With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.
Issue link: http://digital.canadawide.com/i/1505828
SEPTEMBER 2023 BCBUSINESS.CA 31 "We promoted it to the Peru- vian community, and they were so thankful. It went so fast. Peruvians don't have a fresh market here really. Everyone was excited—they came here to have those flavours they miss from home." And if you're a touch intimi- dated by the colossal range of choices in Mi Tierra Latina's stores, the founders are also working to make their products more accessible to those not from Latin America. Rustrian and Zebadua are from Mexico, and Garcia is "from Colombia and Venezuela, depending on the day you ask her," according to Osan, who is from Romania. "I had a very basic knowl- edge of Latin flavours when we started this," adds Osan, who learned mostly from the public tastings the stores host on weekends. "I was like, Wow, this is so good. Now I actually know what a feijoada is." —N.C. FRUITS OF LABOUR Clockwise from top left: Sonia Zebadua, Nilka Garcia, Michelle Rustrian and Alexandra Osan run Mi Tierra Latina n Megan Sheldon became an end-of-life doula and celebrant around 10 years ago, when she and her husband were going through a period of profound grief and loss. "We had recurrent miscar- riages, we lost his father to ALS, we had family members that were going through big health crises and friends losing parents and children," she lists. "Nobody knew what to say, what to do." Without anything to guide her through this difficult time, she felt isolated in her "invisible grief." So she leaned into her background as a cul- tural mythologist (a subject she specialized in at the University of Edinburgh) and started creating ceremonies first for herself, and then for others. "One of the most popular ones is somebody taking a rock or a piece of paper and writing, on one side, an emotion that they're sitting with and then thinking about another emotion they're hold- ing that feels kind of opposite," says Sheldon. The "ritual" works like a guided meditation to come to terms with disparate emotions that we might be holding at the same time. Fast-forward to COVID, when events started getting cancelled and there was a demand for new ways of connecting with others. "People started reaching out from all over the world. They couldn't be with their loved ones when they died or they were grieving and they couldn't make it back for a ceremony," Sheldon recalls. "So together with my colleague, Christina Andreola of [Vancouver-based] New Narrative Events, we (as far as we know) did the very first Zoom celebra- tions of life and memorials in North America." In the second week of COVID, Sheldon's software engineer husband, Johan Hoglund, lost his job. He's an advocate for slow tech ("kind of like slow food and slow fashion," she says), so the pair started talking about how technology could be used to enhance connections and relationships in moments of grief and loss. Sheldon hesitated. Normally she would sit with people for hours, guiding them through some F E E L I T A L L Be Ceremonial is a North Vancouver-based online platform for building rituals around transitionary life events such as pregnancies, miscarriages, crises and funerals