It's a Small World Part III

Friday morning, I met with a Brazilian-Canadian involved in one of our projects in the State of Sao Paulo. From his email tag, I knew that he worked in the same neighbourhood in which I grew up in Montreal. Once we got chatting, we discovered that he actually lives and works two blocks from my Montreal home! Of course, for the rest of our meeting, we spent more time talking about our common reference points than about the subject at hand.

On his way out, we started talking about the process to immigrate to Canada and the fact that the Province of Quebec runs its own immigration programme which complements Canada's programme. I mentioned that a Brazilian contact of mine recently immigrated to Montreal using the Quebec process. When I mentioned my colleague's first name, my visitor opened his eyes wide and said "do you mean so-and-so?" And of course, I did mean so-and-so!

According to estimates, there are a couple of thousand Brazilians living in Montreal. I would ask what the chances are that a connection like this would happen, but I suspect that we all know the answer!