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Bulla Mustakys ...the oldest ESL student.

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We, my family and I, and the family of my friend and colleague were granted, ministers permit to come to Canada as government sponsor refugees. Our jobs as a human rights lawyers had put a target on our backs. To protect us the Canadian government sponsored our immigration. The two families traveled together. Shortly after our arrival, and thanks to local contacts we had secured through our work in El Salvador, organizations such as the Jesuit Centre for Social Justice and the Inter Church Committee for Human Rights in Latin America, we were able to connect with a supportive community. Through these relationships, we secured a house where the two families could live together in community. Our new home in Toronto was in a neighborhood on Jones Avenue near Danforth Avenue, in what is known as Greektown. There was relief in finally having a place to call home, a space where uncertainty began to settle into something more stable, more hopeful. Once we had housing, our next step was to regi...
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A Mysterious Object

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 Everyone in the family knew the object, even if no one could say with certainty where it had come from. The older siblings remembered it on the mantel above their grandparents’ fireplace, as fixed to that living room as the house itself. It looked ancient; the wood it was made of had been polished by time, and its sharp edges had been rounded by the passage of years. It was older than memory. Its brass plates on each of the side pieces were polished and, at the same time, marked with little dents that added to what had once been decorative symbols engraved in it. Each of the wooden side pieces was about forty centimetres long, three wide, and about one centimetre thick.  The two side pieces were attached at the top by a bolt. Their extension was guided at the bottom by a fine curved piece of wood attached to each side. The curved piece had a little bolt attached to the side pieces that made the two side pieces wider or shorter through a small guide cut through the centre, all...
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Easter and Holy Week ... Memories

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 In Canada, Easter is celebrated, not commemorated. It’s a time of sweetness and joy, marked by hot-cross buns and chocolate eggs left behind by a cheerful rabbit. The origins of this celebration, however, reach far back, long before Christianity. In the Northern Hemisphere, Easter echoes ancient traditions linked to Ishtar, the Mesopotamian Akkadian goddess of love, fertility, and war, venerated as the “Queen of Heaven” and associated with the planet Venus. At its heart, Easter is about renewal, the awakening of spring, the return of life after a long, cold winter. In El Salvador, things were very different. We didn’t celebrate Easter. We commemorated Holy Week. It was a time devoted to the commemoration of Christ’s martyrdom. It was solemn, somber, and filled with silent reverence. There were long masses and slow processions. Sonsonate is one of the places in El Salvador where Holy Week commemorations are known for their historical significance. It was a place where the symbols o...
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The Procession of the Holy Burial (A Memory of My Childhood)

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My grandmother Virginia, my mom’s mom, had a deep and enviable devotion to the Catholic faith. In Chinameca, our small town, the leadership she shared with her husband, my grandfather Miguel Enrique, from whom I was named after, made her an influential figure in many decisions surrounding church life. Although my grandfather wasn’t particularly devout, he rarely attended Mass or any other religious services, his voice carried remarkable weight. So much so that Father Montesinos and later Father Ventura often relied on my grandparents’ judgment when making important decisions about church events. I was about seven years old when I first witnessed the preparations for the Good Friday procession during Holy Week. That year, however, something unexpected happened. One afternoon, I was sitting in my grandparents’ living room, absorbed in old comics, my grandfather, who was a typographer who owns the only printing press in town, had collected over the years, from the pages from Sunday papers...
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Lisa and her cat

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Lisa, a young Trinidadian immigrant living in Toronto, moved to Montreal with one clear intention: to learn French, a dream she had carried since childhood. Back in Charlotteville, in Tobago, she used to play with the children of Haitians working there. She had always thought the way they spoke to one another was beautiful, melodic. After, her family immigrated to Toronto, her connection to her French-speaking friends quietly faded away. After graduating from University of Toronto, Lisa decided to dedicate a year of her life to learning a second language. What better way than to immerse herself completely? She moved to Montreal, determined to live and work in a French-speaking environment. She relished her newfound independence as a university graduate. For the first time, she truly felt free, eager to explore her adopted country and embrace a new, official Canadian language. Montreal, one of Canada’s most vibrant bilingual cities, seemed perfectly suited to help her become the biling...
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Not even the Chafarotes dare to

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Definition: A chafarote is a broad, short, and often curved sword. Informally, particularly in Central America, it is used as a derogatory term for a crude, ignorant, or uneducated soldier or officer, often referring to a pompous member of the military. That is to say, every single one of them. To friends who ask me, “What’s happening in my homeland, El Salvador?” The situation is complex, painful and deeply rooted in history. To understand it, we have to look back a bit. Since independence from Spain in 1821, Central America has experienced a strong concentration of power in the hands of the Creole families who led the break from the crown. That power was never truly shared. It remained with the elites who controlled the land and the means of production. El Salvador was no exception. Even so, there was something resembling a bourgeois democracy, with civilian presidents backed, and monitored, by the military establishment. Everything changed in December 1931. The Minister of Defense o...
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Atecozol

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Now that I am retired, I have begun to enjoy the facilities at the YMCA in Peterborough, especially the swimming pool.  After several months of practice, I have managed to swim more than a thousand metres, something that fills the little boy still living inside me with quiet pride. The same little boy who had such a hard time growing up doing any kind of sports.  At the time I didn’t know that the reasons I had such a hard time on sports was because I have flat feet. Now I ware special insoles inside my shoes that help me to walk something but as a child I didn’t know, neither were my parents aware of my condition. Since I didn’t do many sports and walking or running was so painful for me, I entrain my self reading, and by not doing sports I became overweight at a very young age.  Thus, with time swimming for me be become the sport of choice. Although I wasn’t very good at because I didn’t like sports.   One day, while I was swimming, in the pool of the Y anothe...
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