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Summer Camping

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The concept of summer was new to me. When we arrived in Canada, winter was the true shock. In my homeland, summer seemed to stretch across the whole year, warm and familiar, like a song I had always known. It took me a few years to understand why Canadians waited for summer with such longing, why those brief months felt almost sacred. Summer here is a season of festivals, celebrations, barbecues, gardening, civic gatherings, and long afternoons spent outdoors. It is a time to bathe in wild waters, in lakes and rivers, and to travel across this vast country. Road trips become a national pastime. The days are long, the evenings gentle and warm, and Canadians seem to spend the whole year dreaming of these few golden months. The mother of a friend visiting from Ghana once described the Canadian seasons better than anyone I had ever heard. When someone asked what impressed her most about Canada, she answered, “Well, it is cold, that is for sure.” Then she added, “Autumn is colourful: everyo...
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It Was Not Always My Hobby

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Starting a new life in Canada brought one challenge after another, and transportation soon became one of the hardest. Public transit was expensive, and I was living on social assistance. With so little income, I needed to find work. As a government-sponsored refugee, I had spent most of my first-year learning English. I was far from fluent, yet I knew enough to begin looking for an entry-level job. Beneath that practical search was a deeper need: I wanted to prove to myself that I could build a life in my newly adopted land. In March of the following year, I began to look for a job in earnest. I was willing to do almost any kind of work, but I carried one hope with me: if possible, I wanted to serve in the nonprofit sector and help people in need. That hope led me to my first job, working overnight at a women’s shelter run by the Salvation Army. The shelter was near the Junction in Toronto’s west end, relatively close to the rooming house where I lived. Finding the job gave me a sense ...
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Water Is Life

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One of my earliest memories of the sea and the sand is of my grandfather changing into his bathing suit inside a small hut made of dried palm leaves. It served as shelter, changing room, and shade for those of us who did not own property beside the beach. Why that particular memory remains in my mind, and not another one that might seem more meaningful, playing in the water, holding my mother’s hand, or laughing with my father, I cannot say. Memory is like that. The brain keeps certain images and lets others dissolve, and at least for me, there is no logical explanation for what it chooses to preserve. I am sure it was not my first visit to the ocean, but it is the first one I remember. I wish I could recall stepping into the water, running barefoot along the shore, or playing with my parents beneath the sun. I remember many other visits to the beaches of my homeland, yet from that day, what stayed with me was the aging body of my grandfather as he put on his bathing suit and hung his ...
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"... The English children don't like me dad..."

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 Family dinner was perhaps the most important time of the week for our newly blended family. It was the one occasion when both sets of children truly spent time together, a chance to reconnect, share stories, and catch up on everything that had happened during the week. With children of such different ages, those moments were rare and precious. Saturday dinner became our shared promise: no matter what, we would all be home for family dinner. My youngest son had what I can only describe as a sunny disposition. He radiated warmth, with a natural friendliness and an enviable tenacity. These qualities made him a joy to be around. His creativity and playful sense of humour drew people in, helping him make friends easily, at least under familiar circumstances. His determination quickly became legendary in our household. I remember when his school organized a chocolate bar fundraiser and asked students to sell door to door. He approached the task with relentless enthusiasm, knocking on ev...
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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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