For 13 years already, I've been working at Romero House. Now I'm the finance manager at Romero House as well, after being part of the community as a refugee.
What I will say is that if you have left your country, if you have left everything you had in your life—your career, your family—for a new country, and you're trying to build trust in this new community, it's a hard time. You don't understand what is happening, but you start believing in God, if you have a God, and saying, “I want to try it again because I love my profession and I want to be alive again.”
Being here, being able to get the assistance and go through the ESL classes for my English, then to a Job Track centre for my accounting skills, and then taking income tax courses and now running the tax clinic in Romero House with our new immigrants and new refugees and teaching them how the system works, teaching them the basics...all of it is a great opportunity to build your life again. You feel like you are reborn and you are part of a community. Then you can use your passion. My passion is my accounting background and my bookkeeping and I can use it in this way.