Ottawa has become an unexpected refuge for one Venezuelan family caught between grief at home and life abroad. Carlos and Neyda De Sousa were visiting their daughter Maria in the capital when earthquakes struck Venezuela on June 24, upending everything they knew back home.
A Visit Turned Into a Waiting Game
What began as a family trip to see their daughter in Ottawa has stretched into something far heavier. As news of the earthquakes reached them, Carlos and Neyda learned they'd lost loved ones in the disaster. Their home in Venezuela was severely damaged, leaving them with no clear picture of what they'll return to — or when that return might even be possible.
For Maria, watching her parents process this from thousands of kilometres away has been its own kind of hard. Being the one physically present in Ottawa, fielding calls and piecing together updates from family back home, has put her in the middle of a crisis she can do little to fix from here.
Medication Running Out, No Easy Answers
One of the more urgent problems the family now faces: the medications Carlos and Neyda brought with them for their stay in Ottawa are finite, and there's no guarantee of a quick, safe path back to restock or return home altogether. It's a reminder that disasters overseas don't stay overseas for families with one foot in Ottawa and one foot in the place they still call home.
The De Sousas' situation echoes what a number of Ottawa's Venezuelan community members have faced in recent years — sudden, disorienting gaps between the safety of life in the capital and the instability unfolding for relatives left behind. Ottawa is home to a modest but growing Venezuelan population, many of whom have navigated similar waves of bad news from family still in the country.
An Ottawa Family Bridging Two Worlds
For now, the De Sousas remain in Ottawa, trying to figure out next steps while supporting relatives in Venezuela from afar. Their story is a stark illustration of how global disasters ripple into everyday life in Canadian cities — a family trip to visit a daughter in Ottawa turning into an extended, anxious limbo, with the added weight of dwindling medication and an uncertain timeline for going home.
Ottawa's tight-knit Venezuelan community has often rallied around families navigating exactly this kind of hardship, offering support networks for those separated from loved ones during moments of crisis. Whether that kind of support materializes for the De Sousas remains to be seen, but their experience underscores how deeply personal international news events can become for the people living right here in the capital.
Source: CBC Ottawa
