[LINK] "Cold comfort: The trials of Sweden’s Syrian refugees"

[rfmcdonald]

Shannon Gormley's MacLean's article looking at the situation of Syrian refugees in small-town Sweden, struggling to adapt to a very different environment in relative isolation.

Mohammad Mahsoun doesn’t understand what he’s looking at. His morning began the way his mornings often do. He woke up. He climbed out of bed. He got dressed. He left his bedroom. He stepped outside. But when he saw it—whatever it was—he gasped, blinked, gasped again: a delicate, translucent film clung to the grass, the trees, the road, everything.

Is it some kind of chemical fertilizer? he wondered. Vandalism? The end of the world?

It’s not. It’s the season’s first frost, and Mahsoun, a 26-year-old Syrian from Aleppo with a master’s in engineering, will wake up to many more: He’s close to the Arctic Circle, where Sweden houses thousands of refugees. Throughout Europe’s deepening refugee crisis, the Swedish government has been uniquely generous: It predicts it will receive 190,000 asylum applications in 2015, and offers permanent residency to all Syrian asylum seekers who have come to Sweden. But some refugees find that coming to Sweden is easier than integrating within it.