Yesterday I gave my destination and we discussed the route. Then the driver cautiously asked me if I were Québécoise pure-laine? Well, I said, I’m anglophone but I’m born here.

Because, rushed on my driver, he had read a story in the newspaper that morning* and couldn’t stop thinking about two countries, on two continents, separated by history and religion but united in their misery. La Guinée, in Africa, and Haïti, where he was born.

He was satisfied with his life in Canada, he wanted me to know that. His children didn’t eat steak every day, but they could have meat every week. Canada is a good country, built by people who were not his parents, and he was grateful for the welcome he had been offered, the opportunity to make a life here. But he couldn’t stop looking back to his people in Haïti, feeling for their suffering.

Yes, I said, and feeling responsible but helpless and not knowing what to do. I told him I’d lived in Nigeria in the seventies when people were doing very well, that I knew a little about how people lived who didn’t have a lot of stuff, and even a little about what children looked like who didn’t have enough to eat. That I felt a bond with people in other countries and circumstances that I had no idea how to act on.

Yes, he said. One doesn’t need to have a lot of stuff to be able to care for a family. His father had been a cultivator and he had worked with him. They rotated crops with the seasons, rice and yams and vegetables. In between crops, his father fished. There was always something to do. His father had also been a judge. This was in the time of Papa Duvalier. He had disappeared one day. Both his father and his mother. The children had all found their way out of the country. It had been hard, but the children were now all over the world and managing fine. Even their cousins had left.

But now, he said, Haitian rice farmers can’t make a living any more. They can’t compete with the price of rice imported from the US, where agriculture is heavily subsidised. When rice can be bought so cheaply, people would rather buy it than grow it themselves, so they leave the farms and go to the city. But of course there is no work in the city. People struggle, women prostitute themselves.

Yes, I said, and you and I look on from our comfortable spots and don’t know what to do. I told him my father had recently returned from Bangladesh and was struggling trying to help a woman he had made friends with there. He was helping her, but it was hard. It’s hard for one person to help another person, for a country to help another country. And for one person, like him or me, to help a country – it’s very hard to know what to do.

The kind of work my parents do makes some difference directly. The kind of work I do does not. I can only donate to local and international aid organisations, but it doesn’t feel right, or like enough.

Yes, my taxi driver said, he gives to aid organisations too. To Centraide and Jeunesse au Soleil. But they’re all local.

Yes, I said, to support international aid means donating to different organisations. And then it can be hard to know if the help being offered is really useful; for instance, free american-grown rice is even worse for farmers than cheap american-grown rice. I contribute to one that gives agricultural animals. The people who receive them must commit to breeding the animals and sharing the offspring. It sounds like a good program, though I can’t be sure of its impact in practice.

My taxi driver got very excited at the thought of country people receiving such a useful and community-minded gift as breeding animals, but pointed out that it takes so much more. There has to be water, for instance. And transportation. And fertiliser. And there has to be a market.

You know, I said, we aren’t going to solve the world’s problems parked here in your taxi. But I will shake your hand and wish you a good and happy new year, and know that your frustrations are shared.

He shook my hand, and thanked me for telling him about people who work in international aid, who travel and care. He feels better now, knowing that he isn’t alone in caring.

I feel better too, knowing that I’m not alone in my lack of direction.

Happy new year to all, and may we continue to shake hands with our neighbours and share our challenges!

__________________

* That would have been these articles:

http://www.cyberpresse.ca/dossiers/crise-alimentaire/200901/10/01-816458-le-monde-de-sily.php

http://www.cyberpresse.ca/dossiers/crise-alimentaire/200901/10/01-816459-la-faim-dans-larriere-pays.php

Yes, he is wearing a sweater.

The other day I took the dogs for a walk in the Parc Regional de la Nature at Papineau and Gouin. Pepe’s stamina is not so good these days, so I tucked a baby carrier in a bag just in case. And I did end up using it, posing great, if imaginary, social difficulties. Sometimes I could completely hide him inside the carrier and I could imagine that other people assumed it was a baby. But mostly his head stuck out. Besides, pretending your dog is a baby is even creepier than just treating it like one. 

I knew that rushing up to people and explaining that YES I Let Him Walk, But He’s Thirteen With Kidney Disease And He Gets Tired, OK? was not the right thing to do. And staring people down with an I Dare You To Say Something expression was not fun for anyone either. So mostly I avoided people’s gaze, which is interesting because when I am not carrying a chihuahua in a baby carrier I’m not aware that I look people in the eye that much.

One possibility would be that I just stop taking him on these walks, and just let him walk up and down the street in front of the house. That would be the sensible thing, right?

Another would be to get a BAT CARRIER to perplex, amaze and amuse.

Found on stuffonmymutt.com. Thanks, Leanne!

Before leaving for Toronto last week I developed a canker sore in my cheek. I don’t get them often – I think the last one was probably fifteen or twenty years ago. After a day in Toronto I was really fed up. I was having trouble swallowing, and the sore was clearly poised over some nerves because I had pain in my ear and teeth and that side of my face was numb and tingly from my lips to my lower eyelid. I made an appointment with a dentist. (Why a dentist? Because you can look them up in the phone book and you don’t have to ask if they are gynecologists or gastroenterologists or pediatricians before making an appointment. Because you can get an appointment. Because even if the problem isn’t my tooth, it’s the kind of thing dentists see a lot. Because when I got a canker sore on a trip to Vancouver in… 1974? my mother took me to a dentist. Because I let my Medicare card expire and getting a new card is taking a lot longer than getting a reimbursement from my employer’s dental plan is going to.)

Anyway. It was a very nice dentist’s office. The receptionist had me fill out a card with contact info and medical history. She led me into an office and sat me in a dentist’s chair, and a young man in scrubs came in and started asking questions. I giggled privately to myself about the phenomenon of professionals becoming so very young as one ages. He didn’t look in my mouth though, and the conversation soon tuned to the upcoming Gay Games / Outgames and Divers/Cité / Pride parties in Montreal, which he will be attending. I started thinking that this was a very peculiar dental appointment, and when was he going to look at my canker sore? And then the dentist walked in…

The nice Jewish dentist looked in my mouth, asked a few questions and immediately called in a colleague for a second opinion. I started feeling like less of an idiot for consulting over a canker sore. The stern Goyish colleague looked in my mouth, asked the same questions and pronounced: “Salt water rinses. If it doesn’t get better in three days, come back and we’ll do x-rays and exploratory surgery. No antibiotics. The body heals itself.” As a stern Goyish type myself, this evaluation sounded right to me and I submitted easily. But as the stern Goy turned on his heels and left, my nice Jew started twittering anxiously over me: my mouth must be very painful. Do I need a prescription for painkillers? Ultimately he wrote me a prescription for penicillin, which I accepted after receiving assurances that yes, canker sores were bacterial infections. I giggled privately over this little drama and the cultural split and the stereotypes, imagining them as a couple with their children, one giving directives for life and the other fussing over feelings and offering palliatives in secret.

I had been given the penicillin prescription with the proviso that I didn’t need to take it, but that it would shorten the course of whatever it was. My stern Goyish self held out for two hours before shamefully caving in and filling the prescription. Sigh. So much for cultural stereotypes. (I mean, I know I flout the WASP taboo against TMI, but I had sincerely thought I was good for the one against unnecessary antibiotics.)

My course of antibiotics ends today, and while my thingy has gotten a little better it’s not a dramatic improvement. Another appointment, this time with my own dentist. Who likewise calls in an immediate second opinion. I get a name this time, “aphthous ulcer.” It’s a combination bacterial-viral thing it seems, so antibiotics only help up to a point. My dentist’s second opinion held forth that Big Pharma won’t develop antibiotics against viruses because then they would lose all that income from cold remedies, and that I will get best results with homeopathic Arnica granules. The sore is infectious now, so for the next two weeks, as it finishes healing, no kissing. My own dentist looks on from the sidelines, fascinated. I firmly decline the homeopathy – somewhat scandalised, in fact – and go home to research “aphthous ulcers” on the internet.

Turns out they’re an autoimmune phenomenon of some kind. Neither bacterial nor viral. Certain antibiotics (not the ones I had been prescribed) do help, but probably by their direct effect on the immune system and not by killing bacteria. They are not infectious.

You know how they say to trust your professional and not the Internet? I’m going with the Internet on this one. I have a funny feeling.

And am feeling even more deeply ashamed for caving on the penicillin. (On the bright side, I can go snog my beloved now.)

[originally transmitted by e-mail July 18, 2006]

Pat said that he’d never heard of Housekeeping doing it, but he could get me a new keyboard. Somewhat miffed, I wanted to know if I was the only person in the organisation who managed to make her keyboard so filthy?

No, said Pat. Certainly not. But I was the only one in the organisation who wanted someone else to clean it for her.

Oh.

He brought me a new keyboard.

[originally transmitted by e-mail June 12, 2003]