Was at CFUW last night where a professor from U of W spoke about poverty and Crown Wards. She spoke about poor people and damaged children. She also talked about her life of privilege and the women she worked with and their lives of poverty and disaster and how she could walk away from it and they couldn’t.

She was a wonderful person,one of our people doing great work in the community and a foster Mom, but her talk made me uncomfortable. Not because I have a good life and others don’t, no that wasn’t it.  I think it was once again the problem with stereotypes of poverty.  I felt this prof wondered why more children weren’t taken from their parents and why CAS lets them stay with relatives.

But it’s way more complicated than that. I know people who despite mental illness and poverty and neglect in their poor family, still love their parents and want a connection with them. And they should have it.

I kept thinking of this song and to show you anything can be found on youtube,here it is.

Dead End Street by the Kinks

I guess it’s also because I know people (someof my best friends are . . .) who are poor, some in my own family, and single mothers and people with family members with mental illness. None of them have children with “failure to thrive” In fact their children are growing up or have grown up successfully.

Yes others I know have families in a mess (poverty not necessarily in the picture either, though messy lives can lead to poverty) but I have lived long enough and seen enough to see that what is true today, isn’t necessarily true tomorrow and may not have been true in the past.

Mary Catherine Newcombe. Built by The Two Smiths

Celebrated the installation of the new sculpture at 99 Regina St. It celebrates the functions of the Social Services Building.  The winding vines not only reflect the living vines in the atrium but also the winding on the symbol of medicine for public health. The pear represents a lot of things, food security, local food, Ontario Works. The nest for family and child care. The artist says that each of the eggs represents the future of a wish.

The sculpture is made of aluminum, copper and brass.  The artist is local and the cost was $65,000, under budget. It was a lot harder to make than it looks.

Doug Gilmour had a great time lapse video made of the piece being put up.He has promised it will eventually be on the net and I can link to it.

We had a pear cake in the shape of a copper pear to celebrate.

The breakfast for Haiti this morning at RIM park gave the attendees much more than a simple tribute to Yvonne Martin and the raising of almost $10,000. Various speakers inspired with their own experiences in needy areas.

Betsy Wall, from the Foundation for International Development Assistance works with Haitian agriculture and was in the earthquake. She spoke about the historic and current needs of Haiti even before the earthquake and how the people of Haiti are resourceful. When she returned home, the TV pictures of food aid being thrown at people and a foreign military presence patrolling streets of desperate people upset her. The Haitians she works with are hardworking and persevering despite hardships. She told us our help is not always good help or compassionate help. An example, North American volunteers building projects that local people could build and get paid for to support their families.

This lead into a presentation by Sylvia Scott, RN, a Kenyan and Canadian, who dedicates her life to improving the villages near her original home in Kenya. She emphasized that Canadians or “developed world” volunteers should not be discouraged and that nurses and people like Yvonne Martin  make a difference. Sylvia was so impressed with the strangers giving out inoculations that she ended up finishing school and after immigrating to Canada, she returned to help her village. She emphasized that development and change must come from the people being helped themselves. They must decide what they need and they must be in control of their lives, not well meaning strangers.  The people of Sylvia’s village wanted a clinic built. It was built but then they found out they needed electricity and clean water and supplies to run it. Not to mention basic health and irrigation for crops. So they have moved forward with projects for those needs, including micro-businesses.

Diego Marquez-Leon, a male nursing student immigrant from Columbia then spoke. He decided to go somewhere in the world that would be the last place he would want to go. He chose India because he doesn’t like spicy Indian food. That choice led him to work in the slums and in a home for AIDS orphans. He found many rewards and some challenges such as the fact they worked with only the equivilant of a first aid kit.

Jill Gale, RN from Grand River Hospital talked about the hospital pairing with a hospital in Jamaica. Jamaica, where we go as tourists to richly appointed resorts while many of the citizens are mired in poverty and do not have universal health care.  Donors from the States had given the hospital sophisticated equipment but it sat on a balcony rusting because no one knew how to use it or fix it.  The people from Grand River taught “artisans”, basically untrained workers, how to fix the equipment the hospital had and the nurses taught the Jamaican maternity nurses a simple technique for reviving new-born babies that thrilled the people at the Jamaican hospital. Air Canada donated equipment for a birthing room and the artisans were taught how to maintain it. Jamaican nurses came to Canada to learn our techniques for running operating rooms and keeping supplies. A Jamaican doctor came to Canada and taught our doctors and nurses how to do breach births instead of relying on Caesarians.

I am always amazed at the number of people going about quietly changing the world for the better.

The morning gave all of much food for thought or “reflections” as the nurses call it on how to do foreign development and aid well and how to do it badly. A necessity as the world works with Haiti to recover.

Bridges

If you want to go from Hespeler to Galt across the Franklin Street bridge or God-forbid the Hespeler Road bridge, it is taking your life in your hands if you are on a bicycle or walking.

When Minister Wynne, Minister of Transportation, was here on Saturday, I talked to her about this problem. She had just given a talk at a fund raiser and included the need to redo our provincial bridges in Ontario. Almost all of them are over 50 years old and if you remember in the summer in Quebec how a bridge collapsed, it is a serious problem.

But I took some time afterwards to talk to her about the difficulty people have crossing bridges that cross the 401. We do have one pedestrian bridge but the regular bridges are dangerous and impossible unless you are in a car.  When we were passing the building of the pedestrian bridge at Conestoga College (Joint payment by Waterloo Region, Kitchener and Cambridge) I said,

If a car centric bridge goes across a river, you can always get in a boat or swim across but if a bridge crosses the 401, if you are on a bike or on foot, you cannot cross it.

In fact pedestrians and cyclists are banned from our major highways for good safety reasons. Even getting out of your car at the side of the road, you take your life in your hands.

Minister Wynne to her credit said, yes, the staff at the MTO has a big learning curve on alternate transportation. The ministry was originally called the Ministry of Roads, so that gives you some idea where they come from.

Roads

I’m all for diets. Some work, some don’t.

I was at a seminar a few years ago about changing our cities to be healthier (e.g reducing obesity), less polluting and more people friendly. We were shown pictures of places around the world that are much more pedestrian friendly and I also visited some of these areas when in Portland (And also a six lane road that was not!) People in Portland and Vancouver are statistically healthier than people in Waterloo Region (Oh, we come out badly in those surveys) because of efforts made in their cities.

The City of Waterloo is going to actually narrow a road and may narrow another. It seems to go against the common sense of our car crazed society. Bearinger, which is near where I live, needs some further thought as the road was just repaved as a four lane this past fall. My neighbour, Louise McLaren, wrote a great letter to the Record in support of this “diet”,

http://news.therecord.com/Opinions/LettertotheEditor/article/667089

Davenport is another story. It is a short street between a subdivision and the Conestoga Mall with an industrial park at one end and a dead end to a nursing home at the other. It has traffic to the mall and local homes but I have never found it super busy.

It is, however, with the four lanes, difficult for pedestrians to cross. And we need to make our cities more pedestrian friendly. The new change will have two lanes, cycling lanes, a median and a pedestrian island. The traffic will slow (the wider the road, the more cars speed — watch how that works when you are driving down Northfield then into the new Westmount extension) , and alternate nonpolluting forms of transportation will grow.

Those who have heard rumors that I’m not running, check on the Region’s election page where I’ve been signed up as the only candidate for the last few weeks. Read my press release on my about page, thanks campaign team.

Great WMCS! Learned so much about social media, my head felt like it would explode.  The speakers were great and many of the 84 women who attended are either running or thinking of it. Minister Wynne talked about her campaigns, particularly the provincial ones. Catharine Fife reminded her that our last provincial speaker Andrea Howarth became the leader of her party!

Great panel of women politicians, even if I do say so myself, being on it.  Eleanor MacMahon was moving on the legislation she got passsed after her husband was killed riding his bicycle.  Kris Fletcher practical once again about the legal side.  Some of the background materials will be up on www.learnhowtorun.com in the near future.

Great WMCS! Learned so much about social media, my head felt like it would explode.  The speakers were great and many of the 84 women who attended are either running or thinking of it. Minister Wynne talked about her campaigns, particularly the provincial ones. Catharine Fife reminded her that our last provincial speaker Andrea Howarth became the leader of her party!

Great panel of women politicians, even if I do say so myself, being on it.  Eleanor MacMahon was moving on the legislation she got passsed after her husband was killed riding his bicycle.  Kris Fletcher practical once again about the legal side.  Some of the background materials will be up on www.learnhowtorun.com in the near future.

Went to the Sustainable Waterloo breakfast last week and heard three people who went to Copenhagen. It sounded like a real mess, thousands of people and delegates. Canada wining the Fossil Fool award each day. But a prof from UWO who was a rep for the European Union said not to be depressed. Europe, Asia and many of the developing countries are working on reducing their emissions. They are well ahead in the green economy.

The bad news is that Canada and the U.S. with their reliance on oil and gas may end up falling behind as the new green economy roars ahead in other countries. Harper should stop thinking about the tar sands and look to R and D in the green economy.

However, Ontario is seen as doing well and to my surprise, the speakers liked the Samsung green energy deal. As a big player can get things going on the world stage, they said.

http://www.sustainablewaterloo.org/index.php?p=eJ2710

Also, a more hopeful meeting in Davos Switzerland.

http://www.weforum.org/en/index.htm