Real Stories: My family thinks I’m enjoying in Canada, but I clean toilets for a living

If you ask my family back home, they’ll tell you I’m “living the dream” in Canada.

My cousins brag, my mother tells people in church that her daughter is “abroad, working with white people.” If only they knew.

If only they knew I scrub toilets for a living. Literal toilets, public ones. The kind that makes you question all your life decisions.

When I got my student visa to Canada, I thought I was escaping suffering. I thought life would be soft. I thought I’d arrive and start living like those girls on TikTok with perfect snow selfies and chai lattes.

But my reality was different. 

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I was supposed to stay with a family friend for the first month. She told me, “Come o, we’ll manage.” But after a couple of weeks, she started giving me hints. “You know house here is expensive… people are not even taking their own family in again.” I got the message.

I found a shared basement in Brampton. 6 people, one bathroom. My room was basically a glorified cupboard with a mattress on the floor. Rent was $500. My part-time job cleaning at a local university paid $14/hour, but I wasn’t even getting enough shifts to cover bills.

That’s when I found the second job. Commercial cleaning, they call it. 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Monday to Saturday. Offices, shopping centres, toilets. Especially toilets. Some nights, I cried while mopping floors. 

I couldn’t tell my mum I was suffering. She was already struggling with her own health issues. My younger brother just got admission to a private uni, and I promised to support him. So I lie. Every day.

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I send home $100 here, $150 there. And when they call, I fake smiles. I walk outside in the cold just to take pictures in the snow. I wear my friend’s designer jacket and send “soft life” snaps. I’ve even told people I work at a tech company,  just to maintain the illusion.

But I’m tired. I’m tired of pretending. Tired of inhaling bleach every night. Tired of working two jobs and still checking grocery prices like I’m doing calculus. Tired of being in yankee and still feeling poor.

Sometimes I wonder if I made the right choice. If I should’ve just stayed in Nigeria and faced my hustle there. But then I remember why I came. They say Canada is the land of opportunities. Maybe it is. But before the opportunities come, you have to clean a lot of toilets, and fake smiles when you FaceTime home.

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