The Night We Slept in the Airport

As told by Fuad.

Before I tell you what happened, let me tell you what kind of people we are.

We are not big people. I don't mean that in a bad way, I just mean we are ordinary. I had a phone accessories stall in a market in Lagos. Aisha did bookkeeping for small businesses around our area. We managed. We were not suffering but we were also not people that money was waiting for. When we decided to do this Canada thing, we scraped for everything. The consultant we hired, we paid him small small because that was what we could do. The medicals, the police certificates, the IELTS, the biometrics, all of it done here in Lagos, and every one of those things cost money we had to find from somewhere. By the time we paid for four plane tickets, me, Aisha, Ibrahim, Safiya, nine and six years old at the time, we had arrived at a number that was essentially our entire savings.

But we had somewhere to go. That was the plan.

Ahmed. My guy from Government College Ibadan. We sat in the same class, ate the same food from the same cooler, argued about football the way boys argue when they have too much time and not enough sense. He had been in Canada for seven years. When I told him our PR came through, he was happy for us. When I asked him, and it was not easy to ask, I want you to know that it was not easy, whether we could stay with him for a few weeks while we settled in, he said don't worry, you are my brother, family always has a place. Those were his words. Family always has a place.

I believed him. Why would I not believe him? Twenty-something years I knew this man.

So we landed at Pearson, Tuesday evening in early December. Turkish Airlines, through Istanbul. Terminal 1. The immigration officer stamped our documents and said Welcome to Canada and I'm not going to lie to you, I felt that in my body. Two and a half years of waiting and worrying and that stamp hitting the page. We collected the bags, we found a corner, I brought out my phone.

I called Ahmed.

It rang. Nothing.

I called again. Nothing.

I sent a message on WhatsApp. I watched it deliver. I watched it go blue. Read. No reply.

I gave the phone to Aisha. She tried his wife Fatima's number, which she had saved from when we did a video call months earlier to tell them our travel date. The number didn't go through. Not even ringing. Just nothing.

We looked at each other.

The children were on top of the bags. Ibrahim was watching us the way children watch when they know something is wrong but don't want to ask. Safiya was already leaning on Aisha, half asleep.

I'm not going to overdress what I felt. I was afraid. Not panicking, but afraid. We had less than three hundred dollars between us. We had no other contact in Canada. It was early December and outside those terminal doors it was cold in a way that even the harmattan in Lagos has never prepared any Nigerian for. I stood there and I did the calculation and the calculation did not have a good answer.

But I didn't collapse. And Aisha didn't collapse. We sat down. We thought. We prayed. And then we accepted that we were spending the night in that airport.

That night was long. The chairs are hard. The lights don't go off. The cleaners come through with their machines at hours when no human should be awake. Ibrahim fell asleep with his head on a bag and his legs across my lap and I didn't move for hours so he wouldn't wake up. Safiya slept against Aisha. She woke up twice and both times Aisha handled it quietly, no drama, settled her back down. I watched my wife do this and I kept my face calm because my son was watching me and the face a father shows in that situation matters.

I didn't sleep the whole night.

Before Fajr I found the interfaith prayer room. Small carpeted space near the domestic terminal, very simple. I prayed there. And when I came out I felt, not better exactly. Clearer. Like the fear was still there but it had moved to one side and I could see around it. Ahmed had not called back. He was not going to call back. I had accepted that by then.

I was walking back to where Aisha was when I saw this man.

I don't know exactly what made me look at him. Something about the way he carried himself. The face. I looked at him and I thought: that man is Nigerian. Not certain, just a feeling, the kind you develop when you have been around your own people long enough to recognise the shape of them from across a room. I had nothing to lose by being wrong. I walked up to him.

I said: excuse me, are you Nigerian?

He looked at me and smiled and said yes, I'm from Lagos. And just like that we were talking. His name was Niyi. He had just come in on the EgyptAir morning flight from Cairo. Lagos to Cairo overnight, then Cairo to Toronto, landing around seven. He was connecting through to Kitchener where he lived. We were both standing in Pearson at the same hour, both fresh off long journeys, and somehow the conversation opened the way conversations between Nigerians in foreign places open. Quickly, freely, like we had been talking for years already.

I told him what had happened. Not everything at once, but enough. He listened. At some point he asked which area of Lagos I was from and I told him and we switched to Yoruba and something in me just loosened. Like a knot I had been holding since the night before.

He looked at me. He said: you are Muslim?

I said yes.

He said: okay. Give me a moment.

My name, my full name, had already told him. But hearing me say it himself. I think that was the moment something shifted in him. He was not doing it because we were both Nigerian, though that had opened the door. He was doing it because we were brothers in two ways now, and the second one, for a man like Niyi, meant something specific and actionable. He made calls into the Nigerian Muslim community in Kitchener. I stood nearby, I didn't hover, and I watched this man who had just landed from a twelve-hour flight make phone calls on my behalf at seven in the morning without once looking like he was in a hurry to be anywhere else.

By the time I walked back to Aisha he had found us a place.

A brother named Ayo, in Kitchener, had a basement in his house that was empty. When it was explained to him, he said yes. Just like that. Niyi told us and I nodded and I didn't say much because there wasn't much I could say that would be equal to what had just happened.

Niyi drove us himself. He had left his car in the airport parking lot before he travelled, so we walked straight out to it. About an hour twenty on the 401 to Kitchener. The children slept in the back. I sat in the front and we talked in Yoruba most of the way, about Lagos, about Kitchener, about how December would only get colder from here. He didn't make me feel like a problem he was solving. That mattered. You don't always understand how much a thing like that matters until it is the difference between it and its absence.

When we got to Ayo's place, the basement was clean, there was a bed, there was a small sitting area. Within a couple of hours someone knocked. A woman, she said her name was Hafsa, she was carrying a pot of rice and stew and some bread. She set it on the counter. She said you are welcome here. She left.

After that, more people came. A brother from the masjid on Courtland Avenue brought a bag of winter clothes for the children. Proper coats, hats, gloves. Because nobody had warned us properly about December in Kitchener. Someone else brought groceries. A family sent a heater for the basement. Another family gave us transit passes.

None of these people knew us. Not one of them had heard our names before that morning. They just knew a family had come with nothing and needed help and that was enough for them.

I've been Muslim my whole life. I've heard about the ummah since I was small. But I want to tell you there is knowing something and there is knowing something. That day in Kitchener I stopped knowing it the first way.

Ahmed. I'll say this and leave it.

He was my classmate. We shared a cooler in Government College Ibadan. And when we landed in a country we had spent everything to reach, with our children, with less than three hundred dollars, his number was going through but those two blue ticks is what we got.

I don't carry anger about it anymore. I have put it down, genuinely. Not for his sake. For my own peace. But I won't pretend it was small. It was not small.

We have a basement now. Our own tenancy, our own key, in Kitchener. Aisha works in customer service. She is good at it. She has always been the calm one, the one who listens when others have stopped listening. She leaves in the morning and comes back in the evening and I can see her building something here and it is a thing I like to watch.

I drive Uber in the evenings after the children are sorted. Days I work as a line supervisor at a manufacturing facility in Cambridge. Yes, it is two jobs. Yes, the days are long. But I come from a background where long days are how things get built, not a reason to complain.

Sometimes on the Uber I get airport runs. Early morning, families arriving with bags, that look on their faces I recognise. I help with the bags. I tell them things it would take them months to find out by themselves. I don't tell them why I do this. But I know.

One day Ibrahim will be old enough and he will ask me about that night. He was nine, he remembers pieces of it. The lights, the chairs, the cold outside the terminal doors. When he asks I'll tell him everything. Ahmed and Niyi and Hafsa and the pot of rice and the coats that arrived for him and his sister from people who didn't know their names.

I want him to know that both things are true. What people can do to you. And what people can do for you. And that the second one, when it comes, is worth everything.