Thunder Bay to Thunder Bay, ON
Basic rights in our own home on native land
20 km
Rain, sun, clouds, 25 ºC
There aren’t too many photos of today. The batteries of my DSLR died, I wasn’t traveling with the film camera. So the images are from Farhan Yousaf.
We decided to linger for an extra day, partly so I could rest (city days aren’t good for me getting rest, density of stories is too high). Jonathon and I had a great heart-to-heart eating breakfast made by our host. It is something we’ve mostly left out of these digital logs and entries but we definitely butt heads and hearts around our differing styles. It is tough to be spending all this time together but also true that we could not do as terrific a job covering ground as we do. It felt very cathartic to go on a date as our host suggested. Jon went off to the Cascades and, accidentally, wrote it as yesterday’s entry. Time blurs on trips like these.
I went off to Friday prayers near Lakehead University, something I haven’t done much of but keep meaning to. Along the way I stopped to ask directions from two strangers, teachers, and as it turned out later, also with one twin each. Weirdness, I know.
Thunder Bay’s mosque is great in that there is only one. It forces, in a beautiful way, the active Muslim community to gather in one place. I learned of this from Ayoub Ansari, someone I love, admire and respect tremendously whom I met in Toronto, in part with his work starting the the Racialized Young Professionals Podcast group. Hasan Syed was there and his talk later in the evening was another reason to stick around.
Hasan has been running across Canada to raise awareness about access to clean drinking water in First Nations communities. After prayers, I wandered downtown to work on a podcast episode at Upshot Coffee, a lovely space I discovered yesterday, and then settling the tab for the new wheel build Jon’s bike required. It has been a lot of miles on these tires.
Hasan was giving a talk about his findings at Lakehead and it was a wonderful event with delicious food and several familiar faces. I met a young Muslim family who moved back here from Toronto to homestead on 40 acres. I don’t know of a lot of stories like these!
They were bidding farewell to someone from the community at the mosque and I wandered back to it. I stumbled into a bunch of older Muslim men, we’d call them uncles in my community, talking about Indigenous rights, pipelines, the economy, capitalism, colonization, and neoliberalism. There are conversations like these taking place in basements of mosques in a city like Thunder Bay. Tremendously hopeful.