The first time I came to Canada, I was amused to see people in shorts, washing their cars, cleaning their garages and taking walks for leisure. It was cold outside, and for me, a Kenyan, it was not outdoorsy weather. It was the kind of weather to make a fire in a stove, and sit fully covered in a warm shawl around it, maybe, but not, playing in water, hosing down the driveway.
I left Canada with that impression and returned to live here a few years later. We landed here in the height of winter and began the usual running around for the paperwork that needs to be done in order to install ourselves into the system. And we looked for jobs.
If winter was a shock, it did not register much because we were busy beginning our lives here. But the shock was the word job. Nowadays, I hear it in my Kenyan friend's language, but when we came here, we in Kenya, did not have jobs, we worked. We looked for work and we had careers. A job was something like a toil, a difficult chore is what it meant.
To get a job here was easier than I had imagined, but as soon as I got the job, I realised that the turnover of people at the place of work, not only mine, but almost everywhere, was high. The loyalty was not there. The loyalty of the person working in the firm or the recognition of the person who did the work by the firm. This is a culture in the system of employment I found here, which made me rather feel uneasy at the time. On my first day at work, I witnessed a man being fired. I might have stared a little more than I was expected to, and the chill running down my spine might have been visible to the office administrator who was doing the firing, but she did not show it. I could not understand how lightly the man was taking it. Maybe, I thought, he deserves this, he doesn't look like a man who cares much and so he lacked decorum in his work. But in the days that followed, I learned how dedicated the man was, and how diligently he worked, which showed not the signs of the man who stood smilingly accepting being sacked. I learned that he was sacked because he had been late to work three times in a week.
I am a little Canadianised now, I take to the outdoors when I see a slight rise in the mercury, worship the sun, I do. And when I am deep in the heaps of snow that come down, I always think of my fellow Kenyans, who during the months of our winter, are awash in the hottest part of their year. I can almost hear them complaining about the heat, about the drought that has left them in cruel power and water rations. And it is cruelly cold here and we too endure a lot, but the country is run for the people and when I walk into the house, I am warm because there is power and I can take a nice long bath, because water runs in the tap whenever I open it.