The first thing Aisha noticed was the quiet.
“In Mogadishu, the city is awake all night. Cars, voices, the call to prayer. Here, after 9 p.m. — nothing. Just snow falling. I thought I had gone deaf.”
She arrived in February 2024 with two suitcases and a recipe book her mother had hand-written in Somali. The recipe book is now in a glass case behind the counter at her Bay Street kitchen, where she sells lamb, beef, and lentil sambusas to a line that starts forming around 11:30 every weekday.
On Tuesdays, two city councillors come in for lunch. One of them — Aisha won’t say which — has been trying to learn enough Somali to order without pointing. He’s getting closer.
“He says salaam now. He says it wrong. But he says it.”
Aisha’s kitchen opened in November 2025, nine months after she landed. She got the lease through a Somali friend-of-a-friend, the equipment second-hand from a closing shawarma place, and the food handler’s certificate from a free program at Confederation College.
What she didn’t get from any program: the woman next door who slipped a hundred-dollar bill under her door the first week, “for groceries.” The elderly customer who comes in every Friday and tells her, in detail, about his grandmother’s cooking in 1950s Finland. The way the regulars now ask, in the depths of January, whether she’s warm enough.
“Thunder Bay was cold,” Aisha says. “The neighbours weren’t.”
Her sister arrives from Mogadishu in May. Aisha is teaching her to count change in English. She’s already making her practice the word Boozhoo.
Aisha is a composite of three Thunder Bay newcomers Diaspora North spoke with. Names and identifying details have been changed at their request.