Three generations of a Canadian family died in the plane crash in Ethiopia – 14/03/2019

By Dan Bilefsky

BRAMPTON, Ontario – It was supposed to be a family vacation.

An immigrant grandfather eager to set foot on the African soil where he was thirty years ago. A consenting mother decided to show her Canadian daughters their place of origin. Two captivated teenagers with the idea of ​​seeing animals during a safari in Kenya.

Instead, three generations of an Indo-Canadian family died when a plane from Ethiopian Airlines he crashed on March 10; the 157 pbadengers on board died, including eighteen Canadians.

"I'm not angry, but devastated, I've lost all my family"He said Manant Vaidya, 41, whose parents, sister-in-law, brother-in-law and two nieces died in the accident that also killed people from twenty-five countries, including Kenya, Ethiopia, China and the United States.

In Brampton, Ontario, a multicultural suburb on the outskirts of Toronto, where Punjabi is the second most spoken language after English, the community very close to Southeast Asia is shocked by the death of his mother, Hansini Vaidya, 67 years old; his father, Pannagesh Vaidya, 73 years old; his sister Kosha Vaidya, 37 years old; his brother-in-law Prerit Dixit, 45, and his two nieces, Ashka Dixit, 14, and Anushka Dixit, 13.

They are in mourning, said Vaidya, for a family that represented the Canadian dream.

A few hours after the accident, the mayor ordered to raise the flags of the town hall at half-mast in the family's honor. In girls' schools, they did the same thing.

On March 12, a steady stream of neighbors and family members pbaded through the Brampton home where Vaidya and her family were living with their parents to offer their condolences and supplies.

On March 11, Sushma Swaraj, Minister of Foreign Affairs of Indian origin, telephoned him to offer his condolences.

During this time, the family badyzed how to obtain hair samples or dental records from their deceased parents to perform DNA tests. They claimed that According to the Hindu tradition, they were anguished by the possibility of not being able to identify the corpses to cremate the family in their native Gujarat.

"The last time I saw them, it was Saturday morning, when I left them at the airport," Vaidya said.

A friend from Nairobi called the next day to announce the news.

"At first, I could not believe it," said Vaidya, adding that the family had He is afraid to tell the news to his 90-year-old mother, who lives in India.

Vaidya explained that her family members were typical first generation Indian migrants. They had five parent groups who lived five minutes away in Brampton, supervised by their parents.

They were surrogates, mentors and therapists all over the clan, he said, many of them have close relatives in India.

Pannagesh Vaidya, A gentle man with a soft voice and a casual smile, he had been executive director of an engineering consulting firm, according to his son, and he loved helping his grandchildren with math and mental operations.

In the weekly family reunions, which included naan bread and dal, in addition to the pizza, Ashka sang and Anushka performed traditional Indian dances. Anushka wanted to be a robotics engineer.

"The two girls were born here and they were Canadian," Vaidya said. "The whole family believed that Canada was a land of opportunity. "

Vaidya's grandparents met at their arranged marriage in Gujarat, but love between them soon arrived. Manant Vaidya claimed that his father had funded the education of his mother, who had studied to become an architect. "He was part of the older generation, but he respected the fact that his wife had a career," he said.

The family was the embodiment of the work ethic of new migrants.

Vaidya said that when her pbadionate photographer's brother-in-law arrived in Canada, she held two jobs and worked seven days a week, including as a laboratory technician with the Canadian Department of Health.

Her sister, an extrovert woman who was pbadionate about travel, worked in the human resources department of the Canadian Ear Society, which provides services to deaf people.

Nikita Joshi, one of his closest friends, said Kosha Vaidya was determined to visit as many countries as possible before her daughters entered the university.

She had already traveled to Alaska, Mexico and Hawaii and was eager to show her daughters in Mombasa, Kenya, where she was born when her father worked there decades ago.

After Kenya, he planned to take his family to London to attend a cricket match in India to visit his family and Dubai.

The girls swam, loved football, listened to girls' groups, and shared the Bollywood movie nights with the family.

"The closeness of the family was extraordinary," said Pramesh Nandi, a music teacher in Ashka. "They seemed to be done one for the other, the four."

Stefanie Marotta contributed to this report from Toronto.

c.2019 New York Times News Service