Month: March 2022

St. John’s Kitchen is a soup kitchen in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. I spent some time with this community pre-COVID. One person in particular was gracious enough to spend a great deal of time with me to share how this special, unique space offers community and belonging to some of the most marginalized in our city. 

Here is the extended clip of the interview used on the I’m Who I Am album:

What is interesting about this song is that I incorporated elements of a song I wrote when I was 16 years old. I could hear the song from my past haunting me throughout the songwriting process. I kept hearing this interview quote in my head about being “lost”. Once I finally allowed myself to consider how the song I was writing and the chorus from my youth could be brought together, the song came flowing. A true testament to how common human emotion can bridge understandings of one another despite our different journeys.

Take Me Home took me back to interviews from my first masters degree when I was researching how migrant women used food to transition to a new country. The women I spoke with recounted incredible journeys of strength and perseverance as they uprooted their families to come to Canada for education, and “better opportunities”. We shared moments of joy, laughter, and sorrow.

One story that really stuck with me was when one woman, Helen, described her experience in her first job in Canada at a Tim Horton’s.

Here is the extended clip of the interview used on the I’m Who I Am album:

All the women were highly educated in their home countries and their education and professional credentials were not recognized in Canada. They all shared discrimination they faced in this country.

* Sourced from Abdel-Malek Neil, M. (2017). Affective migration: Using a visceral approach to access emotion and affect of Egyptian migrant women settling in the Region of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Emotion, Space and Society, 25: 37-43, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2017.10.005.