Between them, they shake up enough prejudices to make the headlines.
One fled Cameroon to save his skin and quickly resumed his social involvement in Quebec. The other “slept under the bridges” on the way from the Magdalen Islands to Montreal, and found himself homeless after a completely ordinary life.
“I had never even thought of leaving my city, Douala, to which I was very attached. And I left 9000 km further,” says Joseph Achille Tiedjou. He quickly asks to be addressed informally, as a keen observer of Quebec society, who prefers the familiar to the formal.
“If someone had said to me three years ago: you’re going to be in the street, I would have laughed at him,” exclaims Réjean, who asked us to keep his last name quiet so as not to not expose yourself to prejudice. After working a large part of his life in Montreal, notably as a graphic designer and in a CPE, he returned to the Islands after retiring. A health incident made him “panic” and pushed him to leave. He found himself homeless.
These detours in life, both unexpected and often painful, led them to meet. Joseph Achille, who has been working at the Maison du Père for two years, accompanied Réjean in 2023 so that he could find a home and his self-confidence.
“I don’t know how many times I cried in his office,” Réjean recalls. The sixty-year-old baked chocolate chip cookies that filled the air with the music of Serge Gainsbourg and Claude Nougaro.
“It’s been a year to the day since I arrived,” he said, his eyes in the water. In the middle of the housing crisis, it was Joseph who found this place for him, in a building of the Société d’habitation et de développement de Montréal. “He really worked hard,” insists Réjean.
“Yes, but you did the bulk of the work,” Joseph Achille repeats several times.
Against a current
The day before their reunion, Prime Minister François Legault stressed at a press conference that “100% of the housing problem comes from the increase in the number of temporary immigrants.”
The previous week, it was rather the connection between asylum seekers and homelessness that Mr. Legault established on Paul Arcand’s radio show: “There is an explosion in the number of homeless people, of people with mental health problems. We must make a certain link with the explosion of asylum seekers who arrive here because they want to improve their quality of life,” said Mr. Legault.
“It’s terrible to talk like that, I’m not afraid to say it,” Réjean retorts. “That the government decides to put obstacles in the way of people who can bring so much here, I will never be able to understand. »
Joseph Achille weighs his words: “It’s really a shame that the Prime Minister sees things like that. From my little posture on the ground, I think he is wrong. »
He does not deny that the Maison du Père or other homelessness resources have welcomed more people with precarious immigration status in recent years, whether they are asylum seekers, temporary workers or people who no longer have status. “But they are far from being the majority,” he is keen to point out. He has also started a master’s degree in social work to document how homelessness resources are adapting to new realities.
As for mental health resources, asylum seekers are simply not entitled to them, except in rare exceptions, and their health care is paid for directly by a federal program.
Course
In 2018, in his early thirties, Joseph Achille left Cameroon because of the “situation that had become untenable” for LGBTQ+ rights defenders. The country criminalizes same-sex relationships. Arbitrary arrests and violent detentions are rife, as local and international organizations have been denouncing for many years.
Upon arrival, he filed an asylum application, which was accepted three years later, in December 2021, by Ottawa, after postponements due to the pandemic. He then became a “protected person”, in administrative jargon, or in other words, a refugee who can now obtain permanent residence.
However, his file is one of the 38,000 waiting for the green light from Quebec, while the CAQ government has only planned for a maximum of 3,700 “refugees recognized on site” (his category) per year. At the current rate, it would therefore take more than 10 years for all of them to obtain permanent residence in the province.
As a result, Joseph Achille has been waiting for his permanent status for two and a half years. “You have to know how to conjugate the verb wait in all tenses. I wait, I will wait, I will always wait, I know how to wait,” he says with a certain irony. He says that the biggest uncertainty has passed, that of knowing whether his asylum application would be accepted, but that indeed, this “in-between is stressful”.
The heaviness of labels
“If the government wants fewer temporary workers, it can make us permanent,” he slips gently, taking care to avoid any acerbic tone. Above all, he would not like to appear ungrateful or complaining: he was, “like many asylum seekers”, he says, “in a hurry to quickly give back to Quebec which opened this door for us”.
As soon as he arrived, he quickly got involved socially: on Mondays, he helped with homework, on Tuesdays, he was coach as a volunteer soccer player at the sports center, on Thursdays, he leads French workshops with non-French speaking people. “I left Cameroon with very strong social implications, it was unthinkable for me not to get involved here. »
He landed his first job on an outdoor skating rink: “What a great way to land in Quebec,” he says with a laugh. When the pandemic hit, he was one of the “arms” who answered the government’s call. He worked for two years in a CHSLD.
Two years ago, he was hired by Maison du Père, an organization that helps men escape homelessness and reintegrate socially.
This is how his path crossed that of Réjean. “It was a health problem that made me leave the Islands,” says this 64-year-old man, without wanting to elaborate on the issue. In a state of shock, he left in December, sleeping in parks, behind houses, under bridges, passing through the Maritime provinces, days of being “cold and afraid”, of “giving himself another 24 hours “.
He wanted to get to Montreal, “for better [se] get by,” but he couldn’t afford to take the bus. Shortly after his arrival, he came to the Father’s House, met his first speaker and then Joseph.
Neither of them wear their past on their foreheads: “But yes, it is a label that is sometimes difficult to bear. Sometimes, I avoid talking about it so as not to reduce the discussion to that. My status is part of what I am at the moment, but it is just a tiny part,” concludes Joseph Achille.