Aina Anna Miljan was born 15 June 1939 at Liepaja to Ernests Rudolfs Pludums and his wife Emilja Kate.
Rudolfs was a successful farmer and Village Elder of Ziemupe. He escaped being deported during the first Soviet Occupation but was conscripted to labour duty by the Germans in 1944. He was able to escape back to Latvia close to the end of the war in 1945 and take his young family (Arturs in his mid teens, Aina 6 and Martin 3) to Danzig, and make his way across to Sweden, where they were settled by Swedish authorities in Mõlndal, now a suburb of Gothenburg.
In 1951 the family immigrated to Canada and settled in Brampton, where Rudolfs bought a house and Aina attended both primary and secondary school.
In 1959 Aina entered the Nursing School at the University of Toronto. In her third year, before receiving her BScN degree, she met Toivo and they married in on 29 October 1962.
The following year Toivo was appointed lecturer in Political Science at Waterloo Lutheran University, subsequently renamed after Prime Minster Wilfrid Laurier and Aina began work in her profession as a registered nurse at the local hospitals
When Toivo was hired by the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in 1965 she spent the following year working at Ottawa Civic Hospital.
In 1966 she moved to London with her husband who pursued a doctorate at the university. During two eventful years they mat Marilyn and Hartley Nathan and Veena and Mohan Juneja and became life-long fast friends.
Returning to Canada in 1968 they purchased a house in Waterloo near the university where Aina in 1969 gave birth to sons Andre and in 1972 to Erik. She spent the next two decades honing her skills as an extraordinary mother and superb cook and home maker.
The family made a first visit to Soviet Latvia, Estonia and Leningrad in 1990, where she met her extended family for the first time and the house her father had built and in which she had spent her early childhood. She returned with her mother to Latvia in time to live through the attempted putsch in 1991.
From 1993 to 1998 Aina lived in Riga where Toivo was appointed by the European Commission to establish the Euro Faculty to modernize the teaching and learning of Economics, Law and Public Administration to Western standards at the national universities of Latvia, Tartu in Estonia and Vilnius in Lithuania, and later in Kaliningrad as well.
Since he was responsible for 10 faculties they travelled every other week among the four counties, where Aina was of immense help to Toivo in interacting with his local colleagues. In addition, because 17 universities in Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Poland and Britain provided visiting faculty and their state governments partly funded the Euro Faculty, Aina accompanied he husband frequently on the many necessary trips to these European governments and universities. Toivo grew to depend on Aina for her intellectual and emotional support in the diverse cultural environments.
Aina considered that this period of the Baltics transitioning from the Soviet yoke and culture to into Western democracies was the most interesting and fascinating of her life. Incidentally, at this time she also became an Estonian Citizen while retaining her Latvian status and cultural heritage.
Because Erik had gone to Hong Kong for a temporary job at Hong Kong University the same year she went to Riga but especially since he stayed and completed his PhD in biochemistry there in 1999, Aina visited her son frequently and became friends with his wife Jo long before they married in HK.
From 1999 to 2002 Erik was a post doctoral fellow at the Children’s Tumor Clinic at Northwestern in Chicago. Since daughter Aisha had been born in HK the attraction of Chicago was irresistible and meant visits every 5-6 weeks where she bonded with her first granddaughter.
After Erik, Jo and Aisha moved to England in 2002, where Rebecca was born the attraction of two small grandchildren led to frequent visits over the years since.
Andre married Melanie in 2006 and had a daughter Ella, whom Aina was able to coddle daily since they lived only 15 minutes away. A second grandchild, Kalev, two years later allowed Aina to develop her grandmotherly instincts and skills to the fullest. She became the best, most caring and exemplary beloved grandmother ever.
At her totally unexpected death at home on 10 March 2018, not only her friends but her son’s schoolmates, and people she had not seen for decades woke up to recall memories of a wonderful, kind and caring woman, sorely missed by all.
Aina’s life was indeed a life well lived and worth celebrating!