Into an Inclusive World

When much of the world had come to a standstill due to the COVID-19 pandemic, my family was doing whatever they could to move to a country continents away from our home. Canada accepts many immigrants every year and for the last two years, we had hoped to be among them.  

The three of us—my mother, my twin sister and I—moved to Canada in January 2021. I was starting a new chapter of my life and while I was excited about the move, a part of me couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed. When your new home is a country halfway around the world, you constantly question if you have what it takes to adapt quickly. I knew coming from India to Canada would be a huge change. My excitement on the outside helped to hide my feelings of self-doubt and nervousness on the inside. 

I started school a month after moving to Canada. All my life in India I had my classes with the same group of kids so I never really had to try to make new friends. When I first got to know the concept of different groups of kids in different classes, I thought it was pretty strange and seemed confusing. And while I didn’t like socializing much, I knew I had to make friends to make high school easier. 

But that proved to be even more difficult. We had to wear masks in school. For someone who just had an online school in India, this was uncomfortable at first. We had to social distance and weren’t allowed to do many group projects. I knew I had to try harder. I gave some girls a chance, gathered up my courage, and after school, I talked to them. They were really friendly. This eased my nerves. I never had a problem with school because I had already learned about the topics in India, so I helped some of my classmates. I was talking to more people. 

People here, I discovered, were much more inclusive and kinder than I thought, but then again, they had their own friend groups, and I was never part of them. I didn’t have friends, just a few acquaintances. I’d also not met people with the same interests as mine so sometimes it was really hard to keep the conversation flowing. But, I knew I had to trust I’d find friends at the right time. And so, I tried really hard to initiate conversations and tried to ignore the awkwardness. It’s been ten months since I moved to Canada and now I have a bunch of really good friends who share the same interests. Now, I am a part of a friend group, something I had wanted when I first started school in Canada. 

Even though I knew many of the subjects we were being taught, I learned even more as the teachers taught them in a completely new way. While everyone was used to the way the teachers thought, I was always taken by surprise. Canada has a practical approach to subjects. We were shown movies so that we could understand how the plot works and we were given the liberty to write our ideas on paper. We wrote our own stories and created our own book covers. We sat in a park discussing philosophers and teachers encouraged me to share my opinions, something I had never thought about before. They even encouraged me to ask more questions and for extra help. 

I remember the times in my old school back in India when only the boys were asked to pick up the “heavy stuff.” When I was in the seventh grade, a boy once casually said to me, “but you will become a mother when you grow older.” I didn’t comment and walked away from the conversation. He laughed it away.  

These instances made me very uncomfortable. Here in school, it was an entirely different and inclusive environment where people from all backgrounds would come to study.  The way I spoke changed into an accent I only heard in movies and the way I lived changed the moment I stepped into this country. I came from uniforms in school to wearing casual clothes in classes. I came from notebooks and pens to online assignments and laptops and phones in class. I came from a school focusing only on academics and sports to a school focusing even on extracurriculars. I came from not talking to new people to someone who always greets the person sitting next to me. I came as a nervous girl scared about the huge shift and changed into a girl grateful for it.