Forty-Nine Years in Canada

Mantoura and her husband, photographed on their wedding day in Bsharri, Lebanon. (Submitted by Mantoura Soffee) 

The snow fell slowly and steadily, the way it often does here on the campus hill. Below were the lights of a small city going about its business, down where the wind comes up from the frozen river.

Outside the dining hall, a thin line of smoke rose from the bench near the emergency exit. She was already there, her dark hair tucked under a net and a hat, a green collared shirt peeking through her zipped jacket like she hadn’t quite made peace with the cold. She smiled without looking up, easy and unhurried. She had been expecting me.

She smiled with faint dimples, the kind you might miss if you weren’t paying attention. Her eyes were kind, but with something mischievous in them too, like she had already noticed the thing you were hoping nobody did.

Mantoura Soffee.

I sat down beside her without saying anything. At some point, we had stopped needing to greet each other.

When I extended my hand, she passed the cigarette over. I took a pull and immediately coughed, which made her laugh, those dimples surfacing again. This time, I had earned them.

“Jen Jenn,” always twice. “How’s school, how’s life?”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

She nodded, a perfectly acceptable answer, and took the cigarette back, exhaling slowly. Smoke drifted up and disappeared into the cold air. Students moved past us toward the doors of the dining hall, boots scraping over packed snow, shoulders hunched against the wind. Nobody paid much attention to the two of us sitting there.

After a moment, she asked, “You know where I’m from?”

Before I could answer, she said it herself.

“Bsharri. In the north. Up in the mountains.”

She said the name carefully, like something she had not stopped carrying.

“We had the Cedars of God there.” The smoke drifted between us. Cedar, old and deep. Nothing like this cold and exhaust and dining hall grease. Something that had been standing for a long time and knew it.

“Beautiful place,” she said. “Before everything.”

Bsharri sits high in the mountains of northern Lebanon. Cedar forests spread across the slopes, some of the trees thousands of years old. Villages cluster along narrow roads. People know one another’s families without needing introductions.

She grew up in a Maronite Catholic community, one of the oldest Christian traditions in the world, rooted in Lebanon for more than fifteen centuries, with its own liturgy, its own saints, its own way of marking time. Nearly everyone in the village shared the same church, the same traditions. You could knock on any door hungry and leave full.

Then the war began.

“The war started in 1975,” she said. She said it plainly, the way you say something that has stopped feeling like a story and become a fact. Palestinian groups had established themselves in parts of Lebanon, preparing to fight Israel from Lebanese territory. The conflict spread quickly, pulling communities into a war that many of them had never chosen.

“Checkpoints everywhere,” she said. “You don’t know who’s waiting. You don’t know what they’re looking for.”

She pulled on the cigarette before continuing.

“If you were Christian,” she said, “they were killing you for it.”

Her husband had already gone to Canada by then, looking for work. He returned to Lebanon in 1976. She was thirteen when they got married.

“November,” she said.

A few months later, they left Lebanon together, arriving in Canada in January of 1977. Clothes. A passport. The expectation that they would return once the war ended.

She did not want to leave. Her father was still in Bsharri, along with her brothers and sister. Her husband told her they would come back soon.

“Every time we tried,” she said, flicking ash into the snow, “another war started.”

She glanced at the cigarette for a moment.

“We’re still here. Forty-nine years.”

By the end of her first year in Canada, she was fourteen and pregnant with her first son. Fredericton, New Brunswick, in January is not a place that eases anyone into it, especially not someone arriving from the mountains of Lebanon. She remembered the cold first, then the quiet.

“In Bsharri, the mountains tell you where you are,” she said.

In Fredericton, everything looked flat and white. The houses seemed identical at first, repeating down the street in neat rows.

“I didn’t know where I was,” she said. “I couldn’t tell the difference between the houses.”

She spoke some English, but not enough to move comfortably through the city. Her husband worked constantly.

“Three jobs,” she said, shrugging slightly.

Long days alone in a place she did not know, waiting for a baby to arrive while trying to understand a country that did not yet make sense to her.

“You come here,” she said. “You have nobody.”

She said it without bitterness, simply as something that happened.

Her first son was born that October. Her second two years later. She stayed home with the children and learned Fredericton slowly, grocery stores, bus routes, neighbours, the small details that eventually turn an unfamiliar place into somewhere you can move through without thinking.

In 1984, the Lebanese community in Fredericton built their own church, St. Charbel’s on Argyle Street. Maronite, the same tradition she had grown up with in Lebanon. She started going every week and never really stopped.

Later, once the children were older, the businesses began. A convenience store on Woodstock Road. A restaurant in New Maryland called Soffee’s Pizza. A taxi company, which they ran for years before selling it during the pandemic. After that, she took about a year off.

Then someone mentioned that St. Thomas University was hiring kitchen staff.

She had been working in the dining hall for four years now.

The dining hall has its own rhythm during the afternoon rush. Chairs scrape across the floor, trays slide along the counter, and the low hum of hundreds of conversations fills the room. You can smell the food before you even enter. She usually works at the stir-fry station, arriving each morning to check the menu and prepare ingredients before the students come. Around eleven-thirty, the first line forms, and by noon, the room is full.

Students come through in waves. Some appear once or twice a semester. Others come almost every day. She notices them.

“I think I’m cooking for my kids,” she told me once, watching a group of students carry their trays past. “My grandkids. I always think that.”

Four years is long enough to watch entire groups of students graduate and disappear. Long enough to become part of the background of a place, someone who is simply always there.

I arrived in Fredericton from India three years ago to study at St Thomas University. That meant moving from somewhere warm and loud and familiar to somewhere cold and quiet and new. The city was so small that I started recognizing faces before I knew any names. It felt more like arriving halfway through a conversation where everyone else already knew the jokes and understood the references.

I met her sometime that first year, though I cannot remember exactly when. At some point, she was simply there, and after that, she kept being there.

The conversations outside never followed a plan. Some days she talked about students who looked tired, who seemed stressed, who reminded her of her sons when they were younger. Other days, the conversation turned to Lebanon, to what it was like when she left and what it looked like now when she watched the news. Sometimes she talked about faith. For her, it was not really a topic so much as a position she stood in.

“When you have Jesus with you,” she said once, exhaling smoke into the winter air, “you know when to leave him, and he never leaves you.”

I didn’t respond. I just sat there.

She had opinions about everything and delivered them without ceremony. Politics. Family. The way people behave. Sometimes she said something so blunt that I didn’t know what to say. She watched my face and laughed.

There are things she will not let me write here. I know which ones.

What I will say is that she checked on people. Not formally, and not in any way that would draw attention to it. She simply paid attention.

She said your name twice. She asked how you were doing and actually waited for the answer.

“I love seeing you,” she said once. “You make my day.”

Then, without missing a beat: “Sometimes I want to break your neck for things you do.”

That combination felt about right.

Once, I asked her what she would want people to know about her. She thought about it for a moment.

“Nothing,” she said. Then she shook her head slightly. “I don’t want people to know me.”

She tapped the ash into the snow.

“I don’t exist.”

She said it calmly, like it was simply another fact. Not a complaint. Not a wound. Just a line she had drawn somewhere and learned to stand behind.

I wrote it down anyway.

So, this is what I know about a person who says they don’t exist.

She came from a mountain village in northern Lebanon at thirteen years old, married, carrying nothing but clothes and a passport into a January that didn’t care who she was or where she was from. She raised three sons in a city she had to learn street by street, in a language she had to build word by word. She helped build a church. She fed people. She kept her faith the way you keep something you refuse to put down, no matter how long you’ve been walking.

She called people by name. Most of them never used hers.

She sat outside in every kind of weather and passed a cigarette across the bench to a girl from India who didn’t know anyone and didn’t know what to do with that yet.

She probably didn’t think of it as anything. That’s the whole point.

The smoke drifted into the cold air. The snow kept falling. 

After a moment, she said, almost to herself, “Forty-nine years. In Canada.” She looked out across the campus as if the number was something she could see somewhere in front of her.

Somewhere up in the mountains of northern Lebanon, the Cedars of God are still standing, older than any war, older than any border drawn around them. But Lebanon is burning again.

Airstrikes, displacement, and hundreds of thousands of people forced from their homes. Another war that nobody who lived through the last one ever wanted to see.

She stubbed out the cigarette and stood.

“Okay, Jen Jenn,” she said. “I have to go back inside.”

And she did.