Vietnamese Boat People raise money to help Syrian refugees

Calgary's Vietnamese community is coming together to help welcome and support the wave of refugees coming from war-torn Syria.

Organizers put on a fundraising dinner at a local Vietnamese restaurant and held a silent auction Thursday night. Their goal was to raise $10,000to help settle the refugees.

• Tuscany LRT station hit with racist graffiti
• Syrian refugees: 7 ways you can help them settle in Calgary

Hundreds of thousandsof people fled or were expelled from Vietnam after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, with approximately 60,000 eventually reaching Canada.

Those who came by boat became known as the Boat People.

Peter Phan was one of them. He is still haunted by thedeath and mistreatment that came in the wake of thefall of Saigon.

He stayed in Vietnam for another six yearsbefore his family put him on a boat for Malaysia .

"We never forget it and even we come here and live in Canada for 20 years and after that we still have the dreams about how we escaped," he said.

The boats often lacked food and water, people succumbed to disease and were even attacked by pirates, Phan said.

After about six months, a Canadian delegate arrived and Phan got sponsored and moved to Grande Prairie.

"Very grateful when we come to the freedom country," he said.

HieuVan Ngo also fled Vietnam by boat in 1990.

He's now a professor of social work at the University of Calgary and organized the fundraising event.

"We can showcase that refugees coming to this country are nation builders," he said.

"They can be quite vulnerable at the beginning, but with time and investment people will step up and become teachers, professionals."

Van Ngo says they want to make Syrian refugees feel as welcome as they did when they arrived.

He says helooks forward to the day Syrian food and culture isas embedded in Calgary as Vietnamese food and culture is now.

The provincialgovernment estimates that2,500 to 3,000 children, women and fathers will resettle in Alberta.