This summer I had the chance to have dinner with a remarkable family, the Berhanes, who are originally from Eritrea.

The mom, Miliete, set the table with a mouth-watering selection of delicious East African treats, including my personal favourite, injera, the spongy bread perfect for soaking up the lentils and spices on our plates.

Meanwhile, her husband Aaron and their three children passed around the dishes and filled glasses with juice.

The Berhane family: (from left) Frieta, Aaron, Eiven, Mielete, Mussie. (Mark Ulster/CBC)

It looked as if they had been through this dinner ritual a thousand times, but they hadn't, they were really only now getting re-accustomed to each other.

You see, in 2001, the Eritrean government started cracking down and arresting the independent journalists in the country.

At that time, Aaron Berhane was the editor of the country's largest independent newspaper. Fearing the worst, he fled his homeland, making the difficult decision to leave his wife and children behind while promising them they would be together again one day.

It was only this summer, after nearly nine years of being apart that Aaron was reunited with his family here in Canada. And that is what made that dinner so remarkable.

The rationale

While working on these stories of escape from around the world for CBC Radio's Promised Land, I am reminded again and again about the hardship that people go through to come to Canada.

The physical danger, the expense, the risk to their safety and, the greatest sacrifice for many, the separation from and the impact that has on their families.

What has come up repeatedly in so many of the stories that co-producer Mark Ulster and I have been recording is the repercussions these changes have on the children who are involved.

Most of the people we have interviewed are genuinely humble about their escapes and have not wanted to draw attention to what they went through, even in their private lives.

But what then seems to happen is that their children grow up unaware of the rationale and the risks their parents took to get them to Canada, seeing, in many cases, only the heartbreak and the separation.

The dark moments

Take, for example, Uyen Vu, who escaped from Vietnam along with her parents and siblings when she was nine years old.

Uyen remembers parts of that escape vividly but she was never privy to the details of the plan and, once they arrived in Canada, the escape was never talked about in her home.

As a result, she remembers mainly the darker moments, like when her father was caught during one of their escape attempts and was taken away to prison.

She also remembers when she was eight and her sister, Ni, was 10 and the two of them had to be left alone in their home in Saigon for months while their parents and other siblings were living in the south, trying to forge identities as fishermen.

Just last year, her family celebrated their 30th anniversary of arriving in Canada and, in the course of making our documentary about her family, Uyen asked her parents why they never discussed the details or the motivations of the escape.

Her father, Quang, responded that he didn't want to burden the children with what the parents were going through, or with any expectations that might not be fulfilled.

To escape was the parents' choice and therefore the emotional burden was to be theirs alone.

A badge of honour

Another family we interviewed, the Baraniks, who escaped from Communist Czechoslovakia in 1981, had a very different approach.

The passport documents of Eva Baranik and then four-year-old Miso when they escaped Communist Czechoslovakia in 1981. (Mark Ulster/CBC)

Miso was only four when his parents, Alino and Eva, managed to get away. But he knows every detail of that story, of the plan, the motivation and the risk his parents took.

Miso recalls being carried by his father, who was trying to outrun a Yugoslavian border guard as the family was running toward the safety and freedom of neighbouring Italy.

The guard was hitting Miso's father on the back of the head with his rifle and shooting at them.

But the Baraniks survived that heart-pounding race across the border and theirs is a story that is retold often among friends and family.

Now a man in his early 30s, Miso wears his family's escape story as a badge of honour and with good humour.

No easy transition

Time doesn't always heal these deep emotional wounds, of course. Some children who escape even to a country as seemingly embracing as Canada, are left deeply disturbed from the experience of having to uproot their lives and by the impact on their families.

In the course of documenting one of our upcoming episodes, "Escape from Honduras," I met a woman who came to Canada when she was nine with her mother and two younger brothers after her father had been killed.

While she was on the flight here she recalls singing the Honduran national anthem because she didn't want to leave her home country.

Coming to this strange place and being picked on for being different did not make the transition any easier. Even today, as a mother now herself, she cannot talk about leaving Honduras and how difficult that escape was without crying.

But life has to go on. You build new families and, sometimes, if you're lucky like the Berhanes, you are reunited with the ones you love.