"Thirteen years ago, I left St. Lucia to work in Ontario.When can my wife and sons join me?"

I spend 12 hours a day in a greenhouse, but the hardest part of my job is being apart from family

- Timothy Mark Bernard

I GREW UP IN A SMALL FARMING COMMUNITY CALLED AUX LYON in St. Lucia. As a young boy, I yearned to travel, so when my eldest sister told me there was an opportunity to work in Canada, I immediately filled out an application to be a temporary foreign worker. I came to Ontario in 2010, when I was 24 years old, to work in a greenhouse that grew more than 100 varieties of tomatoes. Nothing about Canada was familiar to me. I lived in a 64-person bunkhouse, with eight people to a room. We had no Wi-Fi, which made calling home very expensive. At first, working in the greenhouse was exciting because agriculture in Canada is light years away from what we have in St. Lucia, where we plant tomatoes with back-wrenching labour, using machetes, forks and spades. Here, farmers have hydroponic systems and tractors. I absorbed all the knowledge I could because I wanted to improve our agriculture back home and own a hydroponic greenhouse one day.