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The best part of being away is coming home. I love being a Canadian.

Five Reasons:

1. Diverse
2. Small and mighty
3. Refined and wild
4. Marriage for everyone.
5. One year maternity leave for mommas or pappas

- Carrie, Refined Treasure

Oh! this is good. I’m inspired to add my 5:

1. Free luggage carts at the Vancouver Airport (so civilized!)
2. Leonard Cohen is from Montreal
3. Hello! Socialized health care!
4. We steered clear of the Iraq war…for the most part.
5. Maple syrup from the Laurentians

- Danielle, Sacred Dramatic, Ontario born and raised

. . . . . . . .

For someone who wasn’t even born here, I am among the most fiercely patriotic. In fact, I didn’t really start living here until I was nearly thirteen. I was born in Africa, and spent about six years in Toronto before my family moved to South America for three unforgettable years. We lived in the ironically named capital city of Boliva: La Paz. The irony came from the fact that we were living under a military dictatorship in what was called “the pregnant state” since every nine months, we’d have a coup. Che Guevera’s iconic portrait was literally everywhere.

When I first moved there I was nine; young enough to feel free and easy, but old enough to sense that something was….off.  My introduction to this troubled land was at midnight, in an airport guarded my paratroopers. The air was so thin up there at 15,000 feet that we’d get winded just climbing the stairs. I went to an international school. I made international friends. If I was at my friend’s home, whose father was an American official, we were kept out of the front room because people would throw rocks through the windows. Everyone I knew lived in a fortress of sorts: broken glass cemented onto the top of stone walls, iron gates everywhere, and an overt sense of unrest. A curfew forbade being on the street past eleven pm and before 6am. You didn’t question that. Ever. People disappeared there. I was inconsolable when our dog got out, because I knew that they shoot dogs in the street. Happily, he came home a few hours later, but no child should fear that way. And people should be allowed to gather together without needing a government-issued permit.

It wasn’t uncommon to be stopped in the street by an armed paratrooper and asked to state your business. One day, my mother was taken to an abandoned warehouse at gunpoint and only released once my father produced enough money. She never told me what happened in that warehouse. But I remember that evening: my father on the telephone with the Canadian Embassy, my brother and I told to pack what we could carry. We left that night.

The security I felt upon arriving back in Canada was ineffable. I saw the maple leaf fluttering at the Montreal airport and with tears in my eyes, I thought, I am home.

- Karryn, Classic Lustre