Our Canada Our Country Our Stories

by Our Canada Magazine a Division of Reader's Digest

  —by Mary Lou Beattie, Hudson’s Hope, British Columbia

  Come From Away

  Learning to navigate the ways of Nova Scotians

  As a “come from away” in the 1970s, I was interested in the Gaelic language still spoken by elders in rural Cape Breton where my husband, Aaron, our two sons and I had settled. One Saturday, D.J. “Beag” MacDonald stopped by to say that the Sunday service in St. Andrews Church would feature the North Shore Gaelic Men’s Choir and a sermon preached entirely in Gaelic by Charlie “Holy” MacDonald.

  I talked Saul, my five-year-old, into accompanying me with a promise of lots of singing. But I didn’t know that the sermon itself would be more than an hour long, and that the only seats available when we arrived would be in the middle of the centre section, hardly the ideal place for an active five-year-old and his nervous mother.

  When the lengthy service ended, I pulled Saul outside, where we were stopped by a group of local women gathered to welcome us to the church. One leaned over my son and asked loudly in lilting English, “Did you enjoy the service, dear?”

  He answered politely: “Yes,” he said and I patted his shoulder approvingly.

  “And did you understand what the man was saying, dear?”

  “No, but my mother told me.”

  I gasped. The women raised eyebrows and looked at me in surprise. Everyone knew I didn’t speak a word of Gaelic, and I hoped that the obvious next question wouldn’t come. But it did.

  “And what did she say the man said, dear?”

  Saul smiled brightly. “He said, ‘Sit down and be quiet!’ ”

  N.D. Carmichael was a backhoe driver who helped many of us who immigrated to Victoria County in the 1970s. He was a quiet man and an artist with the backhoe who could work in difficult areas. He cleared rocks and trees, opened roads, built septic fields and dug wells. He seldom left the cab of his backhoe when he was working. He wouldn’t come to the house for tea and he never gave advice—except, in our case, once.

  When we started rebuilding our abandoned Cape Breton farm, we noticed that local people seldom gave advice unless we specifically asked for it. A neighbour might ask Aaron what he planned to do about the old barn, for example, and Aaron would describe what he had in mind and the neighbour would nod. Unless Aaron asked, “Do you think that will work?” nothing more would be said. But when he did ask, we would hear, “Well, I suppose you could do it that way, and I sure couldn’t tell you folks what to do, but then you might want to…” and we would get excellent information about how it best could be done and sometimes an offer to help.

  N.D. was typical. We needed a well, and we had brought in a hydrologist from the city to help us site it. There was a marsh at the foot of the hill on which our house sat, but we were told to definitely put the well higher up, near the house.

  When N.D. arrived with the backhoe, we explained to him what the hydrologist had said.

  “Well, those folks are supposed to know,” he said, and began to dig near the house. After he’d dug as far as the backhoe could reach, he stopped the machine and climbed down to look at the dry hole, now 12 feet deep.

  “That’s as far as I can go. Now, you might climb down there and dig a bit deeper with a shovel…” He looked at Aaron. The sides of the hole were beginning to fall in.

  Aaron grimaced. “What do you think about the foot of the hill?”

  N.D. nodded. “Oh, you’d find water down there, I guess.”

  He filled the original hole, smoothing the land neatly with the bucket of the backhoe, and drove to the foot of the hill, where he dug into a spring almost immediately. Clear water gushed out and N.D. pulled back the soil as Aaron threw a fibreglass liner into the well.

  Pleased with the result, N.D. promised to return with a load of gravel to put in the base of the well. However, he wondered if the bridge that crossed the stream on our driveway was strong enough for a load of gravel. We’d had trouble before with the bridge and had temporarily repaired it. Now, however, Aaron got some railroad ties for stringers and placed heavy boards across them, extending out on both sides.

  “How strong is your bridge?” N.D. asked, stopping the loaded truck the day he arrived.

  “It’s good; I rebuilt it and it’s strong.”

  The truck moved slowly ahead. Suddenly there was a cracking, splintering sound as the boards of the bridge pulled out and the truck slowly tipped into the stream and rested on its side. The truck was wider than the supports of the bridge and had pulled the bridge over as it tipped. Aaron frantically pulled open the door that now faced up and N.D. crawled out. He walked over to Aaron and stood looking at him.

  “So, that’s your good bridge, is it?”

  N.D. hauled the truck out with the backhoe while we levered logs underneath. By afternoon, the truck was standing on its wheels in the driveway. The door on the passenger side was damaged, but the engine started. Gravel was everywhere and the bridge was destroyed. It had to be rebuilt again.

  “Oh, I suppose I could get a culvert to go under the drive…” Aaron considered aloud.

  N.D. looked at him quickly. “A culvert is the only thing I’ll ever drive over again!” That settled it. A culvert was ordered, delivered and placed by N.D. before evening. Forty years later, it’s still solid.

  N.D. died a few years ago. He is greatly missed by his friends and neighbours. The “come-from-aways” of the 1970s and ’80s still talk about all he did to help build our homes and community.

  —by Ruth Morris Schneider, Baddeck, Nova Scotia

  Journey From Nepal

  Learning to live and thrive in multicultural Canada

  Originally from Nepal, we immigrated to Canada in January 2010. We first landed in Toronto, where it was tough for me and my family because of the cultural differences and the difficulty we had communicating. There was no one with whom we could share our feelings, but we also had many interesting experiences, such as figuring out the city bus and metro system and touring the Greater Toronto Area.

  After three months, we moved to Fredericton, where I joined the graduate program in the Department of Geodesy and Geomatics Engineering at the University of New Brunswick (UNB). This was a tough decision in my life, but it was an exciting learning process.

  I got my driver’s licence in Fredericton and we bought our first car. My wife, Sarmila, supported us financially by working at a hotel while she was pregnant. Our elder son, Amitesh, was happy with his school, sports and other activities offered at the Multicultural Association of Fredericton, the YMCA and UNB. While living in Fredericton, our second son, Aariz, was born and we became a family of four.

  I received a land-surveyor job offer from an Ontario-based company and we moved back to Toronto. Thanks to my job duties, I had the opportunity to travel to many different places in Ontario and Quebec. I learned about the geography, people and cultural differences across the two provinces. I completed my remaining four courses at Ryerson University and York University to become a professional land surveyor of Ontario.

  In 2013, we moved to Edmonton, which has a very strong job market in many disciplines. Every person I met was very happy in their job. The wages are also higher in this part of the country, but the weather is a bit colder!

  Amitesh is now in high school and participating in Air Cadets, which he joined in Fredericton. Aariz attends the daycare where Sarmila works full-time while she studies English as a Second Language part-time.

  To our surprise, we discovered a noticeable number of Nepalese families in Edmonton. They have their own community building here, which not many other cities have.

  We continue to interact with Canadian culture, though sometimes it is difficult. As permanent residents, we feel we have more of a responsibility to Canada and want to contribute towards its strong and positive presence in the world. With Canada being our new home, we also want to feel more secure, especially about our children’s future. Cultural and language differences are the immediate barriers for us, and we would
appreciate more support from government programs to help make us mentally, physically and economically healthier.

  I was well settled in Nepal job-wise, but I immigrated to Canada with my family to better our situation. I often feel we are still in a struggling phase. I continue to work towards securing a better job, perhaps a government position like I had in Nepal. Canada is a highly developed, multicultural country and I am proud to be a part of it.

  —by Janak Gautam, Edmonton, Alberta

  A Pioneering Black Nurse

  Ona Allen had to work hard to become one of the first black nurses in southern Ontario

  I didn’t know where he’d come from, but in 1946, he came to speak at our church in North Buxton, Ontario, urging coloured girls who wanted to take up nursing to apply to a new nine-month, government- funded registered nursing assistant course,” Ona Allen told me one recent February day at her lakeside home in Burlington, Ontario.

  I was conducting an interview with Ona at the time as part of the services provided by my company, Vintage Histories and Stories, which is designed to keep oral history alive for future generations.

  Ona was referring to black advocate Reverend W. Constantine Perry, who explained to her congregation that, with the war over, Ontario hospitals were overwhelmed. Temporary aides had helped nurses cope during the conflict, but they hadn’t been trained to assist with the health system’s greater and increasingly complex caseloads. In their place, the province had decided to train a new line of medical assistants in Toronto and Hamilton.

  Prior to hearing Perry, Ona says she never once considered nursing. After finishing high school in the early 1940s, she had studied to become a secretary. Despite achieving good marks in the course, discrimination prevented her from obtaining employment. Having grown up in nearby Raleigh Township, where poor farmers looked past skin colour to practice mutual aid, she found being shut out of the region’s emerging professional economy surprising and bitterly disappointing. She was compelled to seek seasonal labour, picking fruit and canning tomatoes.

  Still, the fact that Ona had been raised on a humble family farm and had gone to business school was itself significant. Born in North Buxton in 1925, Ona had been pushed towards higher education throughout her youth by her grandmother. “Don’t end up like all these little black girls and boys around here, singing and dancing,” Ona’s grandmother had insisted. “Get something in your head! Look at all the girls going to the universities. You can be one of them too!”

  Ona told me how she would never forget the day she—then Ona Morris—and her friend Cora Prince first arrived in Hamilton. “There we were,” she smiled, “a couple of country girls moving to the city.”

  Having graduated from the program in 1947, the two found work at the Hamilton General, where they came up against racial prejudice that was all too common throughout society back then. Sometimes, the prejudice came from her patients. “Get your black hands off me!” some would cry when she came to help them. Other times it was staff, in particular an assistant head nurse, who took to relegating her department’s “second-class jobs” to black staff. “Miss Morris,” she used to declare, “you can clean the utility room while the other girls do dressings and give meds.”

  When it wasn’t cleaning the utility room, Ona recalls, it was handing out trays and giving enemas. One day, fed up with the situation, Ona threatened to leave. “In the end, they changed that assistant head nurse and brought in another girl,” says Ona, but it was too late; both she and Cora had had enough. It wasn’t just the prejudice but also the poor pay and working conditions.

  Querying staff at Hamilton’s Mountain Sanitorium for employment opportunities led to a meeting in which the young RNAs were well received, treated with dignity and hired.

  After serving for just under a year at the sanitorium, Ona and Cora were encouraged to seek out the training required to obtain full nursing certification. They applied and were accepted to Chatham General and began the three-year program there in the summer of 1948.

  They graduated from the hospital’s rigorous and competitive program in June 1951. Wishing to give back to Chatham General upon graduating, they stayed on an extra year. “We were the first black nurses at the Chatham General,” Ona told me. True acceptance of black nurses only came, she believes, as a result of its fully integrated training program. Once local white families recognized that “our colour didn’t move off onto their daughters, who were also in training, and discovered that their daughters were really good friends with us, and that we had all trained and worked well together, things began to change.”

  In the fall of 1952, Ona was rehired at the Hamilton General. The following year, she met and married her now deceased husband, Alphonso Allen. The couple started a family two years later. Seven months into caring for their new son, the two agreed to share child care duties, with Alphonso working as a porter by day and Ona working nights at the Hamilton General. Nine years later, Alphonso found work at Ford, finally freeing up Ona to return to day shifts.

  She continued on days until her retirement in 1990. During her career, Ona gained experience in nearly every department of the Hamilton General. “I was accepted well in all the areas and by all the doctors there,” she recalls. That she was a people person, she says, accounted for a good part for her acceptance. “The profession pleased me,” she says with a smile. “I loved nursing.”

  Looking back, Ona argues it was in the 1950s that the nursing profession first opened up for black people in Hamilton. The extent to which this was true only became clear to her, however, when local hospitals later began hiring foreign nurses in large numbers. “The new girls would arrive and right away they would say, ‘Oh, I’m not doing that; we never had to do that,’ and they’d complain and complain, and ask for what they wanted,” Ona recalls.

  In contrast, in her early years, Ona says she mostly did what she was told. It was at this point she recognized how distinct her own experience of the profession had been. When a new West Indian nurse pointedly asked her one day, “Why are you so different from us?” she recalls answering, “I don’t know, but I’m a Canadian, and I worked hard to get where I am, even to get to be a nurse.”

  By then, she believes, few knew or recalled how hard it once had been for a black woman to enter, survive and thrive as a nurse in southern Ontario.

  —by John McCurdy, Hamilton, Ontario

  A Long Tradition of Service

  The special bond between firefighters and the community they serve is commemorated in a unique fashion

  Firefighters within my hometown of Kelowna, British Columbia, have long held a place of honour in the hearts and minds of the people they serve. In September 2011, timed to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States, the Kelowna Professional Firefighters Association acknowledged the special relationship they have developed with the community over the years by erecting a commemorative statue in front of Kelowna Fire Hall No. 1. Aptly named “Tradition of Service,” the statue was donated to the residents of the city, and, in an artistic and compelling way, bridges the gap between the modern era of Kelowna’s fire department and its early days.

  The origins of the Kelowna Fire Department can be traced back to a bucket brigade formed in the late 1890s. In 1903, the town had its first major fire, in which a local business was burned to the ground. Residents decided afterwards that they needed to organize an actual fire department. Easier said than done, the task was completed by 1909.

  The first truck that the department acquired was a Broderick hand-pump truck, built in San Francisco in 1850, one of the first manufactured in the state of California. It took 20 men to operate, and failed to work at times. On May 28, 1928, Kelowna’s very first ladder truck was purchased—a 1928 Graham, one of the finest trucks of its time.

  In Kelowna, the term “firefighter” has included women as well as men for a very long time. The Women’s Volunteers Brigade, also known as the Ladies Hose Reel Team, came into exi
stence during the First World War (1914-1918), due to the lack of men, who were off fighting the war. The ladies were well equipped with boots, coats and masks, and were always prepared to jump into the fray when needed.

  Our first fire hall was built at the corner of Water Street and Lawrence Avenue, and is still in use full time today. A beautiful heritage building, it not only still serves a vital purpose but also attracts a lot of attention from visitors.

  In 1976, a new fire hall was built on Enterprise Way and it has been the department’s headquarters ever since. Now referred to as Kelowna Fire Hall No. 1, this main station is now home to the “Tradition of Service” tribute.

  By now, you must be wondering why I know so much about Kelowna’s firefighting services. Well, while I don’t recall the actual date that our Volunteer Fire Brigade became active, I do know that my father, Fred Coe, signed up on August 29, 1960, and volunteered until April 16, 1979. By the time he retired, he was a captain of the volunteer brigade.

  I have many memories of Dad being called out in the middle of the night to fires, but the most vivid in my mind were the 1964 fires at the Kelowna Growers’ Exchange: Four KGE packing houses went up in flames on March 14 of that year, which just so happened to be my dad’s birthday. He was helping to fight those fires for more than 24 hours and returned home, totally exhausted, still wearing his fire gear with his sodden pyjamas underneath. I was so upset, as he had missed his birthday and all he wanted to do was sleep.

  At the time, he was also fighting for his livelihood, as he and three other partners owned the Rowcliffe Cannery, which was only one block away from where these big fires were raging. Our family was very concerned not only about Dad’s safety but also about his business future.