slow down!” Mom called out. I was running ahead of them, always the scout. At 13 I could dodge not only the dodge balls in gym class but also the people moving through the airport. I stopped before I got out of their field of vision.
“It’s down there!” I called. The stairs down to the next level were strange—they were moving. I took a hesitant step onto their surface, joined by my brother and sisters.
Rushing off the escalator, I was the first to arrive at the carousel. Pulling the boarding pass from my pocket I compared the flight number with the numbers on the wall. Our luggage was coming one carousel over, and I waved for my family to join me. We moved, spread out in a line with my parents holding the rear. Even though they weren’t moving all that fast, I could tell they were excited. I hadn’t seen a smile stay on Dad’s face for that long since—well, perhaps never.
“We have the green bag,” Mom was telling me. “And don’t forget the red suitcase.”
“I know, Mom, I know,” I spoke back to my mom with a wave of dismissal. She licked her finger and came at my face, but I dodged it deftly. If having your mom clean your face with her spit is embarrassing in Paraguay, I knew it couldn’t be any better in Canada.
She made a move to chase me, but there was no competition. I ran away, running around a few other weary travellers. One older gentleman glared at me, and I used my charm to let him know that I wasn’t up to anything suspicious. Finally, a smile cracked his face as he followed my gaze back to my family. There were regular travellers in airports, and then there was us, clearly out of our element but clearly loving every second.
“Mom, look!” my brother was saying. I followed his pointing hand and saw a shop, the beginning of a line of storefronts stretching off impossibly far.
“Ice cream,” I whispered. A treat that we could only dream of. Mom looked up at Dad, the desire to treat her children evident in her eyes. They tried communicating quietly, but we weren’t little kids anymore.
“Can we have some ice cream?” my older sister asked.
“Yes,” Dad responded, and we all let out a little cheer. Beside us, the conveyor belt began to move, still empty. He fished his wallet out of his pocket, opening it. I had gotten so used to seeing it empty that something—anything—in it was a surprise. The bills were colourful and strange, completely foreign.
Dad looked at Mom. Mom looked at Dad. They looked at us. We looked at each other.
“You go,” Art said to me. I shook my head, more nervous than when standing in front of a penalty shot.
“I think you should,” I whispered to him. We went through the entire family until we finally realized that Elfie, the only one with any guts, should do the buying.
“Go buy one,” Mom said to Elfie. She pulled one of the bills from Dad’s wallet. We didn’t know how much it was or what it meant, but she handed it to my sister and spun her in the direction of the shop. Elfie hesitated, but we all cheered her on with our whispers. Behind us, there was a loud clunk as the first piece of luggage hit the conveyor belt. It wasn’t ours.
We all watched Elfie without breathing, as if she was going to defuse a bomb. She got to the shop and pointed at the ice cream. She was trying to speak, but it didn’t look like any words were falling on understanding ears. But the pointing worked, the money exchanged hands, and she was given the ice cream—and three coins—in return.
Another bill passed, another trip, another three coins.
After four trips and some serious smiles from the ice cream, we figured we had this down.
Finally, all seven of us had a cone. Elfie had gotten every single one. And received 21 silver coins in return. Seven dollars and twenty-one quarters later—we had no idea until later that two bills would have sufficed—we had had our first taste of the country that would become our home.
* * *
Canada’s immigration department had denied us entry for over 10 dedicated years of our trying to get into the country. Due to health concerns, the number of children, my family’s poverty and the lack of family support in Canada, it was tough to meet the immigration point requirements in order to be accepted into the country. Which is why, perhaps, it felt like the Israelites entering the Promised Land as we landed in Toronto at the beginning of August 1970. A thin and athletic 13-year-old with blond hair, freckles and not a word of English to my name, I was nervous yet excited about the opportunities and possibilities ahead.
Everything was big—from the plane we travelled on to the vastness of the land in which we were arriving. After the flat plains of the Chaco, the rise and fall of the Appalachian Mountains was new to my young eyes. But we plunged further inland and flew to Winnipeg, a city with a rising industrial emphasis and a growing population of people just like us—immigrants, refugees, Mennonite folk with only hard work and the fear of religious persecution in our past. We were in a land where we could build our churches, speak our language, work our work, drink our maté (a tea-like drink that’s passed around with a communal spoon-like straw), worship our God and continue our traditions. Of course, at my age I wasn’t as concerned about our traditions as my parents were. In a country where homes were solid and my town would be thousands of times the population of my village, I was excited about the future.
Would Canada be the land of prosperity, the land flowing with milk and honey, that we had all dreamed it would be?
It was amazing that we could travel thousands of kilometres away from our home and move into a community with people who understood us. Even those who didn’t understand us were willing to accept us.
When we arrived, my dad and older siblings went immediately to work. For the first year the income was pooled until we could buy and pay off our first and only family home. From that point forward my siblings could work for their own income but paid room and board until they moved out.
Mennonites, though not the wealthiest in Paraguay or anywhere, came with a hard work ethic, honesty and loyalty that made them fantastic employees. Dad began working as a labourer and moved to a machine operator, building furniture. The work was different than what we were used to as a family, and the fulfillment it provided was not the same as working on a farm and bringing in your own food, but the work was consistent and the income well appreciated. The Palliser factory was full of others like him, fresh off the boat, as well as immigrants who had been in Canada for several years. There was a camaraderie that pervaded the factory and boded well for keeping employees loyal.
* * *
We arrived in Winnipeg in August. Because we had thought we would be immigrating sooner than we did, I hadn’t gone to the junior high school class in Paraguay that started in February. This meant that not only was I a year older than some of the others in my grade to begin with, but now I had missed half a year of grade 7. We were forced to make a decision—should I go into grade 7, at nearly 14 years old? Or should we bump me up to grade 8, where there were people a little closer to my age?
Given that junior high school is not the easiest place to be, any teenager with a few strikes against him is likely to get bullied or victimized. With not knowing the language, with my blond hair and freckles, with not knowing a single person going to the junior high school, I already had a few strikes against me. Dropping into a grade 7 class while almost two years older than everyone else would be the tipping point, so I wasn’t eager to jump into that atmosphere. Besides, I’d always had an aptitude for math and had never struggled through school.
Though it took some convincing,
