The three years leading up to Natasha Thomas’ arrival at the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences brought with it challenges that could have easily derailed her goal of becoming a nurse. Well on her way now as a U1 Nursing student (after arriving in 2019 for her qualifying year), Thomas’ journey is familiar to many new Canadians trying to enroll in university.
Her story begins in Germany with her mother and father, newly arrived from Nigeria, meeting and becoming a couple. Her father worked as a truck driver and later a bus driver; her mother took courses in nursing in between raising a family. “I remember her studying when I was a little kid, and I would listen to her reciting medical terms,” says Thomas, who had been cast in a small role for her mother’s training. “She used to practice on me, listening to my lung sounds.”
Her mother became a nurse, but her father had become frustrated with his prospects in Germany. Relatives living in Canada talked to him about schooling opportunities for their three children and job opportunities for the couple, one of which came his way in the form of a better paying fulltime position with a Winnipeg trucking company. He took the job with just one week’s notice.
With her father already in Canada, Thomas helped her mother pack up their apartment and, once in Winnipeg, set up their new home. Her father was driving long hauls and on the road for a month at a time. The family lived on the outskirts of the city, had little money and few ways of getting around. Simply gathering furniture became difficult. A charitable organization provided her toddler brother with Christmas presents.
Adding to the hardship was the fact that the province of Manitoba didn’t recognize the German nursing qualifications for which Thomas’ mother had worked so hard. They could be upgraded with new courses but only once the family gained permanent residency. As for Thomas, not being a permanent resident when she graduated high school meant having to wait before she could apply to university.
During that year off, Thomas took on various jobs, including nanny, cleaner at a long-term care home and food server at Tim Horton’s. At her parents’ insistence, she also took classes in French, biology and molecular biology. “They didn't want me to just work but to also keep my brain active.” The jobs allowed her to save money for university and to travel to Germany to visit friends and family.
The family did receive their permanent residency and Thomas applied to Ŕ¦°óSMÉçÇř. She chose Montreal because it was a new city for her and so different from Winnipeg. She also could only afford to make two university applications. As for choosing nursing, she loved the sciences, and having seen in her mother’s eyes years earlier the joy for nursing studies, the profession had always held a special appeal. Her 90-plus average on her transcript helped Thomas earnĚýan acceptance into the Ingram School of Nursing.
The Hakim Family Bursary, created by Raymond Hakim, MDCM’76, offers help to refugee and immigrant students. Thomas, who is the financial award’s third recipient, says the funding helped her afford tuition for her first year, since the savings from her working year fell short. “I was considering even taking another year off just until I was able to save up enough money.”
Thomas knows the value of funds like the Hakim Family Bursary. “Scholarships like these encourage people who are not that financially stable to look into going to university,” she says, calling it a blessing. Her attending school seems to have also hadĚýan influence on her other brother, who is looking at applying to universities on an athletic scholarship.
Living in on-campus residence, Thomas has been taking a mix of online and in-person classes and was recently on a learning placement at a long-term care facility in Montreal, learning about PPE and working under COVID restrictions.
Her family is adapting well now to life in Winnipeg. Her father has a route that has him home with the family every night and her mother will be graduating soon from college and getting her LVN.
Thomas recently FaceTimed with her mother, who took the opportunity to show her how to find the brachial artery, on which one places a stethoscope when taking manual blood pressure. The online tutorial from her mother, she says, helped her pass a mid-term.
All those years ago, it was lung sounds that her mother was picking up when a young Natasha was breathing deeply for the stethoscope. But, as Natasha now studies nursing full time, maybe there was something else her mother was hearing from her daughter: a calling.
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