“Against all odds I made it.
My name is Noel Abingwa and I am hungry to succeed. I was born in a beautiful country in Africa called Cameroon, which unfortunately is currently under the dilemma of civil unrest. Anyways, moving on from that. Before immigrating to study in Canada, I gave up a year of my life and sacrificed the comfort of being around familiar faces by moving away from my family and friends to the French-speaking part of my country to work on a farm as the farm’s project manager. Upon arriving at the farm for the first time, I was given a house to sleep in that was anything but comfortable. The walls were unfinished, parts of the floor were dirt and the holes in the wall were hideouts for lizards. Before you start feeling sorry for me, you haven’t heard the best of it yet.
Regardless of all the justifications, I couldn’t turn down the job, put my tail between my legs and go back home to my parents like a scared puppy dog, so I braved the odds and accepted the challenge. It was going to be tough. To share one funny story hahaha “one day, as I was supervising the workers as they cut the grass in the pineapple farm, one of the spikes from the pineapple leaflets went through my boots and into my foot, the pain I felt was enough motivation to quit. I went into my room and started packing my stuff while calling the farm proprietor to quit, then on the wall I saw my vision board, and on it was ’Work, Save and Travel to Canada.
The voice that whispered ‘quit’ was silenced and I promised myself I would never go through the pain and not get something out of it. At the end of that year 2017, I was finally ready. I applied for a Canadian Study Permit and finally, I said goodbye to my boss at work and was ready for my new beginning. On my way from Douala, the city where I worked, to Bamenda, the city where my family was, I receive an email on the boss from IRCC. When I saw the sentence, ‘I regret to say your application was refused’, the blood in my body dried out.
I felt like I was raptured from the bus. It was over. But I remembered the promise I made to myself, ‘what I want I will get and I won’t go through the pain and not get something out of it.’ I came back to myself and started strategizing for my next step. I came back, my father gave me a small room at the back of the house and I started a poultry farm business using part of the money I had saved for my travel. I waited for two months and applied for a Canadian study permit again in the early part of 2018, and I was refused again.
Again, I was already too invested to quit, so I applied again and finally, my persistence paid off. Long story short here I am in Sheridan College, one year into my dream to become an investment banker. The first time out of my country, the first time in a plane and while on the plane I knew I had to be an investment banker.
Soon after arriving in Canada, I went onto a train for the first time. I was going to downtown Toronto from Brampton to meet a hedge funds manager who is the founder of a renowned hedge fund. I was meeting him for the first time, to hopefully convince him to be my mentor. His secretary was a great gatekeeper, but I spoke my way through her and eventually landed a 2-hour mentoring meeting with him, and today he is a finance mentor for me.
These are not scenes from movies, hahaha. I have so many other stories to share and I sure will. I believe in “The Canadian Dream” and I want to encourage and inspire as many students as I can especially here in Sheridan to challenge themselves to create their dream life. We owe ourselves to live the best life we can. My word of advice to anyone reading this is; If there is something you want to do, have or accomplish, or if there is any single human being on the surface of the earth who has or is doing what you dream to do, it’s a testimonial that you can do it too. So start now, keep going and keep growing and one morning you will wake up to realize that you are living the dream. Secondly, don’t ever feel pain going through something and not demand some lesson or value from your pain. Become a better person from every struggle and remember that you have love to give.
I believe in you, so believe in you and wish you the best”
- Noel Abingwa