Even 45 years later, Diane Dicks can still remember exactly where she was when the Lord called to her and cemented her firmly on a path toward a lifetime of service.
“I was watching a TV show that showed the story of the Vietnamese boat people on the waters, drowning while fleeing the country. My husband Adrian worked the night shift, and that night he called me and said, ‘Diane, we have to do something for these people,’” she recalled.
“I’m thinking, I’ve got a four-month-old child, four kids, what can we do? And he said that it seemed like when the Holocaust went on and nobody helped, that this was God giving us a second chance. He told me in his Bible that he had read Matthew 25, ‘For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in.’”
Dicks told her husband that while God may have been calling on him to help those in need, she had yet to feel the same. The next morning, the course of her life’s work would change dramatically when that exact calling found her as well.
“ I turned on the TV at eight o’clock in the morning, and a Christian talk show was on, showing not only the boat people on the water, but the host proclaiming Matthew 25. I will never forget it, all I could think was that God was calling me too, and I heard Him,” she said.
With that encounter, Dicks’ life of service in helping refugee families torn apart, through no fault of their own, began. What ensued is the story of a near half-century worth of tireless commitment and around-the-clock dedication that continues even now through her retirement.
Over the last 45 years, her work has grown from simple grassroots parish efforts to extensive formal roles, including years spent as a refugee sponsorship administrator at World Vision Canada, where she helped develop the Refugee Sponsorship Training Program and handbook, as well as the Archdiocese of Toronto’s Office for Refugees (ORAT).
Throughout her career, Dicks was a member of various committees, such as the Catholic Refugee Sponsorship Council (CRSC), the NGO-Government Committee, the Iraqi Roundtable Committee and the RA Advisory Committee.
Dicks has also collaborated with sponsorship agreement holders and churches, like St. Anne’s in Brampton, Ont., to sponsor refugees, focusing initially on the Vietnamese and later on Kosovans, Syrians, Africans and countless others living in war-torn countries across the globe.
While recounting decades worth of work and commitment, she couldn’t help but bring to mind the first family she assisted in coming to Canada through her home parish of St. John Fisher — a Vietnamese family fleeing Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur in the early 1980s.
“In the end, I helped facilitate more than 3,000 Vietnamese refugees to Canada, 95 per cent or so, I’d say I was hands-on with their case, and I still think about all of them,” she said. “The first family has become an extended family of my own; they’ve been in our lives ever since.”
More than simply advocating and assisting in bringing refugees to Canada, Dicks also worked to provide wrap-around care to so many throughout her career: resettling individuals, reuniting families and providing living spaces and apartments, all with a hands-on approach. She explained her drive to help refugees secure paid jobs as well, directly contacting companies like Maple Lodge Farms and Burlington Carpet to ensure fair and adequate work for the families she helped.
Her continuous work even allowed her to travel abroad on mission trips to Africa and Lebanon with ORAT in past years, a continued dedication even after retiring from taking on formal sponsorship roles.
Looking back on her life’s work, Dicks acknowledges that her lifetime vocation is a testament to God’s use of His people, admitting that her limited qualifications at the time once made her life’s mission seem impossible. She shared her experience moving to Toronto from her home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, one that also inspired her to continually work to bring families together.
“I would pay the 25 cents to phone my mother and father, crying because I missed them so much, and we never had the money to go back and forth to see each other. To think that I would never be able to see them again, I couldn’t fathom that,” she said. “That is something that drove me, even as someone with no experience, to want to help these people as best I could, and to reunite families torn apart by war.
“God doesn’t call the qualified; He qualifies the called,” Dicks added. “All I had was four children, my husband and my God, who qualified me. I’ve sat with prime ministers, ministers of immigration, PhD holders, and I just think: ‘God, you are so funny to use me in this way.’”
This April, Dicks was awarded the Sovereign’s Medal for Volunteers by the Governor General of Canada for her career facilitating the transition for thousands of refugees across the country.
On Oct. 5, a Mass and award ceremony at Toronto’s Good Shepherd Chaldean Cathedral celebrated the prestigious honour. In a full circle moment, both the first and last families Dicks sponsored joined in attendance to congratulate the woman who helped shape their lives in Canada, along with many other families she’s assisted over the years.
“It’s something I never thought would happen, but I am just blown away and humbled to receive (the award),” she said, thanking her family and colleagues for their lifelong support.
Dicks is now technically retired, although she laments that when God calls you to a ministry, you don’t ever get to truly retire. She hopes the recognition and story of her call to service inspires someone else to continue refugee support in her place for just as long.
When asked how someone would even begin to go about filling her shoes, she assured The Catholic Register that whoever steps up will be in the best of hands.
“Anybody can do it. If you feel the call, don’t fear, because God will help you through it,” she said.
