PARKSVILLE, B.C. — Although she was photographed with a stoic expression on her face when she was six years old, Gina Yrjana remembers feeling all sorts of emotions. “I thought it was a little bit weird,” Gina says, smiling. “But also, kind of cool.” But after years of living in an orphanage in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, being adopted by a white family in Canada was not what Gina expected “I lost my birth family, my culture, my friends, my language, my food,” Gina says. “And I came into this new world where nobody looked like me.” While her adopted mom Colleen Yrjana tried everything to make Gina feel included, nothing really workeduntil Gina attended her first hockey game. “She said, ‘Can I do that?’” Colleen recalls. “‘I want to try.’” You can tell from the smile on her face in the video from her first skating lesson, Gina liked it. And by the time she posed in front of the mirror in her first hockey uniform, she loved it. “She would wear it around the house,” Colleen says. “She would wear it to sleep.” And by the end of her first season, Gina was playing so well she’d earned a spot on the local all-star team. “It was kind of like, ‘Whoa!’” Gina recalls. “Maybe I can do something with this.” Although she was often the only girl in the game, Gina was driven to become the best — training just as hard off the ice as on. “The ice was my place where I could be free from all my traumas and my worries,” Gina says. Instead of being defined by race, gender or a traumatic past, Gina says hockey is where she found the freedom to just be. “It gave me my hopes and dreams,” Gina says, fighting back tears. So, you can imagine how she must have felt to be scouted, earn a scholarship to attend the Ontario Hockey Academy be on the path to realizing her dream of playing for team Canada and then suffer a career-ending injury. “I was broken, lacked confidence and saw no hope,” Gina recalls, wiping away tears. Gina says she lost her sense of self and her mental health suffered. But then she found the courage to face her feelings and felt compelled to write about them. “She’d never read a book cover to cover, until she wrote one,” Colleen says. Now Gina is a professionally published author, with a memoir titled Nine of Ten. Just as sport once inspired her to find herself, Gina hopes she can inspire others by writing about the adversity she’s faced. “I want to show your worth isn’t found in your career or your sport or what you do,” Gina says. “And if it doesn’t work the way you thought there’s always light at the end of the tunnel.” For Gina that’s find finding a new purpose off the ice. “I want to be a voice for the voiceless and for the underdogs and be a light wherever I go,” she explains.
