Last February, after 36 months of planning and waiting, I moved to Canada with my wife, our six-year-old triplets and my 75-year-old mother, who came along for six months to help us with the kids.
Calgary was our destination. We left our country, Brazil, with 15 boxes and seven suitcases and arrived on the second of the month – facing snow and cold weather. Well before leaving home, we had arranged to stay for one month in a short-term, fully furnished rental house in the city’s northwest.
One of the many challenges involved in immigrating to another country is finding a place to live. After 15 days in our first rental, with our essential documents ready, school for the children chosen and things running smoothly but still uncertain, we started looking for a house to rent.
I pored through websites looking for homes. After selecting a few ads and showing them to my wife, we decided on a handful of houses to view. We had already decided on our children’s school, so we wanted to be close to that community.
Among my initial choices was one with a short description of the house and a couple of pictures. Two things in the posting grabbed my attention: The home was “very well maintained” and the landlord lived next door.
What could be better for a newcomer than renting a well-maintained house with the landlord next door? He could look after all the stuff I have no idea about such as shingles, furnaces and boilers. I sent the owner a message and he replied with his phone number.
I called him. I must confess I barely understood him. Tomorrow? At 10 a.m.? Is that what he said? He gave me the address but I couldn’t understand a single word of it until he spelled it out.
I took note of it and told my wife: “l couldn't get much of what the man said. I think I set up a viewing for tomorrow at 10.” At least I had the address.
The next day, at the time supposedly set, we were meeting the landlords, a couple with two children. The house seemed perfect to us. It was bright and, true to the posting, very well maintained. The owners appeared to be nice people. They explained that he uses the basement as his own office and if we were interested we could lease it month by month.
They asked questions about us, our family and our reasons for immigrating to Canada, and we told them we wanted to have a new experience and expose our children to a different culture and language, and better education.
Our conversation included a few misunderstandings – solved satisfactorily, I guess – such as the common misuse by us Brazilians of the word “pretend” instead of “intend.” My wife said, “Don’t worry, we will pay the rent accordingly, we sure pretend to have jobs!”
We expressed our interest in renting the house. They asked for references, and before leaving I told them, “This is the first house we are viewing and the reason we are here is because you live next door.”
“I was worried about meeting you because I hardly got what you said on the phone. Your English is quite good,” he said.
After a few days, we signed a lease and he asked us if we needed help moving in. “We have just a few things – our minivan will handle it,” I said.
Without seeing any other houses, we moved in with all our belongings. We had no furniture, no housewares, nothing. Our new landlords offered us foam mats to sleep on for the first few nights.
A couple of days later I met him in the backyard on his way to work and we started chatting. I can’t remember why but we ended up talking about pizza. I said that we were pizza lovers. He said he had dough rising at that very moment in his kitchen. The next Friday we were in their dining room eating pizzas with slow-cooked pork and barbecue sauce.
The pizza was the trigger for countless occasions when our landlords gave us their assistance. He helped me set up a VoIP phone, hang things on the wall, get wood and split it for our fireplace. He built and set up an antenna for our television and shares his Internet wireless network with us.
It’s not only about helping newcomers or neighbours or tenants. Our landlords are great people, and I think they like us. They lent us a sofa bed, a desk and a computer for the kids. She gave us bread recipes and showed us how to bake our own. Their son passes us cinnamon rolls over the fence and their daughter babysits for us and prepares delicious sushi rolls at lunchtime that come into our kitchen on fancy plates. He gave me a handmade pizza peel and rolling pin. And when he and his son go biking, they take me along.
During the summer we hosted my niece and nephew from Colorado for 50 days. Our landlords came up with a series of events, short trips, special meals and gatherings at a non-stop pace. He even bought a new, bigger fridge for the home we rent because he knew we’d need more storage space.
In the big list of things I was expecting to face in my new country, this wasn’t one of them. I never would have thought we would be so lucky. We have been living in this house for 10 months, and we can’t imagine ourselves away from the family next door. Besides being our neighbours and landlords, the whole family has become best friends. My kids, wife and I found much more than just a house to live in here.
Octavio Lacombe lives in Calgary.
