PROUD CANADIAN

A place where every citizen has the opportunity to become whatever they want to be in life

A Cape Breton man offers a heart-felt story about why Canada is a country worth bragging about.

My mother was 16 when she became pregnant with me. I’m sure she was frowned upon by her parents and community, which at that time considered an unwed mother sacrilege. I met my father 27 years later. By then mother, a true beauty, had been married to two other men and delivered eight more children.

I was born in my grandmother’s house in Elmsvale, on the corner of the Moose River Road in the Musquodoboit Valley. It was a small two-story house with a kitchen, living room and two upstairs bedrooms with no indoor plumbing. The outhouse was complete with a Sears catalogue and a dug well.

You came in the back door directly to the kitchen. On the right was a sink and a shelf with a bucket of water where we washed up before meals. On a hook was an aluminum dipper used to get a drink from the bucket. In the center was a wood stove complete with warming oven and warm water tank to provide water to wash and clean with. The stove was meant to heat the whole house with a ceiling grate so heat would rise.

Since those days I have lived from one coast to the other and have developed a love for the diverse ethnic cultures that make us who we are. When I see the recent wave of immigrants coming into Canada, I think how lucky we are and how truly grateful I am for having been born and raised in Canada.

In my younger days I was a rifleman and a member of the band in the Queens Own Rifles of Canada. I played “Oh Canada” and “God Save the Queen” before Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and the Queen. I represented Canada as a U.N. soldier in Cyprus.

While in Cyprus one of our duties was to go to various long-term outposts and pick up the garbage with a duce and a half truck. The outposts were strategically placed to monitor activities of the fighting Greeks and Turks. The military was strict about hygiene and disease prevention. We had five or six 45-gallon drums on the back into which we would pour leftovers from each outpost. Other garbage we piled up the floor.

This job took a driver, codriver and myself riding shotgun standing in the back of the box with a sub-machine gun. In armed conflicts anything could happen. Part of why the U.N. was there was because of the senseless killing and roadside bombings, especially buses often full and carrying many children.

I was shocked to see donkeys pumping water in the fields and used as transportation. Farmers plowed their fields with oxen and shepherds tended sheep moving from pasture to pasture while war ravaged all around. A beautiful country of Greeks and Turks where Alexander the Great, Richard the Lion-Hearted, the Romans, Paul & Barnabas either came, conquered and left or spread Christianity and stayed. The island where Aphrodite emerged from the waves.

On my first scheduled duty day of riding shotgun on the way back to the dump, something happened. Within a quarter of a mile of the dump a large group of children came out of the surrounding bushes and shacks. They chased after us climbing up on the moving truck till we arrived at the dump. As we unloaded the garbage and poured out the 45-gallon drums the children cupped their hands and gathered up the slop. They were starving.

Later on one of our members was killed in Cyprus and had to be buried there because of regulations. At his funeral I played the “Last Post” and “Reveille” before the band played “O Canada.” The tears in our eyes were for our fallen comrade and also memories of home. As I spoke to my friends after the funeral the same sentiment kept coming through the loss of our comrade; the love of our country and how lucky we were to live in it.

“The tears in our eyes were for our fallen comrade and also memories of home.”

I was a soldier from a land far away who never knew that this could exist. Since then every time I think of those kids I think how lucky I was to be born in Canada. I didn’t have anything to do with being born here, like they didn’t choose to be born in war-torn Cyprus. It was the luck of the draw.

When I think of those children I give thanks for the country I live in. I understand how grateful new immigrants coming to Canada must feel. To come, to this wonderful country of immigrants and to be taken in with compassion. Being told: “Here it is, make what you can, it’s yours to do what you will.”

Whenever I travel I tell people from all walks of life and nationalities of this great country of ours Canada. They want to know more. Our reputation says we are warm, approachable and caring. Then as now every time I have been away, I get giddy at the thought of returning home to a country that affords every citizen the opportunity to become whatever they want to be in life.

We are all dealt the same cards in life, granted some much easier than others. Living in Canada gives us an advantage. Most of us are a far cry away from those slop barrels in Cyprus, but not so far from the aluminum dipper and bucket in your grandmother’s house.