‘Here is my home:’ Refugee whose fingers froze off finds hope in Winnipeg
WINNIPEG — Razak Iyal still wakes up in the middle of the night feeling the icy winds on Christmas Eve two years ago when his life drastically changed.
“It comes into my dreams all the time. I am thinking about it. When you wake up from the bed you see your hands and you don’t have your fingers,” Iyal, 36, said in an interview last month.
A powerful winter storm was pounding southern Manitoba as Iyal and Seidu Mohammed, whom he had met at a bus station in Minneapolis in 2016, made their way to the Canada-United States border near Emerson.
The overnight wind chill dipped to -30 C as the men trudged through snowy fields in the dark. They spent hours in the cold before they were noticed by a trucker.