​

Frances & Bob’s Honeymoon in Guatemala

​

Bob and I were married in 1975 and we went to Guatemala on our honeymoon. We had a friend, Manolo Garcia, who had been to Canada to visit, and he stayed in our apartment. He said if you ever come to Guatemala you have to stay in my home. Which was why we decided to go to Guatemala. We were very interested in knowing what was going on and so we stayed with Manolo and his wife, and they gave us their car to go to Santiago Atitlan.

​

I remember that night in Santiago, that was a sign – that tree that was on fire. We saw all these indigenous people with pails and throwing water on the tree until they got the fire out. It was just like this whole community came together to do this together, and they used the water from the lake. I can still see it with my own eyes.

​

Bob and Fran’s First Trip Together to Mexico

​

I met Bob through Development and Peace. When I came back from Mexico I understood that I could share some of my experiences with people. I met Bob quite by accident one day when I walked into the Development and Peace office and there he was at the desk. We met and, you know, struck it off as friends and I said to him, “You know, we need to do some work with adults here. All of this experience that I have, I could share it with other people.” And of course he had a lot of experience, too, although not on the ground in Latin America.

​

It was two or three years later, I said to Bob, “You have to come to Mexico with me, to see what it’s like there!” So we drove down. We drove with Michael, a Jesuit who was working with native peoples in northern Ontario, and he and Bob were friends. The first time we went down Bob had a beard. So we went to see the Sisters and they thought Bob was the priest! We got a laugh out of that. But anyway, he said, no, no, he wasn’t going to celebrate mass. Michael is.

​

That was a very good trip. We went to Aguascalientes and Mexico City. He got to know the community and of course, Bob always had his music available for anyone who wanted to listen. From the time I knew him, Bob was always playing music. And he became better with the years and began to write his own songs and all that, and was very good. He became very attached to Mexico. He liked the Latin spirit and their music.

​

CENCOS and the Canadian News Synthesis Project

​

Some time later Bob and I went back to Mexico City, just the two of us and that’s when we met CENCOS. We met Pepe Alvarez Icaza and we spent a fair amount of time with him and he talked about how CENCOS had developed and how important it was for other countries to do the same to understand what was going on in their countries. And then I met Chucho and Barbara and we spent a lot of time together.

​

You know, everyone who joined the News Synthesis project came away from it radicalized, with a deeper understanding of Canada. I think back on all those people now, I see what they’re doing now, every one of them has good political sense. We always said it was important for a person to be committed on three levels: the international (which was the Latin American work we were doing with LAWG), the national (the News Synthesis Project) and the community.

​

The News Synthesis project grew out of CENCOS. It was a time when Bob was a member of the Youth Corps, a Catholic group that tried to help young people understand what was going on in the world. Because you know a lot of the Catholic stuff at that point was pretty intensively spiritual. But Father Tom McKillop had a broad vision of what should be done, so he and a couple other priests formed Youth Corps and out of this a number of people grew into leaders themselves, like Bob, who was very, very touched by that experience. Bob had already been to Mexico and already knew about CENCOS and we had met Pepe Alvarez Icaza who challenged us to do something similar in Canada.

And it was so important. There’s nothing like it today. It was a lot of hard work. Because we came together once a week. We all were assigned to look at one newspaper which we clipped every day on some topic or another, and then came back and talked about it, and analyzed the information. We looked at energy. We looked at economics. We obviously looked at the political, at government. We looked at grass roots groups and so on, and then we would come together to talk about all these things, which has helped us to develop a global understanding. Like, I might be covering energy, for example, or immigration, but when you came together you talked about what they were doing in other sectors, right, and began to form a bigger picture of what was going on in Canada.

​

I think most of the people in the group were involved in actions in other ways, and so this work helped them have a clear understanding of what they were doing.