He was a farmer out on the Canadian prairies. The year was 1897. For Danylo Babchook it was his first winter in the new country and he was all alone. His family was still back in the Ukraine as he had set out to scout the new land in country known as Canada. He had heard that for ten dollars you could get 160 acres of the most fertile land in the world in the province of Alberta. So Danylo had come to see what the country had to offer and yes it was true that there was 160 acres of fertile soil for ten dollars. But nothing could have conditioned him for the hardships that he was about to face. It was not the cold, the hunger, and the privations that were so brutal and demoralizing. That was something that he had become accustomed to as a serf while Ukraine was under rule of the Austrian Hungarian Empire. It was the loneliness and isolation that he faced on a day to day basis.  Something that he never expected to be so soul destroying, a million times worse than famine, war or the cold.

​Stan Powley sat in his living room chair in his farmhouse on the Alberta prairies and felt a cool breeze blow through the window. He stood up and walked over to window and looked out to the west. Storm clouds were on the horizon. As he continued staring out the kitchen window he could hear what he thought was a train off in the distance. But it wasn't a train, it was the wind about a kilometer away. Stan stared at a bush that was still but seconds later the trees swayed and bent violently as the storm winds approached. The winds became louder and louder sounding like a freught train coming through his yard. Only moments later the winds arrived and blew back the curtain and rocked Stan back on his feet. He quickly closed the windows and told his wife he was going outside. 

​Yuri Balan sat in his rocking chair thinking about what the future was going to lay out before him. He had heard about the recent plague that had gripped North America and he worried about it hitting his region in eastern Alberta. There were all sorts of stories floating around the community about what this plague actually was and where it came from. The Ukrainian community called it a plague but the Canadian government said it it was nothing more than flu and nothing to worry about. Yuri thought about it as he rocked in his chair and wondered if he could trust the government. He had been told that the Canadian government was infallible but many years ago when he arrived to Canada he found out that this was not so. From the day that he stepped onto Canadian soil he had been lied to and cheated at every turn. He became a suspicious and paranoid man because of it. But now with this so called flu that was supposedly nothing to be worried about, Yuri asked himself why everyone was wearing these masks? And why were there so many people dying? It just didn't make sense to Yuri.

​Stephen Yorpan had escaped the drudgery from his former country of the Ukraine nearly a decade ago, but he had done it in an illegal manner. The year was 1917 and the Bolsheviks had just come to power in Eastern Europe and Stephen was part of a family that were all involved in the pre-Soviet intelligentsia in the Ukraine which made them number one targets for Stalin's henchmen to execute. These executions were done in order to eliminate the old type of thinking and usher in the new communist thought and those that did not submit would be executed or sent to slave labour camps in Siberia.