There are moments in life when you realize you don’t quite belong to the place you come from, or the place you live in. For me, that’s never been just a passing thought. It’s been something I’ve carried for as long as I can remember – like a second skin.
I came to Canada as a child, with little more than a name, a few memories, and a language that slowly slipped away. I didn’t choose to leave Rwanda. Like so many of us, I was lifted by the tide of history, pulled from a life I barely understood into one I couldn’t yet imagine. I didn’t know what I was losing. I didn’t know what I was supposed to become.
The First Winter
My first winter in Canada felt like stepping into a dream I hadn’t asked for.
Snow was everywhere, falling like silence, piling like memory. It covered rooftops and sidewalks and trees, smoothing over every edge like someone trying to hide a scar. Everything looked pure, untouched, immaculate – like the world had been erased and redrawn in white.
I had only seen snow in movies before – Home Alone comes to mind. In Rwanda, we watched it on grainy TV screens, laughing at the boy left behind. Now, somehow, I was inside that film. The snow was real, yes, but the cast was missing. All my heroes were missing. No parents. No siblings. No grandparents. No uncles. No friends with mud-streaked faces, shouting as we chased each other barefoot near the river. Just me, standing in the cold, surrounded by white that didn’t remember my name.
The snow didn’t melt under my feet like the red dust of my village. It didn’t carry the heat of the African sun in July or the rhythm of our bare feet pounding the earth. It didn’t know the way we woke up at dawn to play before the day got too hot. It didn’t hold the smoke of morning fires, or the smell of sweet potatoes roasting in ashes. It didn’t gather children in circles to dance, to laugh, to pretend we were kings and warriors. It didn’t wrap around me like my mother’s arms when the night got cold. It didn’t call me home with the sound of my father’s voice at sunset. It didn’t tell stories by firelight, or sing the songs that made us forget the dark.
The snow was still. It was white. It was everywhere. But it didn’t know my name. It didn’t know who I was. It didn’t know how my friends and I bathed in the river at dusk, laughing as we splashed each other with muddy hands. It didn’t know how we chased grasshoppers in tall grass, or how we lay on our backs staring at clouds, guessing shapes until someone called us home.
It didn’t know the smell of rain on dry soil, or the taste of mango juice dripping down our chins. It didn’t know the games we played with nothing but sticks and imagination. It didn’t know how we argued, forgave, and forgot, all before the sun went down.
It didn’t know the sound of cows returning from pasture, the bells around their necks ringing like lullabies. It didn’t know how my grandmother’s voice could quiet a whole courtyard. Or how a shared meal, even when small, could make us feel rich and so happy.
The snow was beautiful, yes, it was. But deep beneath that beauty, I could only hear drums. Soft, steady, calling. In their sound were the voices of those I’ve lost, the ones I left behind. They play so I won’t forget where I come from And I know, I’ll have to follow that sound and go meet them to the place we call home, wherever it may be. I will know when I get there. Till then, I walk on the rhythm of the sound.
Coming Home
This isn’t a story of arrival. It’s a story of remembering. Of piecing together, a self from places that don’t always speak the same language.
Maybe the key to heaven really is hidden in the hell we try so hard to avoid. Maybe pain doesn’t come to destroy us, but to pull us deeper into who we really are.
I think about that boy in the snow, holding a coat too big for his body. He didn’t know what was happening. He just knew the world had changed, and he had to change with it.
But maybe that’s how it begins. You walk through the silence. You carry what you can. You light a candle. You stay. And slowly – without asking permission -you come home to yourself.