International students and their stories of how they found Sudbury

The number of international students in Sudbury is growing and becoming more diverse.

So are their reasons for picking this destination.

Laurentian University was home to more than 430 full-time international students last year from sixty countries, the highest proportion from China.

The small number of students from West Africa where French is the primary language is growing, perhaps as they realize the may have an edge in bilingual Sudbury.

Lionnel Thes is from the Ivory Coast and is the president of the African Carribbean Association at Laurentian University.

He landed in Sudbury last year for graduate work after earning a degree in India.

Thes says he loves spending time with other international students and advocates for them.

"I can not say they all have a good experience because it's actually tough for them because, I've met some students they're actually alone here, the only representative of their country. said Thes. "So for them it's actually very difficult.

"That's one of the reasons why the association is for us, to just give it and to be with them and just to make them feel known, or to make them feel valued. So this is one of the reasons that's why the association is there, we are actually trying to make them feel at home, to make them feel not isolated."

Thes is fighting loneliness with food, urging food services to serve meals the students might have in their countries of origin

He admits he craves a dish from his home country of cassava and chicken.

Thes' family has gone far and wide to get educated.

He says his mother got her PhD at McGill, his father studied in France and his sister is getting a law degree in Morocco.

Across town at Cambrian College, there are more than a thousand international students, with about three quarters from India.

Kawaljeet Kaur from the Punjab was the first in her family to go abroad in a bid for self-determination.

"The city I belong to or the area I belong to, most of the girls, if they're not going to school they get married so I, like my parents, wasn't in favour. So they wanted me to study and get settled, get on my feet and make my own future.."

At 17, she flew halfway around the world to Cambrian College in pursuit of a dream to become a doctor.

At home in India,  she had taken pre-health courses so balked at paying money at Cambrian for the same courses.
Instead, she took dental hygiene courses, and then qualified as a personal support worker.

She applied to the registered nursing program at Laurentian University but was rejected.

Kaur, now 22, is working as a manager in a gas station and hoping to get permanent residency, and then she'll apply to the nursing program again.

She has not been back to India and doesn't know when she will be able to afford to go. She has only seen her father once when he came to Sudbury to visit, and misses her brother and mother.

She says that many of her friends from high school continued on to college in India but are unable to find jobs because of fierce competition, so they are getting married.

She thinks that is probably what would have happened to her if she had stayed in India.

While most students choose Sudbury for a particular course, it was among the last places that Tarun Godara of New Delhi expected to end up.

He was a 25 year-old former IT worker turned artist who intended to study in Barcelona, Spain.
    
But Godara says he "screwed-up" his visa application and discovered that the only place he qualified for in the end was a design program at Cambrian.

So off he went to a city he knew nothing about.

"When I was leaving India, when I was leaving the airport, I had no emotions. I felt so empty. And I had my parents crying and I was just like, I didn't feel anything.," said Godara. "When the plane landed in Toronto, it hit me. I had a panic attack and I realized,  I can't go back. I was "What if I'm making a mistake?"  What am I doing?

"It took me 21 hours to realize that I might be making a mistake and it was scary but as of 2017, sixth of September, until now, I don't think I made a mistake and it's only because of the people that I've met here."

Godara has just graduated and had his first exhibition in Sudbury.

He says he still deals with bouts of homesickness, and although Sudbury is a far cry from Barcelona, he plans to stay awhile.