Speaker at PVLIP celebration encourages people to live life to the fullest
An annual event that highlights and celebrates the region’s diversity featured a guest speaker who both offered inspiration through her own journey and aimed to spark discussion about what can happen if we remain open to all possibilities.
The fifth annual Connecting Cultures and Communities celebration of the Pembina Valley Local Immigration Partnership (PVLIP) last Wednesday in Morden heard from Linh Huynh, who was the seventh of eight children in a family who fled from Vietnam after the war.
Having grown up mostly in Canada, where she calls Calgary home, Huynh’s message is that people don’t need a special talent to live an extraordinary life—amazing things can happen when people live with passion and curiosity. Huynh believes wonder is the spark that asks each of us: Where do we go now?
“This is my passion,” Huynh said in addressing the audience at St. Paul’s United Church. “When I have an opportunity to speak to newcomers and when I have the opportunity to speak to service providers and community members … it is my absolute honour.”
Huynh and her family first arrived at a refugee camp and stayed there for a year before getting sponsored to move to Canada, where a church congregation had to demonstrate that it would support the entire family for 12 months.
“We came from a third world, war-torn country,” she said. “The church provided us with a mentor, and she was by mom’s side for the entire first year … she took my mom everywhere.”
She recalled such moments as when the family arrived on a Greyhound bus not even closely dressed for a Canadian winter.
Today, Huynh is a professional speaker, author, educator and extreme “non-athlete.” She has completed the Antarctic Ice Marathon, the North Pole Marathoh, and a series of desert ultra-marathons.
Her journey as a child opened her eyes to what is possible if one lives intently and fearlessly. She says that surviving a harrowing journey at such a young age instilled a deep sense of gratitude for the life that was gifted to her.
Huynh’s driving philosophy is to explore everything that life has to offer, and she is on a mission to inspire people to face challenges and create an extraordinary life full of courage, joy, and wonder.
Huynh used her story as a launching point for table discussions that were aimed at helping generate ideas on how PVLIP and the communities it serves can launch further change in the region.
She asked how many people in the room were newcomers, had moved to a new place to live, or had started anew in some other way and asked them to stand—this led to the whole room standing.
“This is so beautiful,” she said, noting how the definition of a newcomer can be any person that is in a new situation, any person that has faced new challenges, or anyone that has had to adapt to a new setting or situation.
“With every person that is added into a new community, the dynamic changes,” she said.
PVLIP co-ordinator Elaine Burton Saindon noted they went in a different direction with the event this year to feature a keynote speaker, and she thought it went over very well.
“[Huynh] has a remarkable story with the successes that she has been able to accomplish in her life,” she said. “And she uses that to kind of inspire others on their journey, whether they’re a newcomer from another country or if you just curious about stepping out of your comfort zone and trying something new.”
Burton-Saindon said Connecting Cultures and Communities is an event they host to engage community members and help them understand what their work is all about.
“We don’t have a lot of public presence just because we are mostly dealing with helping community members or leaders mostly and decision makers kind of understand from their perspective what’s the impact of immigration in their community or in a workplace,” she said. “For that, we need to collaborate with multiple people across 15 municipalities … so we need to move throughout the region a lot.”
Their hope is to not only bring awareness to the organization but also celebrate the diversity of the region.
“We want to highlight what we’ve done over the last five years and launch into our next five years of planning,” she said. “It’s also kind of to get the communities’ involvement and hear what they have to say about different themes when it comes to diversity and inclusion.
“We really want to celebrate our diversity, celebrate our cultures in the area,” she continued. “It would be wonderful if people would find inspiration and would want to join PVLIP. We really function mostly with volunteers. We have multiple committees that focus on different priorities that we have established.
“We want to encourage each community to have an action team … [considering] how to foster inclusion or how to improve belonging or how to improve services for newcomers.”
