‘Dreams come true’ for SFU graduate
Refugee, single mom celebrates 65th birthday with a bachelor of arts degree
Once, in a land far from here, there was a time when a little girl would hold her mom’s hand and walk to the library.
The library, a concrete bunker of a building by the sea, was miles and miles away, and they would cross dry, prickly corn fields under a sweltering sun every week to get there, where the mom would seek out romance novels while the little girl disappeared to the fairy tale section
This week, that little girl turned 65, and she graduates on Thursday from Simon Fraser University with a bachelor of arts degree.
For Rozy Karim it is a milestone not just in age and accomplishment, but also a marker in a journey that began with a book-loving little girl in East Africa who wound her way through arranged marriage, ethnic cleansing and single-motherhood as a refugee in Canada.
“Dreams come true,” Karim said, the emotions raw still today. “As a girl I would read fairy tales and imagine myself in a foreign land where I could study in a ‘big school’ and where everyone lived happily ever after.”
Fairy tales have their ogres, however, and, at 18, Karim was married to a man 11 years her senior who she’d barely met. He moved her to violence-racked Rwanda in 1973, where warring Hutu and Tutsi were slaughtering each other, and innocents, indiscriminately. Her brother-in-law and sister-in-law were two of the victims.
Karim, in her third trimester with the first of her three sons, and her husband put on camouflage clothing one night and crossed the mountains to the capital city of Kigali, where the Canadian consulate was processing refugees.
They arrived in Toronto in November 1974. Karim was 19, they were penniless, and their son was born in December.
“We were so grateful Canada accepted us,” she said, and even now she can’t contain the tears. “Canada is a big mom to us and I will never forget her kindness.
“From a land of nothing to a land of plenty ... but you can’t forget the people you left behind, the millions who weren’t as fortunate. The women, the children who die of poverty and hunger, of pain, of atrocities.”
Canada, meanwhile, wasn’t without its challenges.
Karim recalled young boys throwing snowballs at her as she crossed the street, pregnant with her second son. They called her Paki and told her to go home.
“It didn’t bother me because my life was safe,” she said. “I knew it was just lack of education and ignorance.”
She worked three jobs, one requiring her to lift heavy boxes into trucks despite being pregnant. Her husband cleaned toilets. They were exhausted but they were putting food on the table.
They moved to B.C. in 1980, where their third boy was born; and she became a single parent. When her boys got their macaroni and cheese at dinner and asked why she wasn’t eating, too, she told them her tummy was still full from lunch.
“Because I didn’t have any money to, you know ...”
She kept working hard, saving every cent, and started an insurance business in White Rock, and later bought a bowling alley in Cloverdale.
So at 58, dreaming of representing Canada with a philanthropic organization in underdeveloped African countries, Karim began studying international relations and education through SFU NOW: Nights or Weekends.
It was the “big school” she’d always dreamed of attending as a little girl, and Karim can’t say enough good things about the classes, professors and fellow students, some of whom were young enough to be her grandchildren.
She had tears in her eyes on the last day of exams.
“When I was a little girl, I didn’t know that happiness meant you were alive,” Karim said. “Happiness means your life has been saved.”