Got back home from Ottawa last Wednesday. Can't believe I had lived with alcoholics, drug addicts, and people in and out of jails for more than six months.
Still, I have to marvel that Canada is a great country. While billions of people on this planet living on a dollar a day or less, some of the "clients" of the shelter seemed to have lived there forever, at a cost of approximately C$30 a day, without having to do anything. ( I worked as a private tutor at nearby University of Ottawa in the midest of fasting and blogging, in order to pay my rent in Vancouver.)
That Canada is a great country is further confirmed by the people and land I saw aboard Air Canada flight 189. Besides me sat two older ladies who were very talkative. Looking out the window, one of them correctly pointed out that we were flying over Winnepeg. How did she know? Canada is such a vast country yet the land and people never failed to amaze me. I wish I had not fallen asleep and talked to them a little more.
Finally, I was home. Indeed, there is no other place feels like home.
While I am writing this blog and reflecting on my Ottawa trips, I realize that my homy feeling will forever be discounted if I failed to bring justice to Cecilia Zhang, whose feeling of comfort and security of her home as a 9 year old girl must have been completely shattered when she was grabbed from her bed and taken away from her parents in the middle of the night October 19-20, 2003. I also know that for myself, if I do not find out who brazenly intruded my privacy by putting survellience device in my apartment, I will not feel secure again, even in my current home, even in this great country called Canada.
Cecilia Zhang and I are targeted because we are immigrants, second-class citizens from a "communist country", in the eyes of the establishment, and possibly the government. Therefore, I will, and must, continue my fight to bring "equality everywhere" so that Canada will be an even greater country for all people.
