I made one of my closest friends, Hoa, in a hospital waiting room in Melbourne about two years ago. I'm from Kenya originally, and I'd moved to Australia for work, so I didn't know many people yet.
I'd gone to the emergency department late one evening with a badly sprained ankle from playing basketball. The waiting room was full and the wait was over four hours. Hoa was sitting next to me with her elderly father, who'd had a fall. At first we didn't talk; we were both staring at our phones. But then her phone died, and she looked so worried about not being able to contact her brother that I offered her my charger.
That small gesture started a conversation. She told me she'd moved from Vietnam as a teenager, and I told her about growing up in Nairobi. We discovered that we both worked in accounting, both loved terrible action films, and both missed our mothers' cooking. When her father was taken in, she wrote her number on the back of a parking ticket and told me to call if I needed anything.
This friendship is important to me for a few reasons. Firstly, she was my first real friend in a new country, and she introduced me to her friends, so in a way she built my social life. Secondly, we understand each other's experience of being an immigrant without needing to explain it. And finally, it reminds me that good things can come from bad days. A sprained ankle is one of the luckiest injuries I've ever had.