It can be hard being in a new country, especially when there is a strong language barrier.
That’s why Nancy Giovinazzo, an educator at St. Joseph Catholic School in Guelph, first launched a group for Tigrinya-speaking mothers in 2018.
“I think it’s our responsibility to find ways to make it easier for them to navigate being here,” Giovinazzo said. Especially, she said, as the demographics of the school were beginning to change, with an increasingly high population of Tigrinya-speaking families coming to Guelph.
The language is commonly spoken in northern Ethiopia and Eritrea. According to the most recent census data, there has been a significant increase in new immigrants from Eritrea to Guelph in recent years. In 2016, Eritreans made up 5.2 per cent of recent immigrants, but by 2021, that number had grown to 17.6 per cent.
“It wasn’t as pronounced as it is now, but it was definitely changing. There were a lot more immigrant families, especially refugee families coming to this area,” Giovinazzo said.
“(The group) was a way of welcoming them into the school and making school accessible and not a scary place for them,” she said, adding that it helped to provide a bridge between home and school life.
The group ran for several sessions into 2019 until the pandemic shut it down. But recently, as the women were “quite keen” for the group to return, Giovinazzo approached principal Andrea Welsh-Devlin about bringing it back after a two-and-a-half year pause.
“I just felt that we don’t see a lot of our community, and because of COVID, parents haven’t been as involved. So this is a good opportunity to bring that community feel back and get to know our families, get to know the culture,” said Welsh-Devlin, who was on board with the idea from the start.
Their first meeting was in December, during which they focused on the Tools For Life, a program often used in schools to help children learn to problem solve through their emotional and social challenges.
“Basically how to handle conflict in respectful ways and not having to lean on the teachers, but learning how to self-regulate themselves,” Giovinazzo said. “This is something that’s being taught in the classes; we wanted to introduce it to the parents and say, this is something that you can start doing at home with your kids.”
They meet in the gym and offer childcare so parents can bring their young children without being distracted.
As each meeting has a translator from immigration services, Giovinazzo and Welsh-Devlin said it helps to connect them to both their school community and immigration services, “just to know all the programs that they have available for them,” Welsh-Devlin said.
Each session also has a different theme, primarily based on what the women in the group want.
“We started out initially just trying to help them navigate through school policies and forms and how to deal with school trips, and just giving them some background so they would be more comfortable with it, because they’re coming from a completely different language, not understanding how things are done here,” Giovinazzo said. “We wanted to help facilitate that in a welcoming, warm way.”
But she said the meetings are also a chance for community building and socializing.
“I really like seeing them come into the school. I like seeing them laughing, talking, asking questions, and being comfortable, because they don’t come into the school (otherwise). Especially since COVID, there’s a real pronounced feeling of caution.”
The number of women per session varies, because there is no requirement to come; it’s more of a drop-in format. Sometimes, she said, they would have five, other times 12 to 15. Their first meeting since returning after the pandemic had only five, and they’re hoping to see more at the next one in February.
Going forward, they hope to get the women involved in running their own programs for children, and Giovinazzo said she wants to get the Tools for Life handbook translated to Tigrinya to better support the community.
She said it would also be nice if other schools started to form groups like this, since it isn’t curriculum and they are doing it on their own time.
The group is open to Tigrinya-speaking mothers in St. Joseph Catholic School, Our Lady of Lourdes Catholic School, St. Francis Catholic School and St. Peter Catholic School in Guelph. If you’re interested in joining, you can learn more here.
