First Connection with LAWG

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My first recollection of LAWG was while I was President of the Student Christian Movement and living in Toronto, working out of Bathurst Street United Church. Fran Arbour and Bob Carty were at the 1974 Christians for Socialism Conference in Minden, Ontario. I can’t remember if that was the first time I had met them or if it was just that it was, sort of, that I got to spend more time with them than I had before that.

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I had known John Foster for a number of years because he had been a student at St. Andrew’s College in Saskatoon and because he worked for the United Church of Canada. When the coup in Chile happened there was a big teach-in shortly after the coup in Sept. ’73 at the University of Saskatchewan and the speakers were John Foster, Michael O’Sullivan, and David Green, my professor of Latin American history. I’m not quite sure why I chose to take that Latin American history class that year but I loved it. Of course my dad had talked about Allende and his Socialist government and the kinds of things he was doing in Chile quite a bit, since he had been elected. He was a real hero of my dad’s.  It was standing room only. There were kids sitting in the aisles, the stairs, the place was packed. The speakers of course were amazing.

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Chair of Saskatoon’s Chile Solidarity Committee

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Then I think it was Michael and John who put a request out, at the end of the teach-in, and asked whether any students interested in forming a Chile solidarity committee, would stay after the meeting and we’d talk. And I was one of about ten students that stayed. And I became the first chair of the Saskatoon Chile Solidarity Committee. Michael O’Sullivan coordinated all of the work of the Chile solidarity committees in Saskatchewan and he and I attended a number of national Chile solidarity meetings (in Toronto, I think) and that’s how I met Florrie and Arturo Chacon, Louise Casselman and maybe Fran and Bob as well. 

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Shortly after the coup, our awful Minister of External Affairs, Mitchell Sharpe came out in support of the Pinochet regime as did the Canadian Ambassador to Chile, Andrew Ross.  The Canadian government refused to help bring political prisoners in Canadian jails to Canada, so that became the focus of our lobbying efforts.  Our lobbying efforts got a lot of support from Canadians and the federal government reversed its position in early 1974.  The first political prisoners started arriving in Canada a few months later in 1974.  The government sent them to communities all over Canada and it was job of our local Chile committees to connect with them when they arrived.  Many of the first political prisoners who arrived in Saskatoon became members of our solidarity committee.

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As time went on, our Chile Support Committee became the Nicaragua Support Committee, the backbone of Medical Aid to Nicaragua and later the Cuba Support Network which functioned well into the 1990s.  This was true of solidarity committees in other cities that I know of in the west.

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Hired by LAWG

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So when I did become student president of the Student Christian Movement, at one point Bob Carty and Fran Arbour approached me and asked me if I’d be interested in working for the Latin American Working Group, and I said, “Not until I finish my English degree or else my mother will kill me!” So I said, “Let me go home for a year and then I would love to come back to work for the Latin American Working Group.” So then I remember coming back and having an interview, and just being devastated after the interview because I was sure that I’d blown it, and they weren’t really interested in anything I had to say. And I forget if it was you I told. I told somebody anyway, and they said, “Oh no Christine. You nailed it. Of course you’re going to get the job.”

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So then I started working for the Latin American Working Group. I was so thrilled to meet socialist Christians! You know, like, that’s the home environment I grew up in. To meet this whole network of people who believed in the same things I did and to have the same values, it was wonderful, really important to me.

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So I started working at the LAWG office on Crawford. One of the things I remember is Betsy gently reminding me that cash flow wise, it would be good if I filled a few book orders. But it just seemed to me that our days were full of meetings. At one point, Betsy decided to do a bit of a study and we actually tracked our meetings for a week, and sure enough, found that we were each spending 40 hours a week in meetings! Which was why I was filling book orders a lot of nights til 8 or 9 at night.

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I struggled a bit at the beginning, sort of figuring out what my role could be, or what my niche could be. And then what happened was, I guess we were all involved with this, but I remember distinctly there were groups of people like refugees from Uruguay and Argentina, and from Chile who regularly came to our office and we had meetings with them. And I was also the LAWG rep on ICCHRLA. So I also met some of these same very fine articulate people from Argentina and Uruguay who would come and speak at ICCHRLA meetings. So we all, it seems to me, played a role in supporting these groups of refugees in Toronto who were trying to raise public awareness about what was going on in their countries.

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I went to Latin America in March of 1979.  Gonzolo Martin one of the two CUSO directors in Peru facilitated me going to Peru for 6 weeks as a short-term cooperant and I spent two weeks before going to Peru with Louise in Mexico.  In Mexico we looked at impact of oil and gas exploitation in Mexico City and then along the Gulf of Mexico coast and then I went to Peru to research Canadian corporate investment in Peru and cover labour disputes at those companies.  I remember writing a piece on a strike by Bata workers that we published.

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Learning Spanish in Peru

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I flew to Lima and on the plane I got Montezuma’s revenge, really really bad. And somehow or another Greg Chisholm, who was my contact in Peru, and I had miscommunicated. I can’t remember what happened, but Greg wasn’t expecting me then and I was sick as a dog. So I phoned the only other person I had a number for. He wasn’t that happy to hear from me, especially when I told him that I was sick as a dog. But he came and got me and took me to his home and his wife was very lovely and took care of me. And they helped me contact Greg and he came the next morning and took me to “Kilometro 22” which was a mission with two Scarborough Foreign Mission priests (Greg and Jack) and five sisters of Providence from Edmonton located 22 kilometers north of Lima on the Tupac Amaru highway in a slum area.  The priests slept in one building but the heart of the place was the second building where the nuns lived and where we had all of our meals. The cook was a wonderful local woman named Clementina. At my request, she took me to see her home, which was both an eye opening and a humbling experience. She supported about 12 family members on her salary and she only had enough money to buy food for one hot meal a day.  Everyone was very kind to me.

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I went as a CUSO co-operant with Gonzalo Martin’s assistance, so the deal was I was a short-term co-operant doing research into Canadian business involvement in Peru and I was also to study Spanish. So, ’79 was right after the general strike in Peru in 1978, and all the strike leaders had been blacklisted and couldn’t get jobs. So Gonzalo had arranged with a political friend of his, Victor Torres, to be my tutor and he was brilliant.  In six weeks of Spanish classes with Victor I learned more Spanish than in 11 years of studying French in Canada!

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When I was in Peru the military government of Bermudez was in power and it was ruthless.  Military helicopters armed with machine guns flew over poor neighborhoods like Comas every day. The military was very much present. When I was there, there was a great deal of talk of Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path).

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Every morning that I had a Spanish class I took the bus from Kilometre 22 into Lima and then I took another bus to Victor’s mother’s place, and that’s where he came on his motorcycle. And he gave me 3 hours of instruction and then he gave me I think, 2 hours of homework for every hour of instruction. I don’t think it was everyday. I think it was 3 days a week. Because it was a lot of  homework. 

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After classes I would stay in Lima and do my own research

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On at least three weekends I travelled, twice with Greg to visit a Massy Ferguson plant in Trujillo and the other time to Ayacucho. Greg and I did interviews together and it was great having his company.  I went alone to Machu Picchu and Cuzco, and had a wonderful time. 

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Sundays when I wasn’t travelling I accompanied Greg and Sister Rose to “Kilometro 18” where there was a little church where Greg served as priest.  Jack, the other priest, did Sunday services at Kilometer 22 and the whole team took care of the people in the community.  People came to either house all day every day looking for help.  I attended an “emergency baptism” that Greg and Jack did in Kilometer 22 for a family with a baby dying of dysentery.  It was horrible and we talked afterward about how angry this made us.  The water that people bought from water trucks was contaminated and if people didn’t have money for kerosene to boil the water they got sick, especially young children.

 I loved going with Greg. We’d go to this little church, and wooden benches inside, and there was be a cork board at the front of the room – and Greg, before the service, would put up all these articles from the newspaper about the week’s events. And then basically, his homily was based on the news events of the week.  Most of his parishioners couldn’t read or didn’t have access to newspapers.  He’d tie all this together with scripture and we sang a lot of songs, joyfully. It was an amazing experience.

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And, living in this sort of very poor, slum community, everywhere I went with Greg, there were always young people who wanted to talk to him. He was very popular. So I asked Greg, before I left, what I could do.  He said, “If you have $200 that you could give me, we’ll buy these kids soccer equipment.” So that was what I left behind.

I really, really loved the nuns. Rose was an older nun whose family had desperately tried to get her to go back to Canada many times, and she wasn’t going anywhere. There were just these wonderful strong, wise women.

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Every day water trucks came into this desert slum area to sell the people water – that was contaminated (which is why the babies got sick and died.) One of the nuns who had been there the longest, Irene, had parasites throughout her body that had damage to her organs. But there was no way she was going back to Canada. So regardless of the health issues for her, she was going to stay.

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The third nun, Rosemary, did all of the cooking on Clementina’s days off.   That’s where I first tasted ceviche.

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But I was very frustrated by the lack of infrastructure. I remember walking up Arequipe, a major street in Lima, trying to find a payphone that worked. And finally hitting the Sheraton Hotel that had a bank of payphones, and so I would regularly after that position myself at those phones and use those phones, you know, sometimes an hour or two, connecting with all the people I wanted to interview. And I think I got told at some point I was sort of overstaying my welcome. But it was sure a lot better than walking in the hot sun and I was in an air conditioned hotel.

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A few times I had to go into the CUSO office to see …Gonzalo, and he had this lovely woman who worked with him, Beba, I think her name was.  I hadn’t had the proper shots for Peru before I got down there, so she gave me all those shots once I got there!

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Yeah, so I always knew I could go there, like if I …had an issue or a problem, or was at loose ends, but actually I didn’t need to. Greg and the nuns were just wonderful, really.

 

Remembering Monday Night Meetings

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The collective meetings – the collective met every Monday night at 7 o’clock! In somebody’s house. And John and I lived together in the Sarah Binks Memorial Co-op, where different people cooked every night. So we were very much at the mercy of whoever was cooking. And if it was Barry we were in serious trouble because Barry usually wouldn’t arrive to start cooking until 7 o’clock. So we were almost invariably late for collective meetings, which wasn’t very good. The collective meetings would go on until at least 10:00 PM I hardly ever remember a meeting that ended before 10. We were clearly a lot younger then because I think most of us now are in bed by 9:00 PM!

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And lots of, again, fine people, volunteers who worked for other justice departments of churches, and you know, as teachers … all kinds of different professions. But all … you know, I felt like, in the meetings, there was no distinction between staff and non-staff, or volunteers and staff. I felt like there was lots of mutual respect for all points of view from people. That doesn’t mean that the discussions couldn’t be long and tedious. I have a feeling this is what got me ready for co-housing, you know, returning to the same topics, you know, time-after-time, because someone still wasn’t happy with how things were going – that was very common.

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My main recollection was the amount of respect people had for one another. We could listen to somebody say the same thing for the fifth or sixth time in the same conversation, and people just listened. And nobody shut them down. But the other thing we were all smart and there were no narcissists, no huge egos that had to be stroked – I felt like a lot of that stuff got left at the door. People were in there to make the best decisions for the group, and for Latin America. To this day, I’m still just amazed at how well the collective worked.

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I remember us meeting in the library to come up with the agenda. But I don’t remember how we handled the chairing. They were often difficult, those meetings. But again, like at co-housing, you have to learn to respect differences, and not let your personal feelings sort of interfere, and not take things personally.

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Amazing – Making Do with Few Resources

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We were an amazing group. Because we had very few resources, other than great people. And we worked in shitty working conditions. I mean, no benefits. No pension. So it wasn’t something that people could do for very long. I think people were taking turns living on EI although I never had to do that. I remember having $27 a month for fun money after paying all my bills. I was subsidized by the people I lived with. It seems to me I was making some like $150 a week. But you know, I’m glad of the fact that I learned how to live on that. And I did have $27 in a month to go to movies and out for dinner. I really didn’t feel deprived. I had enough money to go home by train, or by car, at Christmas and in the summer to Saskatchewan. I had everything I needed.

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