I am an immigrant from Venezuela, a recent Canadian citizen, and a member of the kingdom of God. These three identities collided with each other one recent afternoon when my husband and I went to our local pharmacy to get our seasonal flu shots.
After checking in for our appointments, made weeks prior, my husband Gustavo and I squeezed past numerous coats, jackets, purses, and backpacks as we navigated the cramped waiting area of our local pharmacy. With fewer than ten chairs and twice as many people waiting their turn, we eventually found standing room space that curved out into the store’s aisle of antihistamines.
As we waited for the nurse to call our names, I wondered how a routine appointment had packed out the waiting room. Slowly it dawned on me that the staff was squeezing in people without appointments between those who had them. Judging by the languages that these patients were speaking, it seemed that many were immigrants.
At one point, I took a freed-up seat next to a white-haired gentleman. Visibly inconvenienced, he muttered something about there being an orderly way of doing things, that they should make an appointment like everyone else. His accent gave him away; he was very much a local. I quietly agreed with clenched teeth, sharing this Canadian grandfather’s irritation.
When the nurse walked over to him to let him know it was his turn, I caught my last name on the nurse’s clipboard right after his. But instead of her reading my name aloud, she called out two more people, a middle-aged woman followed by a young college-aged student.
I rolled my eyes, looked at my watch, and tapped my foot. I looked over where my husband was still standing. He threw a “Don’t worry about it” look, mouthing in Spanish that our turn would come eventually.
The next time the door opened, I was ready to storm in, roll up my sleeve, and give the nurse my arm. But instead of calling a name, she looked straight past the row of chairs where I was sitting, pointing toward a couple with a young boy standing in the crowd, and beckoned the family in.
The party of three crammed inside the tiny office, a space not much larger than a bathroom stall. Behind the closed door we could hear the couple speaking in a foreign language, trying to calm their frantic son, who was terrified about getting a shot. After ten minutes of the grade schooler wailing—both before and after receiving the vaccine—everyone in the family had gotten a dose. When the mother walked past me as I switched places with her, she avoided eye contact, an embarrassed smile on her face.
We left the pharmacy after 35 minutes. I felt indignant. So much of my time had been taken away from me for no reason other than by the selfishness of families who were asking the system to accommodate them, rather than following the procedures of a free health care system. In my own anger, I saw myself only as a Canadian citizen, not someone who had been a newcomer to the country at her own point in life. I forgot anything about my own faith and how that might provoke me to consider my fellow vaccine patients.
I grew up privileged, educated in both Switzerland and the United States. My husband and I hold university degrees from the UK and the US, respectively. But these credentials didn’t afford us job security when Venezuela’s economy began declining in 2010. They also didn’t give us automatic residency nor work authorization in any Western country.
After several months of research, we learned we could qualify for Canada’s immigration program for permanent residency and began the application process, a journey which included my husband learning French.
The process felt like running through an obstacle course in slow motion. We needed the Venezuelan government to provide numerous original documents, leaving us at the mercy of government officials trained to intimidate would-be emigrators.
We also knew that we were among tens of thousands of applicants petitioning the Canadian government for this change in status. After two years, thousands of dollars invested in language learning, bureaucratic fees, background checks, and academic records from three different countries, in late March 2012, we left 72-degree Caracas and landed in Montreal at an icy 14 degrees Fahrenheit.
Although linguistic difficulty or economic poverty didn’t hinder our integration into Canadian society, starting over in my 40s was humbling. We could fit our whole Montreal apartment in the space of our old home’s common areas. We went from two cars to monthly bus passes.
Looking for work while learning our way in a new city, using a language I hadn’t spoken since adolescence (though at least I hadn’t had to learn it from scratch like Gustavo), and navigating life without an in-person support system left me lonely and disoriented.
So much of who I thought I had been was no longer evident, relevant, or recognized. In one airplane flight, I went from being someone—someone’s child, friend, neighbor, a known member of a community—to a number on a government form, a name difficult to pronounce.
Yet there I was last fall, 15 years on the other side, a grateful Canadian citizen—and an irritated neighbor. Reflecting on my own frustration in the pharmacy has helped me understand the growing negativity toward immigrants. The number of immigrants in Canada has nearly doubled in the last ten years since we landed in 2012, and the government has struggled to provide sufficient affordable housing and quality health care. In 2023, the number of immigrants living in the United States increased by 1.6 million, and the migrant situation overwhelmed the border and cities with inadequate shelter and language resources, and strained many existing social support systems.
The pattern seen in North America echoes a global trend, as the number of forcibly displaced persons worldwide doubled over the past decade, reaching “114 million in 2023, the highest since the beginning of the century.”
The world’s exiled people present a huge inconvenience for the world’s established. For the poor and marginalized, watching the government distribute resources they’ve asked about for years can feel demoralizing and infuriating. The intense emotions present in the pharmacy’s standing room–only waiting area offer a jarring microcosm of a global reality.
Peter’s words to first-century Christians provide a timely reminder: “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy” (1 Peter 2:10).
As Peter notes, God’s transformative work in our lives hinges on mercy. We cannot change without receiving this grace. We also cannot be recipients of mercy if we have not wronged or inconvenienced someone else. And according to Peter, that is all of us. Yet the New Testament consistently reminds us that this does not stop God from wanting to make us family.
James continues this thought: “Judgment without mercy will be shown to anyone who has not been merciful” (James 2:13). We are called to “speak and act as those who are going to be judged by the law that gives freedom” (v. 12). Yes, God’s mercy defines our lives. But so does our own outward expression of mercy.
While politicians debate our immigration systems, our faith calls us to extend grace to the people who challenge us.
After we finally left the pharmacy, my husband remarked on the nurse’s gentleness—and exhaustion. He told me that she had excused herself for not greeting him properly, that she barely remembered what day of the week it was, and that she’d been on her feet for the past seven hours. Hearing her posture shamed me. I regretted my reaction and confessed it to my husband on our walk back home.
I later wondered if perhaps she was one of the quarter of nurses who are also Canadian immigrants. Perhaps she believed that the costs of a recently-arrived family getting sick would be worse (both for the family and their community) than making the rest of us wait a little longer. Maybe she knew their language and felt a personal connection with them. Or maybe the nurse felt compassion for individuals trying to navigate an overwhelming environment. Regardless, she did far better than me, a professing Christian.
During these 12 years in Canada, our nationality, last name, or other factors have sometimes caused others to misjudge, misunderstand, and alienate my husband and me. People have also welcomed us into their homes and treated us as neighbours and respected colleagues, and we have cultivated meaningful friendships. Now with Gustavo and me in our 50s, our relocated life continues to reposition my knees to the ground.
Whether we are part of the world’s exiled or the world’s established, our citizenship in the kingdom compels us to care for immigrants and refugees because of who we are in Christ—a people who received mercy and whose God identifies with the lowly, the stranger, and the needy. Apart from Christ, that’s our true condition as well.
Paola Barrera is a writer born in Venezuela, educated between Europe and the US, and Canadian through the gift of immigration. Her work focuses on how faith and theology inform everyday life. You can find more of her work at https://paolabarrera.com/.
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