I was talking to my daughter tonight on the phone. I was walking out of The Forks in Winnipeg where I had just eaten a pickerel (that I learned was from Kazakhstan…W.T.F!) and my daughter requested that I get a GPS that could beep and show where I am on this epic trip. After being on the road for eight days already, with another 12 ahead of me, I don’t even know where I am sometimes.
Yesterday I was wrapping up the 2009 Good Food Gathering in San Jose and I took a CalTrain up to SFO, hopped an Air Canada flight to Calgary, spent the night there, and flew to Winnipeg early this morning where I joined national gathering of Aboriginal youth who are meeting to thinking about how to renew a very successful federal government program. That’s a lot of travel, but it doesn’t stop there. I fly to Ottawa tomorrow and spend most of the week at an Art of Hosting in Pembroke, Ont. before flying to Kelowna for a one day Open Space and then down to California again, this time to Hoopa, to work with a small Native radio station, KIDE. I get home May 6 after 20 straight days on the road split between five different gigs.
The Kellogg gathering was a lovely experience, and I was especially tickled by how we dissolved the traditional conference model. Day one was all speakers and plenary panel presentations, with a little bit of conversation built in around the ballroom set up with six foot rounds. Day two, we got rid of the tables and held the whole day in Open Space. Day three, a day that we deliberately left free for an emergent design, featured us getting rid of the chairs. When the participants arrived, the room was empty save for a few pieces of tape on the floor. Although half the participants called it a day right there, about 250 stayed on to engage in a beautiful piece of intergenerational work. Led by our youngest team members, Norma Flores, Manny Miles and Maggie Wright, the participants self-organized into a spiral by age, with the youngest person at the centre and the oldest on the outside. Looking around that spiral was to see the journey of a person growing in the Good Food movement.
We then people gather with the ten people closest to them on the spiral and figure out a song, chant, slogan, sentence or movement, that captured what their small demographic had to say to the whole. The next 20 minutes consisted of people bot speaking to the centre and speaking from their place. A voice and story of life in the movement unfolded all the way from the energy and optimism of the youth to the stretch of middle aged people to the tired, but persistent presence of the movement’s elders. After we took a breath we moved to another room and ended it with a drum circle.
Fun.
Tomorrow, a day of Open Space with youth who are designing the future of the Urban Multipurpose Aboriginal Youth Centres Program and then it’s off to Ottawa to run this Art of Hosting with dear friends Tenneson Woolf, Teresa Posakony and Kathy Jourdain and a great local team.
I’m twittering more than blogging these days. The microform works well. If you’re interested (yes Aine, YOU!) my twitter feed is here.
Share:
I’m stranded in San Fransico, sitting on standby for a flight home after narrowly missing my flight yesterday evening due to a big accident on the Golden Gate bridge. So sitting the lounge, guiltily hoping every two hours that someone has some minor misfortune or change of plans that will open up one seat on a day when every flight home is full.
Found a poem by Denise Levertov at the excellent Panhala:
A Gift
Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
of questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands,
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.~ Denise Levertov ~
Share:
I’ve been in Portland Oregon this week working with Native community radio stations from across the United States on an exciting capacity development project. While here I’ve been enjoying the city. Portland, Seattle and Vancouver really are sister cities. We share the same climate, the same eco-systems and concerns, the same look and feel. The histories of the three cities are intertwined by the people that have lived on this coast since the cities were founded. The Columbia is the furthest south outlet of Canadian freshwater on the west coast, so in many ways, what flows nearby here is tied to what happens in the Canadian Rockies. Out in the ocean, the migration of birds, salmon, whales and seals intimately connects these three cities too, even though Portland isn’t strictly a coastal town.
I have been here only once before, on a road trip to California, and I never spent any real time in the city. On this trip, I was staying in a downtown hotel, and working a light schedule, so I had time to walk around and explore. Took in dinner one night at a lovely restaurant, Higgins, which serves local, seasonal food in a west coast style. I also stumbled into the real world version of Powell’s Books which is located in a funky little neighbourhood surrounded by the specialty bookshops that it spawned. It’s a very friendly book store for such a big place, and full of helpful and cheerful staff.
I’ve been travelling by public transit on this trip too. I almost took the train from Vancouver but was constrained by time. Otherwise I would have loved to have gone from Vancouver straight through to San Francisco by train. As it is the only train I will ride on this trip is the excellent MAX light rail in Portland which whisks you from the airport to downtown in a little over a half hour for $2.35.
On my way now to Sausalito to spend the weekend in some relaxed but important conversations around designing a global conference which will be held next year on Hawai’i. Looking forward to being in the Bay area, and at the same time, resolved to return to Portland again soon.
Share:
I am not talking about the bailout here. I am talking about a serious rescue.
Abousifian Abdelrazik is a Canadian who has found himself in a big pickle. He returned to his birthplace in Sudan in 2003 to visit is ailing mother. While there, the CSIS, our spy agency, apparently had him arrested. He was later allegedly interrogated by CSIS, the FBI and Sudanese intelligence officials about ties to Osama bin Laden. He was in and out of detention for years in Sudanese jails, where he alleges he was also tortured. In the meantime, his passport expired and his wife divorced him.
In April of 2008, he took refuge in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum but the Department of Foreign Affairs refused to prepare travel documents for him because he was on the US and the UN no fly lists. After much effort and a huge amount of opposition here in Canada, the federal government finally relented and said he would be allowed to return if he could produce a pre-paid airline ticket. By this time Mr. Abdelrazik was destitute and had no means to pay for a ticket. Instead 115 Canadians defied the federal government’s threat to charge them under anti-terrorism legislation and raised money to buy him a ticket and bring him home.
The ticket was paid for and the clearences offered, but yesterday the federal government reneged on its commitment and claimed that unless Mr. Abdelrazik got himself off teh UN no-fly list he could not return home. I can’t imagine how it is possible that one individual could do such a thing without the help of his own government.
Mr. Abdelrazik has not been charged with any crime. Both the RCMP and CSIS have cleared him of any wrongdoing, and in fact CSIS has even launched and internal probe to see what happened in this case. In short, Mr. Abdelrazik is no different from any other Canadian citizen travelling the world. He is in a bind not of his doing and his own government refuses to help him come home.
This is highly alarming for me and it should be for the thousands of other Canadians who leave our country every day. If you are wrongly arrested in a foreign country, does your Canadian passport mean anything? Will your government come to your rescue or will you be abandonned to rely on your own wits and resources? Do you know under what conditions the federal government will come to your aid?
With this concern in mind, today I sen the following letter to my Member of Parliament, John Weston:
Dear Mr. Weston:
As you are aware, the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik is ongoing. After creating near impossible conditions for his return to Canada, his country of citizenship, and then clearing him of any wrong doing, the federal government has now said that he must clear himself from the UN no-fly list before he can return home. It seems clear that this could be a simple matter for the Canadian government, as a UN member, to speak for the integrity of its citizens and have Mr. Abdelrazik removed from the list and not have that act subject to the veto of any other country. Surely a government can be expected to come to the aid of its citizens in such a predicament.
I am an international traveller who does business in the United States and Europe. Like Mr. AbdelrazikI I work legally and am not involved in any criminal activity. I am very concerned with this case and with the government’s intransigence in bringing this man home even after he has been cleared of any wrongdoing by our own intellegence services.
As a citizen of your riding, I would like to know that if I was ever caught in a similar situation, that my family could rely on you to do everything you can to bring me home. I would like to know, for my own peace of mind and as a citizen, what Mr. Abdelrazik has done to deserve this treatment from his own government. I know you have also travelled extensively around the world, and I would strongly request that you place yourself in Mr. Abdelrazik’s shoes and do everything you can to bring him home without any further delay.
I would like to know under what conditions I would be assured of help from the federal government should I be wrongly arrested while travelling in another country. I think legions of other business travellers and tourists would like to have the same assurances.
Mr. Weston has never responded to any of my emailed requests for information, but perhaps this time will be different. I will post his response here. I am very concerned that something is changing about Canadian citizenship and that our own government no longer has the final say in what happens to our own citizens.
Share:
A cold day to be on the outskirts of a cold city in a cold part of the world. When you travel midweek into Canada’s hinterlands and northern small cities, you share a plane with mostly hard and tired men who work for government or various companies doing business in the far flung nether regions of this nation. Whether it’s travel to Prince George, Thunder Bay, Prince Albert or Yellowknife, it seems like the same guys are on the flight – steak eating, overworked, tired, introverted, hard men. Once in a while, if they are coming home from a job well done, and travelling in groups, they are more garrulous, raucously celebrating and teasing one another across the rows of the small regional jets and Dash-8s that seem to be bulging at the seams to contain them.
On a late winter Tuesday afternoon the flight from Ottawa to Thunder Bay isn’t at all out of the ordinary. Mostly public servants on this trip, a couple of guys wearing jackets with CAT logos on them, two or three professional women, and a young couple who have seen better days, and who seem to be holding out for better days to come. The flight is quiet, descending through an oncoming blizzard to land on a snowy runway. When we disembark, the jetway doesn’t fit the fuselage very snugly and a blast of cold Northern Ontario air stings the face.
Here at the Valhalla Inn – a nod to the nordic history of this part of the world – wood trim and gas fireplaces in the lobby distract the eye from the cinder block hallways, and new carpets in the room offset the aging wood and vinyl topped room furniture. It seems like the meeting rooms are full of Aboriginal women and non-Aboriginal men. Almost every space has a sign that says that people are planning, and being the end of the fiscal year, everyone is turning their thoughts to next year, which starts on April 1.
There is something about the bleakness of being out here, far from downtown Thunder Bay, that brings loneliness on. I have two days of work here, but already I can’t wait to get home to my little house on an island in Howe Sound, where my family are.
It has been a long winter in many ways, and I’m ready for a rest and for spring to come on. Here, it feels a million miles away from that – not even the geese have dared venture this far notth yet, and the storm coming in deepens the mood.
Hunker down , do some good work with local First Nations leaders and youth and then get home. That’s the work of this week. Looking forward to ten days with the kids, writing some reports and getting my hands into the soil of the spring garden.