Generations: 100 Years in Alberta – on CBC Newsworld

		7:00 p.m PST.	Generations: 100 Years in Alberta – Marking the Alberta centennial through the story of a Lebanese immigrant family.
		10:00 p.m. PST	Generations: 100 Years in Alberta – Marking the Alberta centennial through the story of a Lebanese immigrant family.

It's Wednesday… and time to start another episode of CBC's new documentary series of Canadian history told through the experiences of a family's generations.  100 Years in Alberta is the 5th episode of this incredible series which started with my own family history – The Chan Legacy which began when Rev. Chan Yu Tan arrived in Canada in 1896.

You may have heard of CBC's hit show “Little Mosque on the Prairie,” a comedy about an inter-racial Muslim couple raising their inter-racial daughter in a small prairie town, where the new town doctor is a nice Muslim boy from Toronto.  That was fictional – Generations: 100 Years in Alberta is the real thing.

Check out the story from the www.cbc.ca/documentaries/generations website.

The Hamdon/Shaben family dates to the turn of the last century when
two Lebanese peddlers came to Alberta to seek a better life. Ali Hamdon
became a fur trader in Fort Chipewyan. Saleem Shaben opened a general
store in Endiang. Decades later, their two families became one through
a marriage, and a mosque.

Hilwie and Ali Hamdon

Hilwie Hamdon, Ali Hamdon's wife, found it difficult to raise
her children as Muslims in small town where no others practiced their
faith. So, eventually, the family moved to Edmonton, and in the midst
of the Great Depression, Hilwie helped raise money from Muslims all
over Alberta and Saskatchewan, to build Canada's first mosque, in
Edmonton in 1938. The Shaben family, attracted by the mosque, also
moved to Edmonton, and when Saleem Shaben's granddaughter married Ali
Hamdon's son the families became relatives and business partners. Larry
Shaben, Saleem's grandson, developed an interest in politics and became
the first Muslim cabinet minister in Canada when he was sworn into the
government of Peter Lougheed.

Today, the great grandchildren of those Muslim pioneers are
contributing in their own way to building a better Alberta and a better
world.

Produced and narrated by Jim MacQuarrie.