THE LONG WAY HOME ..........
A recollection of my MOST poignant memories growing up in rural Jamaica, not in any particular order, but shared as the memories arrive....
Thirteen years of living (age difference) separates us but an island living experience weaves a binding thread that keeps us connected in myriad ways.
When he looks at me he sees a younger version of his Grandmother who raised him and a mother who was often times physically absent but who loves him regardless.
And quite often, the aroma of my cooking pulls him back to the house in Bellefield, Manchester, where he grew up before he left for Canada at the age of 15.
Nine (9) years ago, when I was clutched in the harried throes of surviving, a faculty support staff at York University in Toronto, Canada, where I was a student, looked me dead in my eyes and uttered words that would alternatively haunt and inspire me for years to come; "remember who you are!"
I guess that was her way of encouraging me to continue to keep trying to land elusive jobs in my career field in non-profit program management and implementation.
At the time, her words rang hollow to me, who was a single mother, and mature student, who had recently relocated to Canada from Jamaica with the determination to carve out a better life for myself and my daughter.
I remember having to balance the near impossible task of single motherhood with my role as a full time international student at YorkU, in fulfillment of the strict requirements of my then student visa. Initially, I did not qualify for a work permit, so I had to find legal and ethical ways to earn in order to financially provide for myself and my daughter including keeping a roof over our heads, all without a work permit.
Despite the overwhelming odds stacked against me; by a combination of +Divine Favour+, strategic planning and determination, I managed to successfully complete my first semester at YorkU with qualifying grades that allowed me to apply for an off campus work permit. This meant I could then widen my search for jobs, which up to that point, had been restricted to on campus jobs, none of which I was able to get, despite the many times I applied for different positions.
In reflection, somehow, no matter what I did, the doors I tried to push open remained firmly closed despite the myriad ways I tried to advocate for myself. Self-advocacy was a honed skill which stemmed from my innate ability to lobby for improved circumstances for others and which, through frequent, applied use and proven results, had become a default setting. As I navigated during my early days as a new immigrant in Canada, self-advocacy was an instinctive and proactive mode which I switched to automatically, when faced with challenging situations My ability to effectively self advocate is influenced by the many years I worked as a journalist and development advocate in media and non profit in Jamaica, the Caribbean and other parts of the world.
To help provide some background for context; I began attending York University in September 2012, but did not secure a job on York University's campus until April the following year (2013), one full year after I moved to Canada.
How did I survive that first year?!!
>> By NOT listening to my childhood friend who I had attended high school with and who, when she became aware of the difficulties I was facing finding suitable work in Canada, candidly advised me to "dumb down" my resume by excluding some of the work experience and academic qualifications from my two page resume which I had already reduced from a five page CV! In retrospect, I feel fortunate that I did not listen to her, because it was the remnants of my 5-page CV (which I kept at two pages despite her advise to shorten/curate it even more), which ended up impressing an employer who visited a job agency where I had registered shortly after arriving in Canada. And that not only landed me the up to then elusive job I had been seeking, but would prove to be the beginning of doors previously closed swinging wide open to let me in. Doors which I had been desperately pounding on, even while I +PRAYED+, anxious to be let in, anxious and sometimes impatient for job opportunities that would take me back onto a path that was more towards the accomplished, professional self who I was, before I migrated to Canada and morphed primarily an International Student; which unfortunately, made little provision for the other aspects of myself I needed to be to survive in a full sense. I was able to successfully juggle the role of being a mother to my daughter and my other responsibilities, because I am a Jamaican woman with a history of hardships and pain which I had learned how to successfully navigate in order to remain sane, viable and functioning from day today. This new experience of having to reinvent myself, from the very outset, seemed destined to simply add to my already lived personal traumas during a 50% lived life. I migrated to Canada when I was just past 40 years old, and was headed towards the BIG FIVE O = 50. So believe me when I tell you, that when I arrived in Canada in April 2011, I had LIVED!! I had LIVED and LOVED and GIVEN birth and MOTHERED and ENAMCIPATED so many persons from social and economic EXCLUSION in a Jamaica which struggled with the challenges of the remnants of a colonial past tied to slavery and the myriad social and other maladies that accompany that. Yet when I arrived at the Pearson Airport with my carryon luggage and a single suitcase as I had deliberately packed 'light' and my very precious daughter in tow, I had to mentally and psychological dial back all I had been and had become, and allowed myself to be morphed and moulded into something else. I had to be so pliable that there were times when I was simultaneously everything and nothing all at once. The immigrant experience is so complex, that it defies exact narrative or written explanation. Like they say: It id better FELT than TELT; meaning, it is more adequately experienced than explained / told.
ALSO, through +DIVINE INTERVENTION+, when another Jamaican student whom I had met in the tutorial for a course we took together at York University, forwarded an email to me with a call or invitation to submit an essay of 100 words. The essay should focus on poverty as an environmental issue in keeping with the focus of my then Environmental Studies Undergraduate degree program in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York UniversityAs Providence would have it, my friend sent the email to me after the deadline for the International Student writing competition had been extended. It appears that they either had not received any submissions or were not satisficed with the calibre of any essays they might have received by the initial deadline. It has been my experience that whenever God has gifts for those who HONOUR him, he usually sends #DIVINE opportunities via specific channels and often, in the beginning, those persons who are God's emissaries, bearing beacons of #HOPE camouflaged as opportunities, usually realize that they have been given a DIVINE assignment which will last way beyond an initial contact. To make a long story short, I wrote and submitted an essay in the Writing Contest and was contacted directly by thecsenior Faculty member from The Faculty of Environmental Studies who had coordinated the writing contest, and advised that I had been selected as the Winner. That #WiN sparked an AVALANCHE of opportunities that effectively took me from the desperate place where I had been existing, towards job opportunities that the Senior Professor referred me to as well as other job opportunities off campus which included a 6 month stint at my first ever job in a call centre working with a third party company on a Bell Mobility campaign for Bell Canada. That job qualified me sufficiently to land a job in a similar but expanded role at one of Canada's top five (5) banks working on an internal campaign for the bank's client . I worked in that position for close to two years. Before that, I landed two (2) part time jobs on the York University campus as a Research Assistant to one of my Professors who was working on a Canada-wide community research project and I also held a Knowledge Mobilization and Online Content Coordination Role with The Centre for Refugee Studies at York University for one (1) year (2013-2014).
The Bible says "A man's gift will make room for him." If anyone reading this is going through difficult times, keep going! Keep praying and believing God for miracles and rescues. God will come through for you in the end. πΏππΏ
