Salutations, dear reader. My name is Mario Jean Constantin and I'm a young man living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario. I was born in the town of Laval, Quebec, to a French Canadian mother, Beatrice Tremblay, and a Haitian immigrant father, Leonard Constantin. It's not easy being half black and half white in Canada, even though I grew up on the outskirts of Montreal, a racially diverse town. After graduating from the University of Montreal with a bachelor's degree in business, I decided to explore life outside of Quebec. La belle province is a fun place to be but I wanted to see what life is like in the rest of Canada.
Thus I ended up in the Capital, working as a bank teller for CIBC and renting an apartment in Orleans, half an hour from downtown Ottawa where I work. One of the first people I met when I moved to the City of Ottawa was Fowziyah Mahmoud, this exotic-looking, tall and chubby, hijab-wearing young woman who came to my bank and asked for help with setting up an account. Fowziyah is new to Canada, having recently moved to Ontario from her hometown of Hargeisa, somewhere in Somaliland.
For someone experiencing what had to be a lot of culture shock, Fowziyah Mahmoud seemed remarkably composed. Sitting her large derriere on the comfy chair across from me, Fowziyah told me what she wanted. The lady spoke French fluently and when I asked her about it, she told me that although her father Yassin Mahmoud is Arab, her mother Farah is originally from the Republic of Djibouti. It's a largely Francophone country, after all. Impressive, I must say. I helped Fowziyah with setting up her new checking and savings account, and deposited the two hundred dollars she pulled out of her well-worn wallet into the account. I also gave her my business card containing my cell phone and email should she need any help.
I never expected to hear from her again, so you can imagine my surprise when I got a friend request from Fowziyah Mahmoud on Facebook. In my inbox I found a cheerful message from her thanking me. I started declining her request because we at CIBC aren't encouraged to become friends with our clients, at least not the regular people like Fowziyah Mahmoud. If a major conglomerate was looking to set up a multi-million dollar account with CIBC and I brought them in, I'd get promoted to branch manager or even regional president for sure. Nevertheless, there was something about Fowziyah Mahmoud's fearless smile. Growing up near Montreal I knew a lot of Muslims, and for the most part, Muslim girls were meek, especially the veiled ones like Fowziyah. Yet I could somehow sense that she wasn't like the others. That's why I added her as a friend on Facebook.
I added Fowziyah Mahmoud as a friend, as I said before, and let me tell you, her Facebook profile was not what I expected. Generally speaking, Muslim women are careful about what they post online. The more adventurous ones will have a few pictures of themselves with female friends or relatives, that's about it. Fowziyah was...different. This chick had a hundred pictures. Shots of her holding a paintball gun while playing with friends in the snow. Shots of her holding a bow and arrow. Shots of her playing rugby with some other girls, all of whom wore the hijab. Damn. I wasn't expecting that. I saw pictures of her with guys, regular-looking, non-bearded, and very western-looking guys. Not the bearded and conservatively dressed Muslim dudes I expected. Cool.
I was about to click off for the evening when I got a PM from Fowziyah. Curious, I opened the chat feature, and sent her a greeting. As Salam Alaikum my friend, Fowziyah typed, by way of greeting. Aku Salam, I replied, thankful for all the time I'd spent in Lebanese restaurants in Laval. I love Lebanese cuisine and made friends with a lot of guys from that part of the world, thus I have a working knowledge of Arab culture and Islam. Of course, I knew next to nothing about Somalis. We have a few in Montreal but they exist in greater numbers in Ottawa and Toronto. They're more Anglophone than Francophone any day of the week, except for the ones from the Republic of Djibouti.
Fowziyah and I began to chat, and let me tell you, it wasn't easy to keep up with her. This chick could go a mile a minute, man. Fowziyah couldn't stop raving about the City of Ottawa and how thrilled she was to see so many Somalis and other minorities. At her new school, Algonquin College, she joined the Muslim Students Club. I warned her about the Capital's covert and insidious racism. If your last name sounds 'other', some companies won't hire you even if you have recommendations up the yin yang and a degree from McGill University. Trust me.
