Murad Al-Katib is a man on a mission as he zips through the scale house at the SaskCan Pulse Processors plant just outside Regina.
He’s in the midst of our interview, and of course we want to grab photos here in the plant while we’re at it.
Al-Katib’s phone has been ringing off the hook all morning with calls from around the world, just like most days, and to top it all off, he’ll be getting on a plane this afternoon for an extended business trip to meet important customers at a Persian Gulf food show. Naturally, there are a ton of loose ends to tie up first.
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But that doesn’t stop Al-Katib from pausing a second to say hello.
“How’s it going, boys?” he says to the employees manning the scale and directing deliveries, sounding every inch like the kid who grew up in Davidson, Sask.
“Great,” comes back the response, as he heads out to his next appointment.
Right next door, Al-Katib stops for what appears to this outside observer to be an identical conversation.
Instead, this time the chat is with a pair of the Turkish splitmasters who’d come to Canada to get the his pulse processing plant company up and running, and the syllables that just flew past me are entirely in Turkish.
Al-Katib’s parents get the credit for his ability to move with relative ease between the two cultures. They insisted their children learn Turkish as well as English, and they regularly travelled home to Tukey, which gave their children excellent exposure to another culture during their formative years.
Al-Katib’s father had come to Saskatchewan to set up a medical practice that he has run for over 30 years, and his mother, Feyan, remembers being a young Turkish woman in 1965 who found herself in Davidson speaking no English and knowing no one but her husband.
“I would memorize children’s books that were in English during the day, and check my pronunciation with my husband, so I could read them to my children at night,” Feyan says.
She then became active in the community, and eventually served as mayor for three terms, and, as Murad Al-Katib quickly — and proudly — points out, “These were all contested elections too.”
Feyan Al-Katib says at times she’s amazed at how far she and her family have been able to come in Canada, but she also takes a bit of quiet pride in the success her children have earned.
“Sometimes I wonder if we hadn’t raised them they way we did, if they’d have had the same opportunities,” she says. “I wonder if Murad would have had the opportunity he does with this business.”
