I’m watching Global National‘s coverage of Syrian refugees and I am struck by one thought: they are risking everything for the sake of their children.
The thought hits close to home. I am an immigrant who came to this country as a child. My family came in the wave of newcomers in the 1960s.
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Our circumstances were not as desperate as the refugees of today, but my mom and dad left behind everything and everyone they knew to come to a country about which they knew very little.
They had no language, no jobs, no money.
What they did have were two little girls who were too young to appreciate the sacrifice their parents were making and the opportunities that sacrifice would offer them.
At the time there was no internet or television coverage so they didn’t know what to expect, but they had heard promising things about Canada. We arrived as “landed immigrants” a month before I started grade one.
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In Italy, my mother had stayed home with us, but in Canada she would have to get a job. My parents worked long hours and opposite shifts to minimize daycare needs. Our first babysitter told my mother she wouldn’t take my baby sister anymore because “she cries for you all day.”
As a child, I found it easiest to learn English and soon I was the family translator everywhere from the bank to the supermarket.
I vividly remember my mother asking me at seven years of age to tell the bank teller what she wanted to do and I recall my father – a proud man in his 30s – struggling to learn a new language.
I remember trying to explain to him the difference between through, though, bough and rough. How do you know how to pronounce which “ough”? My answer was there’s no rule – you just know.
Shopping when you can’t read labels was frustrating for them – the difference between mild and old cheddar, or worse, between shampoo and nail polish remover.
It was humbling and difficult. But, I don’t ever remember my parents complaining about the hardships they endured.
They were grateful to be here and they were, as all immigrants are – especially grateful for the opportunities they could see this country was providing for their children. And, they were proud of every success my sister and I ever had.
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As soon as they were able, they applied to become Canadian citizens.
Our oldest, dearest friends are the ones we met soon after we arrived. We were children when we met and now our own children are friends, even as young adults. Canada has been very good to us.
I am older now and can see more clearly the risk my parents took half a century ago. They saw a chance for a better life for their children and they seized it.
Canada has continued to welcome immigrants and refugees. The pattern that repeats generation by generation is parents, sometimes highly trained professionals who gave up all that was familiar at home to come to a new land and a new culture to drive a taxi, work in a sweatshop or do other jobs that are low pay and long hours, all to provide their children with the gift that is life in Canada.
So when I see the faces of refugees in Mike Armstrong’s stories from Jordan and those arriving in Jennifer Tryon’s stories in Toronto, it resonates with me in a deeply personal way.
I see the adults and I think of how fully aware of the gamble and sacrifice they are making, and I see the children and how unaware they are of their good fortune.
Someday they will know.
(And they will say what I want to say now: thank you Mom and Dad.)
Doriana Temolo is Global National’s News Director.
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