Stop making assumptions about a woman just because of how she dresses or behaves in public, ladies and gentlemen. Seriously. The name is Ayaan Ismail and I'm a young Black Canadian Muslim woman of Somali descent living in the City of Ottawa, Ontario. I was born in the City of Mogadishu, Somalia, and lived there until the twelfth summer of my life. That's when my parents, Mariam and Ali Ismail moved to Canada with our little family.
We moved to the City of Ottawa, and have been in this town ever since. It's been nine years and I consider myself as Canadian as anyone. I speak French and English fluently, on top of my Somali native tongue, and I want to go far in life. I attend Algonquin College, where I'm studying to become an accountant, and when I'm not in class, at home or at my favorite masjid, I'm at the university campus where I work as a cleaner.
The things I've seen as a cleaner on a major Canadian university campus simply boggles the mind, folks. Friday nights are the worst for us overnight cleaners because of all the drunk students, male and female, and the fact that those among them who can't handle their liquor retch repeatedly on the washroom floors AFTER I've cleaned them up. The girls are the worst because they can't handle their liquor, so the ladies washroom is always full of puke. I hate it when they do that shit, pardon my French!
Still, I can't complain because it's because of my job as a cleaner, tough and demanding though it may be, that I met the love of my life. I was cleaning the university library's busiest floor, the first floor, pushing a cart and walking toward the washrooms when some foolish male student bumped into me. The dude's elbows hit my side, hard enough to hurt, and I winced in pain. The fool continued on his merry way, as if nothing had happened.
Pain shot through me, and not just physically. You see, when you're a cleaner, people treat you as though you were something other than a human being. Every building in the world needs cleaning, and cleaning crews work very hard to maintain everything from Parliament Hill to the frigging White House, and yet people like me get no respect.
Well, the bozo's rudeness hadn't gone unnoticed, and out of the blue, a tall and well-dressed young Black man walked up to the chubby white dude who elbowed me and told him to watch where he was going. The chubby white dude stared, dumbfounded as the well-dressed brother lectured him about bumping into people without apologizing. The white dude looked like he wanted to say something but the sight of a towering, angry young Black man in front of him made him keep his mouth shut.
