Canadian Medical Caravan Heads to Tanzania

Moshi, Tanzania

“This spot here is ringworm,” Doctor Karen Yeates says, pointing at her face and inviting people in for a closer look.  Necks crane curiously to catch a glimpse.  It is mid-afternoon in Moshi, Tanzania, and a large tarp is doing little to protect the 20-odd Canadian members of a week-long medical caravan from the intense heat.

On a clear morning, snow-capped Kilimanjaro looms unassumingly over this drowsy city of 150,000.  Its presence is not insignificant – in just five days most members of this mobile clinic will trade their stethoscopes and rubber gloves for pick axes and gore-tex, and make the seven-day trek up the 5,900 metre peak.

For today, however, the jet-lagged volunteers seem oblivious, and participate keenly in the afternoon’s debriefing session.  It is the first day of this free mobile clinic, and for the majority, the first real experience they’ve had with tropical medicine.

 

Dr. Fiona Manning of Victoria with patient

 “We don’t stick needles in joints because it’s not sterile enough.  But we can stick scalpels in something if it looks like it’s going to blow,” she advises, in response to a question about protocol for treating abscesses and infections.

Yeates is an associate professor of nephrology at Queens University in Kingston and is leading this caravan, the first of two she has planned this year.  Yeates also heads up the Global Health Placement Program for the Canada Africa Community Health Alliance, the Ottawa-based non-profit sponsoring the caravan, and through which Yeates first came to Tanzania as a volunteer four years earlier.

Gathered before her is an odd assortment of enthusiastic team members, each having paid between $3,000 and $6,000 for the opportunity to be here. 

There is Louise Moist of London, Ontario, a former pharmacist turned nephrologist, along with Sandy Sousa, a Kingston-based lactation consultant.  There is Damon Ramsey, 22, a McMaster University medical student, and Nini Cohen, a retired pediatric nurse from Ottawa.  There’s Kingston’s Jason Budd, an urban planner turned “pee” expert, who spends his time testing for protein levels and pregnancy.  And there’s Zoe Beiko, 16, and Kashani Thomas, 18, the youngest volunteers in this monumental effort to provide free examinations, referrals, medicine and eyeglasses to some of Tanzania’s poorest citizens.

 

Jason Budd testing protein levels

Over a five-day stretch the crew will see just over 1,000 patients, and treat a range of ailments from worms to hypertension, pneumonia to pelvic inflammatory disease – primarily acute conditions with immediate treatment possibilities. 

The set-up is basic and mostly outdoors.  Visitors head first to one of two triage stations where their blood pressure is noted and where they are weighed and questioned about why they have come. 

 

“I don’t want you guys to ask if they are having eye trouble,” Yeates warns the triage crew, “because everyone will have a problem with their eyes and everyone will want a pair of glasses.”  Sure enough, as word gets out that the caravan is dispensing hundreds of pairs of donated eyeglasses, the number of people reporting sight trouble suddenly jumps – even the least costly glasses are beyond the reach of most Tanzanians.

 

Patients head next to a physician and translator where, speaking quietly about sore joints and headaches, dizziness and coughs, they extend fingers for poking and tummies for prodding. There are no curtains, no examining tables, no beeping monitors, no charts – just plastic chairs and rubber gloves, and boxes of rapid malarial tests and syringes.  Yeates has set up her camp on the grounds of Pamoja Tunaweza, a women’s centre she co-founded in June 2007, and that houses both a shelter for abused women and a small medical clinic. 

Logistical volunteers guide some women inside the spacious two-story building where they are examined for pelvic inflammatory disease, and signs of cervical cancer, among other gynecological conditions.  Intestinal parasites, diarrhea, hypertension, scabies – they are among the most common illnesses the volunteers will treat during their stay. 

But in a country where, according to the UNDP’s Human Development Index, more than one third of Tanzanians don’t make it past their 40^th birthday, where 22 per cent of children are seriously underweight, and where 74 of every 1000 births result in death, do caravans like this actually make a difference? 

Put differently, is the more than $130,000 investment in this massive international aid effort (which includes the $2,000 volunteers paid for the privilege of climbing Kilimanjaro) achieving the biggest bang for the buck? 

 

Travel and the Art of Compromise

(First appeared in The Toronto Star, February 21, 2009.  View the story:  http://www.thestar.com/Travel/article/589491

 

Musee du Louvre

The orange vulva my eight-year old has drawn has sprouted grey and orange wings, and he collapses on the kitchen floor in a fit of giggles. After two hours spent touring the Joan Miro museum in Barcelona, and four days tripping through some of Paris’ vaunted galleries and cathedrals, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of my kids. But in the weeks that follow, it is clear that Picasso, Miro, and Leonardo da Vinci have infiltrated our home and made an impression. 

 

 

 

True, the children speak a bit too curiously about Van Gogh’s missing ear, and about Antonio Gaudi’s fatal misadventure with a Barcelona tram car. And to be sure, images of flying vulva and Guernicaesque battlescenes are not what I’d anticipated they’d end up creating. Nonetheless, I am celebrating a job well done – we’d managed to indulge ourselves in some of Europe’s finest cultural offerings, while our pre-adolescent children had had fun and learned something, despite themselves.

Travelling with children is generally all about compromise – usually on our part, and seldom on theirs.  Hence the water parks, the playgrounds, the toy stores and candy shops.  Museums and art galleries don’t usually make their Top 10 list of vacation hot spots.  And cathedrals and temples?  Don’t even think about it, mom!

And yet, we’d been in Paris only 20 minutes and hadn’t even dropped off our bags when my son pulled at my arm and pointed to the metro sign ahead, “There’s the Louvre, there’s the Louvre!  Let’s go straight there!” he shouted. Determined that our compromise not turn into surrender – that is, resolved to make our holiday as rewarding for us as it was playful for them – we’d spent the last month looking for ideas on how to help make culture fun. 

It wasn’t that hard.  The children’s culture industry, as it turns out, is a multi-million dollar affair, as a quick trip to any bookstore and on-line internet search will reveal.  Children can read stories about Picasso, build a three-dimensional puzzle of the Taj Mahal, download a children’s audio-guide to the Louvre, watch a movie on da Vinci.  They can take on-line impressionist painting lessons, construct their own Eiffel Tower, flip through comic books on Greek gods, and make suits of armour from pop can tabs.  

 

We spent a week with our son as he read Cecile Talguen’s On a Volé Mona Lisa (Someone’s Stolen the Mona Lisa), a short chapter-book about a young French girl who encounters a thief named de Vinci. It was a perfect entry point to begin talking about the spectacular Parisien museum where this iconic painting has been housed since the late 1700s.  And then we happened upon Marie Sellier’s and Violaine Bouvet-Lanselle’s Mon petit Louvre, an artfully written picture book which plays brilliantly to children’s delight of the bizarre and the fanciful.  Using the book as a treasure hunt guide, the kids ran from room to gilded room searching for the 2100-year-old angel who’d lost her hand and her head, the 17^th century lion biting a Grecian butt, and the Mesopotamian demon, Pazouzou said to make all wishes come true.    

 

The battlements at Carcassonne

Getting our truculent daughter hyped about a visit to the walled city of Carcassonne, with its 1000-year-old castle, complete with drawbridges and moats, wasn’t so difficult either, once we focused on the macabre – that is, on all the ways devised by the inhabitants of this southern French city to kill, capture or foil foreign invaders and their plans.  And, okay, truth be told, she was more excited about the candy shop than in the dungeon and murder holes she discovered.  Still, armed with a camera and an audio guide, and with the challenge to document all she could find, she found herself happily snapping photos as she traipsed through the town’s cobblestone streets.

Many cultural sites have tours and activities specifically designed for children.  At the Joan Miro gallery in Barcelona, for instance, a children’s pamphlet (available in Catalan and Spanish but unfortunately not in English) helped move us through the various periods in Miro’s artistic career. Realist, abstract, symbolism – these terms became real to the kids as they looked (disinterestedly) at his early detailed paintings of a village church in Spain, and then laughed, bemused, at his later works depicting women as wombs and genitalia. 

Cultural tourism with children doesn’t have to involve hours of insufferable complaints. And it doesn’t have to mean finding a babysitter, while you hit the cultural sites alone. 

It does mean taking the time to approach the world from your child’s perspective. And if that means showing Disney’s Hunchback of Notre Dame before heading to the grand cathedral, exploiting Camille Claudel’s tortured love affair with sculptor Auguste Rodin before seeing The Thinker in his Parisien jardin, or indeed taking time to laugh at Miro’s use of crude symbols to depict the fairer sex in his art, well, c’est la vie.  Art is, as they say, all about compromise. 

Sweeter words, I’d never heard.

Vintage Cycling

Bicycles, baguettes and bottles of Sauvignon blanc – it doesn’t get any more French than this. It’s 11 am and I’m flying over tree roots and fallen pomegranates, feeling light-headed and carefree in the gentle Mediterranean sun. We’re participating, along with 500 other outdoor enthusiasts, in the region’s first vineyard and epicurean tour à la bicyclette, an event that twins the French passion for wine with their appétit for fine foods, and blends it all together with their obsession with cycling.

As part of the Fête des Vins Nouveaux or New Wine Festival, an annual week-long celebration marking the release of the year’s new vintages, the tour has us cycling through some of southern France’s most spectacular countryside. Autumn has painted the fields with a breathtaking palette – row on row of grape vines, long since released from the burden of Syrah, Grenache and Chardonnay, among other varieties, arrest us with their red, yellow and orange brilliance. Pomegranates dangle tantalizingly over rust-coloured dirt paths that give way gracefully to vineyard laneways lined with towering Plane trees.

A church steeple, a crumbling farmhouse, baked red-tiled roofs on village houses – it is no less a painter’s paradise than a cyclist’s tour de force.

Stretching from the Pyrenees in the west, along the Mediterranean east to Provence and south to Spain, Languedoc-Roussillon is the largest wine producing region in the world, with over 2,800 square kilometres devoted lovingly to grape cultivation. Its more than 2000 vineyards produce more wine than Australia, South Africa, Bordeaux and Chile combined, with an average production surpassing two billion bottles annually.

The region also boasts some of France’s oldest vineyards, their lineage tracing back to the 5th century BC when the Greeks travelling from Asia Minor made their first settlements here. Winemaking flourished under the Romans particularly along the Via Domitia, the ancient road that led from Rome through this sun-drenched region down to Spain and which even 1,500 years ago, transported millions of litres every year.

Which makes it all the more surprising that it’s taken them so long to pull together the Randonnée Vélo Tout Terrain, a mountain biking tour featuring six of the region’s cooperatives each representing a handful of local vineyards. Organized collectively by the Communauté d’agglomeration Béziers Mediterranée, the Foyer Rural de Bassan, and the Fédération Française de Cyclotourisme, the event has drawn all kinds, from mothers with infants strapped on baby seats to seriously-decked out racers pedaling in teams.

Like us, Guy Tannou of Servian and Marie Sibrac of neighbouring Béziers, have chosen the 27-kilometre route, leaving the 51 km option for the more ambitious athletes (and connoisseurs). And like us, they are in it as much for the food and amitié as for the wine. “It’s festive and convivial, and great exercise. Frankly, the wine is nothing exceptional,” they say, with a laugh. “But the food! Now that is something. And it’s free!”

In fact, each of us has paid 12 Euros for the privilege of sampling a wide range of reds, whites and rosés, and an assortment of epicurean delights. We enjoy robust Syrahs, citrusy Clairettes, buttery Chardonnays and lively Grenaches, mature 2005 and ‘06s, along with those born of grapes harvested just this year.

 

Flush From Embarrassment

First appeared in The Globe and Mail (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20081018.TRIP18/TPStory/?query=rita+parikh)

It didn’t come crashing to a shrieking halt.  Bags didn’t fly missile-like from overhead racks.  And people didn’t tumble helter skelter into the aisles. 

Instead, all was calm as the train rolled gently to a standstill.  This is what happens when you pull the emergency stop?

 

We were two weeks into our journey across western India, heading north from ancient Udaipur, chug-chugging through the colourful state of Rajasthan.   

 

And we were relaxed – after our white-knuckle drives on India’s treacherously narrow highways (where the still smoking wreckage of transport trucks seemed part of the natural landscape); after harrowing auto-rickshaw adventures through spice markets and back alleys; and after agonizingly long journeys on busses exploding with Bollywood music, spending a night on a train felt like a walk in the park. 

 

Rail travel in India is a fantastic way to see the country.  More than 63,000 kilometers of track crisscross India’s 29 states, reaching languorously to the white sands of socialist Kerala in the south, bustling through vibrant metropolises like Mumbai and Calcutta, and careening north to far-flung villages of tea-terraced Darjeeling and beyond.  More than 13 million passengers ride the rails each day, a staggering figure by any measure.

 

And they do so in relative ease and comfort.  You can travel first, second or third class, have standing room only, or opt for an air-conditioned sleeper, complete with freshly-laundered sheets.  You can travel in the privacy of your own spacious cabin, or, if you’re a woman travelling solo, hop on a female-only car.  Best of all, you can open your windows to the scents of sea, spice and diesel, and to the calls of touts and hawkers peddling chai and spicy samosas.

 

Much as I was enjoying this heady awakening of my senses, it was to the rumblings of my tummy that my attention was turned.  With some trepidation I headed off to the washroom – what would a toilet used by hundreds of millions of people look like?   But with Indian Railways positioned as the world’s largest state employer, I had little to fear – somebody, clearly, was assigned to cleaning the toilets.

 

I glanced at the sign posted on the wall behind the toilet.  Flush before and after use, its bold, black letters advised.  In front of the sign dangled a bright, red, chain. 

 

I shrugged and pulled hard, staring down at the toilet. 

 

Silence.

 

It was then that I noticed the foot pedal on the floor.  And in a flash, the adrenaline began to course through me. 

 

Sleepless in Béziers

 

 

 

“You deserve to lose a night’s sleep for that one,” Peter says. 

 

“I already have!”  I whine.  Still, I cringe. 

 

My partner is right, of course – me wanting to pull our son from the local public school, and enroll him in a private one instead, all because the stiletto-teetering, cigarette-wielding, prodigiously pierced parents at his inner-city French school frighten me – well, nothing shouts “classist hypocrite” louder than that. 

 

Worse, it is impossible to disentangle race from class in this country – the poor are visibly dark-skinned, and this city has its share of them. And though I know it is not the gaggle of young, veiled women I want to escape, there is no getting around the fact that I feel out of my skin.  I – a 40-something, middle-class Canadian of Indian origin, an NDP-supporting, placard-waving, anti-every-ism feminist – am mortified.

 

 

It’s been a few weeks since my eight-year-old started school in this ancient city in the south of France.  Getting him enrolled was surprisingly easy – anyone with a rental agreement can sign their kids up.   And Sage, to our great relief, has had little trouble fitting in.   His marble-filled pockets are testament to the many friends he has already made.  Teachers have welcomed him warmly and are giving him French-language support, and with two years of French immersion under his belt, il se débrouille. 

 

I, on the other hand, am having more trouble managing.

 

As I stand in the narrow street onto which the front door of the school opens, I steal sideways glances at other parents as they chatter away.  In one cluster are the Arabic women, hair covered, absorbed, speaking in their own language, rarely looking at me.  In front of the door are the Caucasian women, equally veiled but in tattoos.  With their dangling cigarettes and fish-net stockings, they wear their poverty like a cliché.  Women half my age nestle babies, waiting for their other children to emerge; they flirt with young men on motor scooters who pull up on the curb. 

 

Behind me, standing alone and rarely speaking to one another, are a tall Franco-African man with hip-hop jewelry and hat, whose pants are belted so low, his crotch is at knee level; a few well-dressed Arabic men who stand apart from the women; and a Caucasian man whose pale complexion and gaunt frame give him the appearance of an addict.

 

So how, in this crowd, do I realize my vision?  Where are the friends who will host us for dinner, who will travel to Canada, become life-long amies?  In my bourgeois alienation I judge quickly and harshly, and bring to the fore every stereotype I have ever railed against.  Making friends in France was never supposed to be like this . . .

 

École Roland, the school to which the city assigned Sage, is one of Béziers’ oldest.  Named after a heroine who lost her head, literally, during the French Revolution, its thick stone walls have echoed children’s laughter for more than 100 years.  In the five minutes it takes to walk from our home to his school, we wind through some of Béziers’ narrowest and oldest streets.  Fresh-washed laundry hangs out from wrought-iron balcony railings, absorbing the mingled scents of fresh-baked baguettes floating up from patisseries, and of the cumin-laced curries escaping from kitchen windows.  It is clear that generations of immigrants have put their stamp on this place.  The colourful spices that form the basis of North African cuisine, along with okra, black-eyed peas, hummus and babaganouj, can be found in most shops, even the smallest of convenience stores, and restaurants bear names like Le gout d’Afrique and Zebulon Kebab.

 

Oh Merde!

Merde!  Just one block from home and I’m already toe-deep in it.  We’ve been in Béziers for only five days, but already my mind and senses are clearly overwhelmed.  Not with the fact of this French city’s 2,700 year-old history, not with the olive and almond trees and sidewalks strewn with fresh figs, not with the white beaches of the Mediterranean that beckon from just kilometers away, and not with the local wines that are cheaper than Coke.

 

Bezier

Nope – it’s the ubiquitous mounds of crap that seem to have made the strongest impression on me, despite all my efforts to be nonchalant about it. 

 

Still, I’m trying hard, not only because I sense my family’s irritation with me (I’m freaked out to the point that I’m driving myself nuts), but also because this is not the kind of tourist that I want to be – I will not let a little merde define my four-month immersion in France!

 

But the reality is that it isn’t just a little.  It is everywhere: on the public path that runs alongside our farmhouse leading into the heart of this postcard-perfect city; on the narrow sidewalks and cobblestoned streets upon which the Romans marched 2,000 years ago; in the idyllic square fronting Bezier’s Church of the Madeleine, the site of the massive slaughter of thousands of heretic Cathars and their Bitterois (Bezian) defenders by papal crusaders in 1209; at the Neuf Ecluses, or nine locks, on the wonderous Canal du Midi which have, in a magnificent feat of engineering ever since the late 17^th century, lifted boats travelling by canal from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic up a 75 foot rise over a distance of less than 100 feet; and on the graceful Pont Vieux, the bridge constructed more than 800 years ago across France’s winding River Orb and over which Bezier’s  gothic cathedral, Saint-Nazaire, has towered majestically for more than a millennium. 

 

There is much to be struck by in this graceful community of 78,000, not least of which are some of the country’s finest vineyards, vineyards which led to the region’s spectacular growth in the 19^th century, and for which Beziers came to be known as the wine capital of the world. 

 

Béziers to Bollywood and Beyond

I lie on her bed, my arms wrapped around my 10-year-old, pulling her shaking body close to mine. “It’ll be an adventure,” I whisper, “an adventure for all of us.” But she turns her face away, tears spilling helplessly to her pillow.

Anjali is afraid and anxious and worried and sad, as much as she is excited for the year that lies ahead. In just three more sleeps, the four of us – Anjali, my partner Peter, our eight-year-old son Sage, and I – will be heading overseas for a 12-month family odyssey. Our journey will traverse geography and history as it cuts across three continents taking us from Victoria to Kenya, from Beziers to Bollywood and beyond. A three-month volunteer posting at a school for orphans in rural India, a four-month immersion in France’s hyper-strict public school system, a camel-back trek through the Jordanian desert, a swim in the Indian ocean off the east coast of Kenya – these are a few of the experiences we hope are in store for us as we travel from Europe to Africa and on to Asia.

The voyage has been three years in the planning. It was in 2005 that we set up Peter’s deferred salary plan at work, which meant a diversion of a fifth of his high school teacher’s salary to a savings account from which we’ll draw regularly throughout the year. In January I quit my job and started diving deep into the internet, taking virtual tours through countries I’d long dreamt of visiting. In early April, we posted our house on UsedVictoria.com, and by the end of May had found the perfect family to whom to lend the keys to our home.

Building Community One Lemon at a Time

It’s a gloriously warm summer afternoon and my daughter, Anjali, and two friends are tearing around the kitchen. Lemon juice and sugar are spilled in equal amounts – on the floor, on the counters, inside drawers, on their clothes. The felt markers and poster paper are scattered across the floor where one of the 10-year-olds is busy crafting a sign.

“We should charge a dollar. Mom, can we charge a dollar?” We agree on 25 cents and start searching for cups.

“It needs more sugar!” one yells, dumping in a second cup. I jump in with a quick science lesson on saturation and dissolving points. “Gross! Double dipping!” another protests. Another science lesson, this one on germs, ensues.

The adrenaline is pumping and there’s no stopping the girls – grabbing a table, three chairs, duct tape and signs, they head outside to set up Harling Point’s first lemonade stand of the season.

There’s something indescribably exciting about selling lemonade on the street corner. From the simple freedom of hanging out in the company of best friends, to the joy of counting tips at the end of the day – it’s hard to find a better way to pass an afternoon. The fact that the lemonade stand is inevitably a money-losing proposition, once the price of labour and ingredients (and cleaning supplies!) is figured in, is somehow irrelevant: the kids are oblivious to the true costs and dream big about the windfall.

Some theorists have suggested that the lemonade stand, as a child’s earliest capitalist venture, provides invaluable training to budding entrepreneurs. Marketing, product delivery, financial management, quality – the lemonade won’t sell itself in the absence of any of these. And, true enough, the kids look critically at their sign, and work to colour it just right. Hands dive in and out of money jars counting coins from sales and tips. They sample (and resample), debating how much lemon juice to add. It’s hard not to get a taste for the thrilling world of business.

Still, for me and my neighbours in this coastal Victorian neighbourhood, the real value in this afternoon curbside project is not the lesson in capitalism our children obliviously gain, but rather the social capital it generates – that is, the relationships, trust, shared values and norms that the selling of lemonade seems to create, and that enriches our community immeasurably.

An Ugly Day in New Brunswick

 

 

First published in The Globe and Mail

 

“Maman, j’ai une moustache de chocolat,” says my chocolate-smeared seven-year-old with a laugh.  Though he’s been in French immersion for just two years, the words come easily, and his accent rings true. 

 

Sage is the beneficiary of a stunningly-successful experiment here in BC – one based in research, in faith, and in no small part, beauty.  In contrast, the decision last month by New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham’s government to eliminate early French immersion in that province, and to replace it instead with “intensive French”, is only ugly. 

 

Intensive French is a wonderful program, and it should replace the way French as a subject (the way most Canadians haplessly struggle to learn French) is taught.  In its ability to stimulate a love of language, and instill a basic confidence with speaking it, this innovative approach to teaching French is unparalleled.  It was never, however, designed to produce bilingual graduates, and it does not pretend to do so.  Immersion is the only program truly designed to achieve that goal. 

 

French immersion came to British Columbia 40 years ago and now exists in 44 of our 59 school districts.  While most of these districts have embraced early immersion – a program which starts in kindergarten or grade one, and through which students study everything from art and science to physical education in French, some districts feature both early and late immersion, offering those children who missed out in early years an opportunity to jump on board.  A handful of BC districts – those primarily in rural areas where teachers are hard to retain and student populations low – have opted for late French immersion alone, which starts in grade six, and often ends just two years later. 

 

Now, with more than 40,000 students enrolled in French immersion, a number that has risen steadily for eight years running, French immersion is by far the most popular program of choice ever offered in BC.  This figure is even more significant given that enrolment rates overall in public schools are declining.

 

To read the complete story, visit:  http://hamlit2008.blogspot.com/2008/04/national-news-early-immersion-is.html.