Nimira Parpia looks at the five-year-old girl in the December 1972 photograph and, holding back tears, says it’s time to let her go.
Nimira Parpia flips through old editions of the Yarmouth Vanguard newspaper from 1972 to read articles that were written about her refugee family at the time. She and seven other members of her family came to Yarmouth after being forced from their home in Uganda with nowhere else to go. TINA COMEAU PHOTOYARMOUTH, NS – Her life has been filled with love and support and happiness.Parpia and seven other members of her Ugandan family arrived in Yarmouth in November 1972.
“I was just so blown away," she says."I didn't think he would remember who we were, but he remembered right away."“My grandmother, carried around her waist, all of the keys to the doors for our house in our village in Uganda. She was carrying every single key to every room because she had locked everything up. She thought that things would get better and we would go back,” she says, even though that’s rarely an option, or reality, for refugee families.
This July, Parpia came back to Yarmouth again to continue her research – not only for herself and her family, but also because she’d been contacted by Carleton University in Ottawa,. They want to include Parpia’s family as part of their collection. Meteghan fisherman Lex Brukovskiy knows their needs well. After the invasion of Russia earlier this year, he went back to his home country of Ukraine to deliver humanitarian aid and to help people escape to safe zones. Back home following his three months in Ukraine,“Imagine you’re living a normal life one day, and the next day you literally have no home. Nothing. What you built and your parents and your grandparents were building for decades, is gone.
Parpia looks back at that 1972 photograph of her family. That image of them together, next to a Christmas tree, has always been a treasured keepsake in her family.
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