.

“Most live downtown and they’re an easy target for gangs,” said Kambaja, who was born and raised in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He came to Canada in 1997, got an education degree and co-founded the Fondation Charité Congo-Canada to help fund the summer program that also receives some government support.

He has his eye on a 12-seat used passenger van. They’ve raised $3,000 but need another $10,000 to buy the 2002 vehicle from a Ford dealer, he said. They can’t use program funding to pay for transportation.

They looked at school buses, but there were “too many issues” to make that feasible, he said.

“Our budget is for up to 100 kids,” he said. “We had more new families coming, and we wanted to include them,” he said.

“We have five new families from Congo, and they seem to have really big families,” said Kambaja, who is married with three children.

“Once you take one family, you have to take the rest.” They only planned for 100 kids but will make room for 117 because it’s vital for them to have constructive activities to get them ready for school.

“This is a good way for kids to build strong relationships with us and to have good role models,” he said. “If they’re not in a program, then they get involved in the gang stuff.”

Last summer, they were able to stay at the school until 6 p.m. and drive the kids home in shifts. This year they have to be out of the building by 4 p.m. and it’s a scramble, said Kambaja. For more information, contact Kambaja at mulakambaja@hotmail.com

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca