How important was the community gardens project to adjusting to life in Canada?

First impressions on arriving in Canada are sometimes so striking that they leave vivid memories. For those who grew up here, our surroundings are taken for granted. We learn greater appreciation when we hear from you how it feels to encounter Canadian kitchen appliances after spending years cooking on a mud stove, for instance. What was the thing that fascinated you most after arriving in Canada? When did the amazement fade?

There are 70 million forcibly displaced persons globally. Of these only 1 percent will ever be resettled. The International Organization of Migration (IOM) said that the Bhutanese resettlement was the largest and most successful third-country resettlement ever undertaken. (2015). Bhutanese-Canadians are experts in the lived experience of being forcibly displaced, living as refugees, and then making a new and successful life in a country more culturally different than the one they were forced to leave. They know what worked well and what didn't go well in all of these areas, and have experienced more deeply than most of society will understand, the terrible cost of a loss of good will between cultural groups. The film is a collective, collaborative pathway of meaning-making out of the experience of what happened, facilitated according to the creative hopes of participants as their skills and vision evolved in cyclical process of transformative film making. The Story Bridge Film contains a broad range of information about this lived experience and can be a starting point for understanding and preventing forced migration, and appreciating the gift it is to engage across cultures.