Every week, Zikoko spotlights the unfiltered stories of women navigating life, love, identity and everything in between.
What She Said will give women the mic to speak freely, honestly and openly, without shame about sex, politics, family, survival, and everything else life throws our way.
The subject of today’s #WhatSheSaid is Amina*, a 28-year-old woman who moved to Canada at 16 for university. She talks about the pension her father spent, the decade of crisis that followed, and why the road back to Nigeria keeps closing in front of her, no matter how hard she tries to take it.
Can you tell me about yourself and how this whole journey started?
I’m Amina, and I’m 28. I moved to Canada when I was 16, straight out of secondary school, to start university. I was doing a double major, Communications and International Relations, though I had to drop one along the way, and it became more of a major and a minor situation. I made the big trip entirely alone. It was just me, a school dorm, and a plan that felt very simple at the time. Go to school, finish, and come back home with a degree.
I started in a smaller city, not one that people usually mention when they talk about Canada. My mum paid my tuition for the first two years without any issues. She was the one supporting me, along with the agency the school used to help with things like accommodation, visa and so on. Everything felt manageable.
What happened after those first two years?
My mum called me one day and told me that my father, her husband, had taken her pension. All of it. He’s not a working man; he’s a pastor, and he had gone and spent the entire thing. Just like that. She was the breadwinner in our house; she always had been, and the only real cushion we had was wiped out by one man’s decisions. I was so angry because how could she give him that money? He was putting it in a business to ‘duplicate’ it. What? You know this man, mummy and didn’t think ‘hmm, my second & last child, my only daughter is still halfway through school’. No! You squandered all the funds you worked hard for and saved for your children’s education! I could not speak to any of my parents for a very long time.
What’s your relationship with your father like?
Strained, to put it lightly. He’s always been a very strict and almost unpredictable man. The only reason he’s never hit any of us is because he holds his pastoral title so high above himself that he can’t reconcile violence with who he’s supposed to be in public. He almost has, though. On several occasions, we have watched him physically struggle not to hit us. He’s abusive in every other way. Verbally, emotionally, and financially clearly. I don’t like him. I don’t think there’s a softer way to say that.
When your mother told you the money was gone, what was your reaction?
I refused to drop out. That was the only thing I was certain of in that moment. I had already started something, and I wasn’t going to let his irresponsibility be the reason I didn’t finish. So I started working. Whatever I could get. Call centre jobs, barista work, retail, anything that would let me cover my international tuition fees, which, if you know anything about studying abroad, are not small numbers.
That must have been an enormous shift for someone so young.
It was the beginning of what I now just call the seven years. Because that’s roughly how long this cycle of crisis lasted, one thing compounding into the next, never really stopping long enough for me to catch my breath.
Can you walk me through some of what happened during that period?
There’s so much. I’ll try to give you the shape of it. At one point, I had managed to gather a significant amount of money for my fees, money I’d put together slowly over months. Family members chipping in here and there, strangers being kind, savings from work and even some loans. I was at a bus stop at night, and it was stolen from me. I didn’t even know when. It was just gone. I remember standing there after, not even fully processing it because my body had gone somewhere else entirely.
How did you cope with something like that happening?
Honestly, not well. I isolated a lot during that period. I pushed people away without even realising I was doing it. By the time things were really falling apart, I had almost no one around me, which I now understand was partly my own doing. When you’re drowning, you don’t always reach for the hands trying to help you; sometimes you just sink quietly because it feels like less work.
Then the health crisis happened.
You also had a health crisis during this time?
Yes. Emergency surgery for ovarian cysts. I had to go through that completely alone, no family nearby, very little support system left because I’d pushed so many people away. It took some GoFundMe to complete the fee I needed for this. Recovery was so lonely. I don’t think I can fully explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. You’re healing physically, and there’s no one checking in, no one bringing you food, you’re just existing through it by yourself in a foreign country.
It was worsened by the fact that I had taken out loans, and loan sharks were actively looking for me.
Loan sharks. Can you tell me about that?
I took out what was available to someone in my position, an immigrant who’d come for school. Some bank loans, but also some local predatory lenders, because at certain points, those were the only people willing to give me anything. It got bad enough that they once showed up at my house. A neighbour managed to distract them while I left through the back. I ended up having to leave that entire city because of it.
What She Said: My Dad Spent My Mum’s Pension. Now I’m Stranded in Canada
That sounds terrifying.
It was. And it’s strange because in the moment, you’re so focused on just surviving the next hour that the fear doesn’t always register until much later. I think about it now, and I get a delayed kind of terror that I didn’t fully feel at the time.
With everything happening, how did your studies progress?
It starts and stops. I had to pause and retake courses more times than I can comfortably count, four or five at least. Every time I couldn’t clear a semester balance on time, I’d lose progress and have to redo things. I watched people I started university with finish, move on, build lives, while I was still stuck retaking a course I’d already passed once before but couldn’t afford to complete properly the first time around.
What finally brought you to the point of wanting to give up and come home?
It was last year. There was a point where I was very close to actually finishing, and a cost came up again, money I was expecting fell through, and I was told that if I missed a certain date, I wouldn’t be able to complete some courses and would have to retake the entire thing from scratch. On top of that, my visa was expiring, and I needed to renew it, but there was an issue with my student paperwork, something about fees not being paid or the institution not recognising my standing properly.
I went to my advisor, who told me she had no time to apply that same day, and then ghosted me for over a week.
What happened with that visa situation?
This is the part I still don’t fully understand. While I was waiting on my advisor, I went to the larger office that handles visas, just to ask questions, and they told me they’d received my email and everything was being sorted. I hadn’t sent any email. When my advisor eventually responded after that week of silence, I asked her directly if she’d sent anything on my behalf. She had no idea what I was talking about. She hadn’t sent anything either.
I still don’t know how it happened. By that point, I had already mentally prepared myself to just go back to Nigeria, papers or not. And then somehow, legally, I was allowed to stay. All I could do was thank God. There was no other explanation I had for it.
Still, I decided to leave Canada eventually. This was because even with that resolved, the bigger issue never went away. The fees, the debt, none of that disappeared. It’s been over ten years of nothing going right in any consistent way. So I bought a ticket home, told my parents and even sent money ahead to secure my own apartment in Nigeria because I was not going to live with them.
Why was that so important to you, having your own place?
My parents are a huge part of why I went through what I went through. They were very strict growing up, and my father’s financial recklessness is the entire reason this seven-year cycle started in the first place. I love them, in whatever complicated way you love your parents, but I was not going to fly all the way back just to walk into another version of the environment I was trying to escape.
Understandable. What happened next?
To get from where I was to Nigeria, the route went through Germany. I asked if I needed a transit visa, and they said no. When I got to the airport, someone said to ask again before I boarded the flight, and it turned out I did, in fact, need one. They apologised, said it was their fault for the wrong information, but I still needed the visa to proceed, and they never refunded my ticket money.
How much was that loss?
Thousands of dollars. Money I did not have to lose again. It felt like every road I tried to take back home was either blocked or, in the case of my papers, divinely intervened for me to stay. I don’t know how else to explain a pattern like that.
What happened after the flight fell through?
My parents arranged for me to stay temporarily with family friends while I sorted everything out. I had sent money home some time ago that I requested back. My parents decided to send it to me through said family friends, but they never gave me a dime. They said it was to cover my rent and food.
What was that experience like?
It was not good. Instead of using that money the way it was intended, they withheld it from me and basically turned me into unpaid help in their home. I was looking after their children, cleaning, cooking, functioning as a nanny in every sense except one. They had a two-year-old and a baby not even a year old yet. The wife worked, the husband just lounged around all day, expecting things to be done for him.
The one line I drew, the only one, was diapers. I did everything else, from cooking, dishes, and taking care of the children all day and when I got a job again, whenever I was home. But I would not change diapers. That was the one boundary I held onto in that entire situation.
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They didn’t even let you eat properly?
No. They claimed whatever money was sent covered my room and board, but somehow that never translated into me actually being fed by them. I was working in their home all day and still had to figure out my own meals separately.
Eventually, they brought up the asylum conversation.
What asylum conversation?
They were the ones who pushed it. They said this was the only way left for me to stay in Canada. They contacted people, made connections, and eventually told me that to stay legally and get permanent papers, not the temporary kind I’d already been given through whatever divine intervention happened with my visa, I would need to apply for asylum on the grounds of being queer.
How did you feel about that suggestion?
I genuinely did not want to do that. I want to be honest, there’s a lot I can’t fully say about why. I’m a pastor’s child. Certain things can’t come out, even to myself. I cannot even accept certain things about myself fully. Who says I’m queer? But yes, the suggestion was made purely as a legal pathway, not because I had ever said anything like that out loud to them or to anyone.
What were your actual options at that point?
Asylum or marriage. Those were the two doors left open to me to legally remain. Neither of them felt like something I had chosen for myself. They both felt like things being handed to me because every other option had already closed.
Where are things now with the family you were staying with?
I’ve moved out. I told them months ago I would be leaving, and at the time, they all agreed it made sense. But the week I was actually meant to move, the husband, the same one who lounged around all day while I cared for his children, screamed at me, asking if I knew who I was and where I thought I was going. I left anyway. What else was I supposed to do at that point?
What do you want people to take from your story?
Honestly, I don’t have advice right now. I don’t even know if I want this for awareness exactly. I think I just needed to let it out, to tell someone, because saying all of this out loud made me realise what a ride this has been. What a life.
I was in secondary school once. I never thought this would be my life ten plus years later. I’m still in the thick of it; I don’t have a neat ending for you. I’m just still here, trying to figure out what comes next.
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