Formative Experience in Colombia

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My interest in Latin America came out of a combination of being involved in the Toronto Left in the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, along with my first experiences of travelling around in Europe, and achieving or experiencing that level of freedom. You know that feeling, that you’re young, that you could do anything. So it was by hitch-hiking around Morocco and Spain and other places and then coming back to Toronto where my friends who were in the Left – Bob Kellerman, and Jane Wyngate and Sarah Spinks and Bob Davis – lived next door in that house on Spadina where the two sides were communes. And then going to Colombia as a CUSO volunteer.

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After travelling in Europe, I came home and I taught English as a Second Language for a year and a half or so. I wanted to go to Latin America. During that period, CUSO was your ‘ticket’. It was one of the few avenues that were available for you, and they taught you Spanish (they gave you provisions for learning Spanish).

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Going to Colombia was a very formative experience. I lived with a Colombian family, and became much more interested in the students than any of the other ex-patriots. I started being very good friends with one of the student leaders who eventually ended up in jail and I used to go visit him. Every Saturday afternoon I’d go down to the prison and visit him. And it was scandalous! That was in 1969.

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Those two years I was supposedly teaching at the university, the university was actually shut down most of the time. It was the Industrial University of Santander which taught engineering. The English Department which was run by somebody who had married a woman from Kansas who had blond, blond, blond hair. So the English Department was like a focal point of attack by the students, because it was representative of imperialism! And I felt the same way. I thought, you know, they should go home to Kansas!

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So my friend, Javier was also an athlete and he ran races, and he was studying medicine. He lived in Medellin and I found out afterwards, years, decades later, when I visited the Escuela Nacional in Medellin, that he was a very well-known doctor. But in the ‘60s I would go and visit him in the prison. They had a separate wing for political prisoners and it wasn’t horrible. But clearly, it was unfair for him to be in prison and that’s one of the things that sort of motivated me, you know, “What can I do to help him and the rest of the student leaders and the student activists who were fighting?” At one point the university was taken over by the army. That’s when he was arrested and made a political prisoner.

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Teaching in Cuba

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When it came time for me to go home, I thought “maybe there’s something I can do back in Canada in terms of finding ways of supporting him  and the movement”, and that’s when I started asking around about who was doing solidarity work and I heard about LAWG. Sarah Spinks was part of that early generation and she lived with Foster and Sandra on Bedford.

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By this time, I was very interested in Cuba. Well, everybody was interested in Cuba, especially the leftists and the students in Colombia. CUSO was just opening its program in Cuba. I decided to go to Cuba after I got back to Canada, and to do whatever I had to do in order to get accepted to the Cuba Program. Luckily, the Cuba Program was based on teaching English as a Second Language. Joe Vise was the Director of the Cuba Program. Although by the time I got there, Pat Hurdle and David Gallagher were the directors of the Cuba Program. So I knew people and I got to Cuba.

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I was there a year. The first four months or so I taught at the Ministry of Foreign Trade, training commercial workers. Canada at the time was exporting a master’s level program in Engineering to the University of Havana. And they decided, instead of teaching the professors Spanish to give their lectures, they would teach the students English and the professors would teach in English and the students would do their work in English.

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About a week or two after I got to Cuba, I went to call my sister – it was September 11, her birthday – 1973. I put in a call to wish her a happy birthday, and by the time the call came through later that afternoon, the coup in Chile had happened. She was in Toronto, and had just come back from travelling around Latin America. She had been in Chile, and decided she was going to emigrate to Chile – this was during the Allende period. So she was coming home to close up her affairs. That’s when I went to Cuba, and that’s when I called her to wish her a happy birthday, and the coup had happened! Then all these Chilean refugees started coming through Cuba and she became very active in the Chile movement here in Canada.

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Joining LAWG

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It felt like a natural step, to join LAWG after that.

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That first year of the coup I was in Cuba. And my friends were all Chilean. And that’s really what drove me through all this, who my friends were and what their backgrounds were. And Cuba played such an important role in America – it really shaped the direction we were going. Anyway, when I came back, I moved into Spadina and that’s when I joined LAWG. That would have been maybe the summer of ’74.

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I remember LAWG was on the second floor of that Italian grocery store, Joe’s on Crawford. The person I had the most contact with was Jim Sinclair and he was doing the LAWG Letter and he taught me how to use the light table, how to use the blue pencil. It just seemed like a natural thing to get involved in. You didn’t need any experience and he knew what he was doing and he taught me.

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Living was pretty cheap back then. I mean, what were we paying for rent, $50 a month or something. I must have been a volunteer at first. I guess I had some savings because when I had Helene’s job I was earning a good salary and I was earning a pension. So I just withdrew my pension when I stopped working there. At LAWG we had this system, interspersing salary with going on unemployment. I don’t remember if it was three weeks off, three weeks on, or it must have been a couple months on, a couple months off. I think I did that for two or three years. I think we all did it. Bob, and Louise, and Tim and me, the four of us were on staff together. And when I think back, I feel just really proud, what a powerhouse of people we had.

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Meeting Chris

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I met Chris in ’76 in Guatemala when we worked on that film. We got a phone call at the LAWG office from a Canadian film maker who was looking for a woman to do research in Guatemala with a film crew. And I answered the phone. It was David Springbett, and he had called CUSO in Ottawa and talked to Margaret Hilson – she was just starting to get into Latin America. She said, “Call the Latin American Working Group,” thinking that Frances might be a good person for this job. Except I answered the telephone so he hired me.

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And then, two days after he hired me I got a call from Vivien Leigh Bosch, who was a film producer and she was working with Claude Jutra on a film in Cuba, “The Arts in Cuba”. She was one of those people who used to come down every winter and so I’d met her in Cuba, so she called me up and asked me if I wanted to work on it to be their researcher and translator. I had never worked on a film before in my life, and then all of a sudden I had two opportunities. I managed to juggle working on them both.

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They’d been working with a Quaker group out of Honduras where there were two brothers who had been in Guatemala working with community groups, teaching them terracing and water conservation practices and they had a program in this town called San Miguel. Chris had been working for OXFAM-England on housing reconstruction, because it was just after the earthquake of ’76. Chris had met this film maker and they cooked up this plan together and there were women’s issues in this film, you know, the women who had to take their laundry down to the river to do their washing, and were carrying water back from the river for cooking. They called it “research on women’s issues” but it was really to have a woman on the film crew, on the site, who could help do translation.

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It was a real education on Guatemala. It was barely a year after the earthquake and it was a relatively peaceful moment. CIDA had put money into earthquake reconstruction and so CIDA was willing to put some money into this film. But afterwards, the shit hit the fan. Then, that very village that we were in was burnt to the ground. Everybody fled.

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And then we came to Canada. First Chris went to Toronto to work on the final script. While I was in Cuba, he went to Canada, stayed in my house, and got to know my housemates – and they approved. And then he went to the Youth Festival in Cuba, and then back to California where he was working at the NACLA Data Centre, with Fred Goff and others. And I went for long visits, for a month, two months, and we wrote.

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One time I remember, I had come home, and I wrote to Chris and said, “Do you want a work/travel experience with me?” And he said yes. So I started looking around and I went to this solidarity event – I think it was a TCLSAC movie – they had this film series. And Judith Marshall was there. I asked her if there were any jobs in southern Africa or Mozambique teaching English as a Second Language. She had just come back from Mozambique. She was the CUSO and OXFAM representative in Mozambique, and she had just signed up the head of the Language Institute to supply them with English teachers. And she said, “Yes, I think we have some spots available.” So that was CUSO. I wrote to Chris and he filled out the application form.

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That was 1977. And then he went to Vancouver to meet Susan Hurlich. She had to interview him because he was American, and CUSO had an agreement with TCLSAC and with the Mozambiquan government, that they would vet co-operants politically, the way LAWG did later with Nicaragua. So he got accepted. Can you see anybody refusing Chris!?! He’s such a nice guy. So we got accepted and we went. We spent three years there and Josh was born there. At that point we left because Chris wanted to go to Central America and there was a CUSO job available. So we got the job and went in ’81 and spent 9 … 10 years there.