(Translated from Spanish)
In 1996, my husband decided to travel to Canada. I stayed in Chile with my two-year-old son, waiting for the moment we would join him.
My husband arrived in Montreal, neither knowing anyone nor speaking the language. Soon he started to attend a church where he learned that we often have to walk by faith and not by sight.
That is how he got three jobs.
Ten months later, my son and I arrived in Canada via the United States.
Within weeks of my arrival, I started working with my husband in a restaurant where I was paid half the minimum wage. Because we had no one to take care of our son, we had to bring him with us to work, where he slept and played under a counter.
With time and hard work, we eventually became restaurant chefs, and my son started attending daycare.
Everything was going well until immigration denied us Canadian residency. We hired a lawyer to appeal, and he recommended that we move to Toronto.
In Toronto, we had to start from scratch, learning another language, finding new work, new friends, and a new church. It was here that we found our home.
One day while I was organizing a family camp, my colleagues tearfully told me that my husband had been detained by Immigration Canada and would be deported.
I remembered what my husband always told me: “we must walk by faith,” and despite everything that was happening, I felt peace.
We discovered that our lawyer had done nothing for us…
It was a painful moment, but we felt the support of our friends and the church.
One week later, my husband was granted bail. We made an appeal on humanitarian grounds, and one week before our deportation date, we were accepted in Canada.
In the aftermath of our case, Immigration Canada asked us to be part of a campaign to support a new law to avoid this type of fraud from happening again. The Ministry made a video about our story, which is on their website. Whenever possible, my husband and I give talks about immigration for illegal immigrants or people in the immigration process.
Now we begin a new adventure. My husband has his own company building beautiful houses, my son is in his first year of university, and I started a daycare. And in spite of everything, we continue to walk by faith.