The Point

Saturday, October 21, 2006

Did you GuluWalk in your town?


An earnest kid.

If you live in Edmonton, you'll know that one of the iconic Edmontonian images is the Listen bird. I don't know how it started, I think it was an ad for Listen Records on 124th Street, but everywhere you go in the city people have tagged birds of all shapes and sizes, simply saying, 'Listen.' It's taken on a life of its own, and when I see them in the spring it makes me take pause (My neighbour Vasyl actually made a short silent film around these birds). Well, this morning on my bicycle, I saw a tag that just said TALK. And at first I was almost taken aback, thinking Talk? We need to be listening here first. On Further Reflection though, I have begun to wonder, why not talk? Why not speak? There are many things we need to listen to, and many times we need to speak. And to dream, and to hope, and to provoke and to unite. Let's talk.

Signing the banner we carried around. Thanks, Earth Water.

The GuluWalk today was amazing. I didn't expect as many people to come out as there were, but all told about 100 of us walked from Strathcona down past Garneau and Victoria Park, all through Oliver and back down Whyte Ave. It was mostly young people, students especially, but there were kids from youth groups there too, and letter writers and peaceful rabble rousers. A couple MPs spoke (one of them seemed to think Africa was a country, disappointingly) and a student from the U of A who I guess leads a Ugandan Students Association? and it was a little cold and a little cloudy but I was warm warm warm walking with such passionate people.

Did it feel like a long distance? Yes. About 11, 12 kilometres is a long way to walk on an autumn day in Edmonton. But I couldn't imagine walking it twice a day back and forth to the city with the constant threat of being abducted or worse by the LRA. Those kids have it a lot tougher than us, and don't get the promise of hot chocolate or water bottles at the end. Walking 11 kilometres for donations is a lot different than doing it to survive.

There were a lot fewer people than came out in Toronto at the one I went to last year, but Edmontonians are more of a shy, retiring folk when it comes to these things and northern Uganda isn't exactly high on the public consciousness. But I guess things like the GuluWalk help bring it to the top, and more power to people like Lillian and Jamil for helping organise a pretty successful walk, I'd say. I guess they stopped by this site a few days ago and I promised I'd put their picture up on here, but Lillian closed her eyes in the one I snapped, so here is a more candid one of them where she has her eyes open. Keep up the good work, guys.

The founders of GuluWalk in its international incarnation (as in, apart from the kids who do it every day) are Adrian Bradbury and Kieran Hayward, and I know they'd like the kids affected by the war in Uganda to stay in people's minds. Canada has the very real ability to help push Museveni's government and the Lord's Resistance Army to keep dialogue open and sieze this opportunity for peace. I don't know if Joseph Kony will ever be tried by the ICC or not, but these children are not safe in refugee camps or in their homes, and it is time this brutal war came to an end.

Si halba español, este blog tiene una buena historia de GuluWalk.

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posted by Christopher at 5:47 p.m. | link | 1 comments

Friday, October 20, 2006

Of giving and taking


Canada World Youth/Jeunesse Canada Monde celebrated its 35th anniversary yesterday. If you haven't heard of it before, it's a Canadian NGO that works with partner organisations overseas to set up international youth volunteer exchanges -- and if that doesn't make sense, an example would be the exchange I was sent on 2 years ago to BC and China for a total of 6 months to learn about... many things.


It's an amazing organisation and I think I've internalised the experience I had with CWY-JCM so much that I forget sometimes how much of an impact it's had on me. Getting to live with a host family in another region in Canada and overseas made me shift my perspective on a lot of things. Parts of your culture you take for granted as being universal, ways of making compromises in groups, ways of overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles in language, relationships, planning community events... The learning that comes from the program is almost all informal, and much of it doesn't make sense until long after it's over, when you can look back and see Oh, that's where my thinking totally changed on this and this and this and I was forced to let the world in.

Anyway, they had a shindig last night at City Hall and two groups on Africa/Canada Eco-Leadership programs came to do some dancing and talking and signing and listening, and I realised how much I missed being surrounded by people who are passionate and driven to learn and consume and thrive off of everything around them. I really think Canada World Youth does a tremendous job of cultivating that thirst, so here's to them, and here's to 35 years, and here's to 35 more.

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posted by Christopher at 9:01 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Walking together


Hey, remember when I was talking about the Gulu Walk, that really cool thing these guys in Toronto started that I went down and did last year without really knowing what it was? It's happening again. I've had someone wander by the site looking for information on it, so I talked to Lillian Du and Jamil Jivraj, the Edmonton organisers, and here's the rundown.

We're meeting at 10.30 at McIntyre Park (the little Gazebo park by the Varscona, just on 83rd and 104th St) on Saturday, October 21st. That's this weekend. Speeches and registration start about then and the walk itself starts at about 11.30, they say. The walk is 11 km long in support of kids in northern Uganda (called 'night commuters' by some) who walk distances longer than that into the city every night so they don't get raped or abducted or forced into the army at night in their villages. Both sides in Uganda have violated terms of the tentative peace agreements signed earlier this year, so raising awareness about this and putting pressure on the international community to step up efforts to end the conflict is more important than ever. I don't use that phrase much, I don't think, so there you go.

This year, the walk is being held in over 70 cities around the world, including Vancouver, Toronto, Saskatoon, Beijing, Washington, Kampala, Amsterdam, Nairobi, Houston, Brisbane... and of course, Gulu. I am, of course, accepting donations, but if you can't afford to donate right now, just find a walk near you and go anyway. More info is available at guluwalk.com and if you're in Edmonton, Lillian and Jamil can be reached at wakadogo_edmonton at... hotmail dot com. I presume you can add that all together.

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posted by Christopher at 12:17 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Thursday, October 12, 2006

The colors correspond

What are the odds that Orhan Pamuk would win the Nobel Prize for Literature the very same day the Lower House of Parliament in France passed a bill criminalising denial of the Armenian genocide?

You've got to hand it to the Nobel Committee for once again picking a general rabble-rouser and disturber of the peace. Pamuk should fit nicely alongside Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchú Tum and Harold Pinter on that front.

I guess I have to read My Name is Red now.

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posted by Christopher at 9:01 p.m. | link | 0 comments

A very special guest

I would like to dedicate this post to a very special guest reading tonight from British Columbia. He is young, dashing, and fond of mayonnaise. My friend, I did not forget you.

The other day in my Persian class an intellectual disagreement came up. I don't remember how exactly, but my friend Dena and I started discussing Iran's relationship with the United States. From matters of neocolonialism we quickly hopped straight onto nuclear weapons programs, and before I knew it, about a dozen of us began arguing over whether or not Iran has the right to develop a nuclear bomb. This is a class, I should tell you, of about half adult students, two thirds Persian kids, Middle Eastern Studies Students to anthropology students to realtors to financial consultants to wayward occasional poets and general disturbers of the peace. The discussion was heated, to say the least.


Very rarely do federal NDP Leader Jack Layton and I share perspectives on issues of international import, but I must say he raised a very pressing and valid point this week after North Korea announced it had formally joined the nuclear club itself. It's all fine and well for Blair and the Chinese Foreign Ministry to condemn the DPRK's unquestionably provocative underground test of a nuclear weapon. But, as Layton argued, does it not boil down to the most dangerous and outrageous hypocrisy for these countries to condemn Kim Jong-Il's pursuit of nuclear armament when they themselves produce arsenals many times more deadly and equally threatening to global security? Who has the right to possess nuclear weapons, the right to use or to threaten with them, and who determines the possessors of these rights? Surely not the other nuclear powers themselves.

Of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, all of them -- Russia, China, France, Britain and United States -- have nuclear weapons. Nuclear Non-Proliferation agreements have been in place for decades. Curiously, none of these countries seems in any hurry to dismantle their nuclear capabilities, and the United States
seems, in fact, to be heading back to testing new weapons itself in Western Shoshone land (already the most bombed region on the planet; this test has been deferred but I have been unable to find more information on the delay). There are ample arguments in defense of these countries' decision not to disarm. It may be pointed out, for example, that the nuclear capabilities of the USSR and the United States kept either from employing any or engaging in direct war. I would counter that Vietnamese and Afghani people still reeling from proxy wars might have a thing or two to say about that, but there you go. It might also be argued that North Korea is a 'rogue state,' and is led by a cruel dictatorship operating under the guise of communism, willing to sacrifice the lives of hundreds of thousands of its citizens to starvation in its pursuit of military might and international defiance. But what moral ground do countries like the Russia or the United States have to stand on by these standards?

How might you present the argument to Ahmadinejad that Bush's administration is any less of a threat to global security, when the last five years have seen the countries to its immediate east and west savaged by wars instigated by the American government? And why, then, does it not have the right to build up nuclear weapons to defend itself, when countries like Israel and Pakistan meet barely a murmur of constenation for doing the very same thing?
This is, essentially, the argument Dena and several other people in our class were trying to make. Every country should have the right to defend itself from threats to its security, right? And all indications have shown that for the past fifty years or so, the countries that don't have the bomb get bombed, and the ones that do don't.

Our friend Chelsea said she thought every country should get a nuclear weapon to prevent any international conflicts from ever arising again. I rather thought they were quite mad, but I wasn't sure how to counter their arguments persuasively.
No, the nuclear powers are in no moral position to argue that any other country should not get the bomb. Their hypocrisy is unconscionable; the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the atrocious treatment of the Western Shoshone, and the unnerving number of weapons unaccounted for in the former USSR should prove, unquestionably, that possession of nuclear weapons is an unqualified danger to human security. That they cling to these false prophets of safety denies them any moral footing on issues of nuclear armament. But where the argument comes down to an issue of balance, I will cry foul.

North Korea's announcement this week, and speculation that South Korea and Japan may now follow suit to defend themselves, proves that this process engenders escalation, not neutralisation. No matter who the country in question is, no matter how many other countries possess these weapons, no matter how many thousands they refuse to get rid of, there are simply some universal moral codes we must adhere to. Use of nuclear weapons is lunacy, on any side. To pretend otherwise is at best disingenuous, and at worst a grave danger of recommitting atrocities we should have learned from by now.

Photo credit: Sarah Lemmon, Vancouver.

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posted by Christopher at 1:22 a.m. | link | 1 comments
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