Jinny fled the tropical country of her birth because she was wanted and pursued by the Secret Police of the Government. She knew she would be imprisoned incommunicado indefinitely, like many others before her, because of her allegedly treasonous Politics.

The fact was that Jinny had no Political views, and had never been interested in her country’s politics to the extend of never having voted in any of the elections since she became eligible to vote a few years earlier.

She was working two part-time manual labour jobs to pay her way through Teacher’s College, after she graduated from Secondary School. She had neither family nor relatives. She had lived in an orphanage from the beginning.

From before she was born Jinny’s country had been ruled by tyrannical military rulers. In the previous two decades, opposition to the rulers sprang up. Quite often the opposition was violent, on the streets and everywhere else. The rulers responded to the violent protests with ever-increasing violent police and military force.

Because as an orphan she had no time left after studying and coping with life’s ordinary challenges, Jinny had never cared to be involved with the Politics of her Nation. Her only focus was to qualify to be an ordinary Primary School Teacher so that she could earn enough money to be able to live happily ever after.

Because there were so many upstart opposition Political Parties around, it was easy for students such as Jinny, to earn lunch money by running errands for the Parties without having to be paid members of any Party.

She was mere weeks from her Diploma exams when she was informed by someone in one of the Parties that the Secret Police were about to arrest her, and that she could join the Underground Movement for free for help to flee the country. Jinny joined the Underground.

When she arrived in that host country where she was a refugee, her future was hopeless. The Underground had selected that host country because its Government provided free accommodation and food for Political refugees from her homeland, on condition that the refugees cease all their Political activism while in the host country.

That host country wanted to avoid provoking Jinny’s Nation’s tyrannical rulers.

Incredibly, within days it was brought to Jinny’s attention that even though she had not completed her Teaching Diploma, she had enough credentials to qualify to apply for a Teaching position in either of two remote towns in far away Canada. Jinny knew nothing of significance about Canada.

The little information she was provided with about the two towns did not make one more preferable to the other.

The one was Whitehorse, the capital town of the Province of Yukon. The other was Yellowknife in the Province of the Northwest Territories of Canada.

The unfriendly mutterings of her refugee fellows that she was being ungrateful in dithering since she alone among them had an offering of a paid professional job in line with her academic education, obliged her hastily to choose to go to Yellowknife.

In her situation, Jinny calculated that since Yellowknife was smaller and younger than Whitehorse, it would be easier for her to spot a Secret Service Agent from her homeland sent to punish her for fleeing. It was not a secret that Government Agents from her homeland had been sent on many occasions to other countries to harm dissident asylum seekers.

This Secret Service Agent factor was significant enough for the officials of the Refugee Organization to communicate in secret to Jinny to not attend any public entertainment concerts starring world-class celebrity persons.

While never in the history of Yellowknife to date had there been such an event, that record was certain to be broken in the present
fast evolving electronic times. Such an event, obviously, would be a murdering Secret Service Agent’s heaven-sent special occasion.

There were two events the officials recommended she participate in as much as she preferred, bird-watching, and aurora borealis (Northern Lights) viewing.

Millions of birds a year, fly into Yellowknife. Bird-watching is a popular organized community sport, especially in the month of May when a wide variety of birds arrive from many parts of the world. In May, there are up to 280 species of birds represented in Yellowknife.

A birdwatcher’s necessary equipment is binoculars. Such equipment makes spotting a mischief-intent Secret Service Agent child’s play.

Viewing the natural wonder of the aurora borealis is the other most spectacular community event in Yellowknife from late August to April. It brings in hundreds of tourists. Yellowknife is the Northern Lights capital of North America. Since all the excitement is generated in the darkness of night, there is practically no reason to fear the shenanigans of Secret Service Agents.

The annual average temperature in Yellowknife is approximately more than ten degrees below freezing. This bit of information was extremely important to Jinny because the annual average temperature in the country of her birth from which she was obliged to flee, was seventy degrees above freezing!

A most depressing thought was that in Yellowknife, never again would she dare indulge in her favourite pastime of romping about on sunny ocean beaches in her tropical homeland.

In Yellowknife, for seven months of the year snow falls frequently most days and nights. This situation troubled her in ways she could not express in words.

By her calculations, while on the one hand she had no choice, on the other, she uncovered so many happy coincidences that augured well for her in Yellowknife.

Jinny arrived at Yellowknife when both the City and the Country were in full celebration.

The Nation was celebrating its first centennial as an independent Country. Yellowknife was celebrating being declared that year the capital of its Province, The Northwest Territories.

Jinny drew particularly secret and personal satisfaction that the population of Yellowknife was less than five-thousand. That would make it so much easier for her to detect any foreign agents searching for her! The population of her tropical homeland she had fled was over half-a-million.

On her arrival in Yellowknife, while she looked forward to enjoying the City’s and the Country’s celebrations as especially appropriate to her new beginning, she could not help being daunted and depressingly overwhelmed by the snow that falling in quantity enough to obscure most details of the environment. In the next few hours she would learn this was normal in Yellowknife for that time of the year.

The obvious shock in two other persons trudging through the snow on the ground with her at the Yellowknife airport was somewhat comforting to Jinny. They were women her age who were, like Jinny, on their way to be Teachers in Yellowknife.

All three of them were eternally grateful for having been met at the airport in Yellowknife by the School Principal who graciously ushered them into indoor quarters where they were presented with free garments and footwear better suited for snow weather.

The contract she signed for the privilege to teach in Yellowknife was most generous.

If she served all five years of the contract, all her salary was free of Government income tax! All her home accommodation in Yellowknife was free. She was eligible for free food stamps in Yellowknife. If at the end of the first five years she renewed the contract for another five years, she would be eligible for immediate national citizenship.

Within a few days in Yellowknife she discovered for herself that the reason why the contract she had signed had such generous terms was because the severe weather in Yellowknife every day made life at least ninety-nine percent utterly miserable!

That daily misery was the cause of ninety-nine percent of foreigners, like Jinny, not serving the entire first full five years!

That daily misery was the cause of ninety-nine percent of applicants for Teaching employment in Yellowknife being foreigners; like Jinny!

All the teachers in Yellowknife’s one Primary school were foreigners. There were six of them.

The seventh, the Principal of the school, was the only Teacher who was a citizen of the country by birth, that birth having been very far away from Yellowknife!

Had Jinny already not been a refugee with no options for a better future, there was the highest probability she would have opted, before the end of her five-year contract, to become a refugee from Yellowknife, too.

Her highest praise was for the Government workers in charge of heating in Yellowknife. In all her years as a Teacher in Yellowknife until she retired as a Senior citizen, the heating system never failed!

For approximately eight months after Winter in Yellowknife, at least three kinds of Bears frequent Yellowknife. While Jinny did not need the officially posted notices everywhere for persons to stay away from Bears, she was glad the Bears were around because it meant that she had that much protection from unwelcome foreign Secret Agents.

Sadly, the possible presence of those Secret Agents prevented Jinny from fully enjoying the visits of British royal persons to Yellowknife. Over the years that Jinny lived in Yellowknife, there were two such visits. Jinny, like most persons, was well aware that on such occasions there would be virtually countless legitimate Royal Secret Agents mingling with ordinary citizens. What a golden opportunity for criminally-minded foreign Agents to mingle, too!

All her life in Yellowstone, the population was less than fifty-thousand persons. That small number, coupled with the year-round severe weather, gave Jinny confidence that she would have no trouble knowing in time if foreign agents arrived to arrest her.

Because of her constant insecurity as a refugee, Jinny stashed all her disposable money as cash in her home, never out of reach. If ever she had to refugee-run for it, again, she was determined to never be cashless!

Jinny never tried to find out why the Central Government allowed her to remain a taxpaying citizen after she retired from Teaching in Yellowknife as a Senior citizen, without ever applying for citizenship.

When Jinny retired, she chose to live the rest of her life in Yellowknife. She had come to learn how to neutralize for ninety-nine percent of the time every one of the City’s naturally inflicted miseries.

In her old age the joy Jinny derived from the one-and-only natural blessing bestowed on Yellowknife far outweighed the many natural miseries. That blessing was that for at least seven months of the year, because of the cold of snow and ice, Yellowknife was completely free of insects!

In that tropical land of her birth, nobody escaped being eaten alive by predatory insects, day and night, the whole year round!