Random Becomes Normal Acts of Kindness

What would I do?  That is the question that I kept asking myself after I read this story on the CBC website a few weeks ago.

Two teenage brothers in Montreal decided to do a social experiment.  The younger one dressed in jeans and a hoodie, sat on a Montreal street in the winter holding a sign made from cardboard saying, “14 years old, hungry, homeless, please help.”  The other brother filmed from across the street. Around 300 people passed by the boy.  A few gave money and two young men stopped to talk.  Then a homeless Inuk man approached the boy, took off his winter coat and put it around the shoulders of the boy with the sign. 

It turns out that the man, Putulik Qumaq has lived in Montreal for 17 years after following his mother to the city from Nunavut at age 21.  He lives in and out of shelters and is part of a community of homeless people in the city.  When later interviewed by the CBC, he said that those people all help each other so it was natural for him to help the boy.  He said that he knows how to deal with the cold temperatures, but here was a young boy who seemed to be in trouble and he wondered what he could do to help him.  (CBC News Posted: Feb 04, 2016)

                                             Random Acts of Kindness facebook page

The Azmeer brothers made a youtube video from their experience which reached people around the world.  Scott Vyse was one of those people.  He recognized the logo on the tuque that Putiluk was wearing.  It was from Northern Mat & Bridge, an Alberta based construction company that he is a managing partner of.  Scott was inspired by Putiluk’s generosity and decided to give what he could as well.  So he sent hundreds of the same tuques to the Open Door in Montreal where Putiluk and his community get food and warm clothing, as well as shelters in Calgary and Edmonton.

                                   

After hearing this story I wondered what I would do if I saw this young boy on the street.  I have raised four kids myself and yet I walk by people with signs and cups in Toronto.  What would I do?  The question stayed with me.

A week later, I was leaving the parking lot of No Frills after buying my weekly groceries.  As I approached the corner I noticed a young man dressed in a parka standing on the corner holding a cardboard sign that looking eerily like the one in the Montreal story.  It read, “Hungry, Homeless, God Bless.”  In my mind’s eye, I could see Putiluk walking over to the man and offering his coat.  So I parked my car, took some money out of my wallet and walked over to the man.  His back was to me so I had to call out to him.  He turned around and I handed him the money.  “Gosh,” he said.  “Get something to eat,” I said, ever the mother.  And that was it.  I got back in my car and drove home, unpacked my food and had lunch.

I know someone who gives loaded Tim Horton’s cards to friends for Christmas so that if they meet someone who looks like they could use a meal, they can give them one of the cards.  She told me that it doesn’t fix the world but it is something that can be done.

Later in the week I was at my office in Toronto and I went out to mail a letter without my purse.  There is an older woman who stands outside of the local LCBO every day with a cup.  She is very friendly and I have talked to her in the past.  She was dressed in a warm parka but it was mid-winter so when I walked past her I said, “It’s cold today, eh?”  She replied, “Yeah but it was colder yesterday.”  I mailed my letter and as I got it out of my pocket, I discovered some coins in there.  So on my way back, I put them in her cup.  She said, “Thank you.  And happy Valentine’s Day… and Family Day.”  I added, “And Chinese New Year!”  She laughed and replied, “Well the only ones I really care about are Christmas and Mother’s Day.”  So I assumed she had kids.  Then we stood and chatted about how long we left up our Christmas lights inside just to bring some cheer to the long winter.  Two older women chatting about how we cope with life. And then I returned to work. 

If you watch the news too much, it is easy to feel that all we have are problems, hate and fear.  It all seems too big to fix when it is presented that way.  Fear makes people pull in which only makes the problems grow.   Putiluk’s words about how the people in his community gathered and shared together to survive stayed in my mind.  He knew what it was to be cold on the street and so he empathized with the boy.    David Chapman, the assistant director at the Open Door talked about how people who have suffered hardship are often the most generous.  “Often, those who live on the street are people with really big hearts, and this is an aspect that’s often not seen.” (Sarah Leavitt, CBC News Posted: Jan 14, 2016)

I wonder how to have a big heart in the midst of all of this?  Perhaps by having the courage to empathize with others and offering whatever help we can.  Science has shown that when we do this, the person helped feels better and so do we and so does anyone seeing this happen.  It may seem like a small thing and on one level it is.  But on another level, doing what is natural – remembering that we are all in this together – is actually being part of the solution. 

                                   

When I shared this story with a friend, she told me the story of how she and another friend were having coffee in a café.  She noticed an older women sitting at the next table who kept counting her money over and over again.  So when the two younger women went to pay for their coffee, they also paid for the older woman’s.  “I felt great!” said the woman telling me the story.  Perhaps, the good feeling comes from remembering that we are all connected, that we can do something to help each other, that together, life can be warmer, even in a big city.

                                      Random Acts of Kindness facebook page

I later discovered that last week was Random Act of Kindness week on theRandom Acts of Kindness Foundation  facebook page where I found inspiring pictures and more stories. This will probably be a good place to visit on days when life seems too hard.  I guess the word “random” is used because the act of kindness is for someone we don’t know.  Not the normal kind of kindness for a friend or family member.  But when we start to think in terms of a global village, a global family, then the randomness becomes normal and new solutions begin to emerge.  Solutions we can all be a part of.

                                      

Return, Renewal and Reconciliation

I recently heard a wonderful story of loss, return, cooperation and healing.  A friend told me about a radio interview he had heard on the CBC.  It was an archival piece of broadcaster Peter Gzowski interviewing Metis filmmaker Gil Cardinal who passed away in November of 2015.  During the interview they discussed Cardinal’s film  Totem: The Return of the G'psgolox Pole   released in 2003.  My friends and I decided to see if the film was available on the National Film Board of Canada website and we found that it was free for the viewing.  We also noticed that a later film Totem: Return and Renewal  was released in 2007 so we chose to watch that one and hear this beautiful story about a little known chapter of Canadian history.

In 1872, Chief G’psgolox of the Kitlope people, now Haisla nation, suffered the catastrophic loss of all of his children and many family members.  Struggling with this loss, he had a spiritual experience with the spirit Tsooda that is expressed in a nine meter tall mortuary pole, a gravestone, that he had commissioned.  It was erected in the Haisla village of Misk’usa in the Kitlope valley, about 600 km northwest of Vancouver.

On the top of the pole is Tsooda wearing a hat.  Below him is Asoalgot and a mythical grizzly that lives under the water.  The pole tells the story of resurrection, that the family and tribe of G’psgolox will be woken up and brought back to life.  

In 1929 without any permission, the pole was cut down by an Indian agent and sold to Sweden.  It ended up in the Swedish National Museum of Ethnography where it was kept in storage for fifty years.  In 1980 when a new museum was built, the pole was erected in a main hall and held up with a metal collar and guide wires.

The whereabouts of the G’psgolox pole remained a mystery to the Haisla people until 1991 when they discovered that it was in Sweden.  Haisla Chief Councellor Gerald Amos and Louisa Smith, a descendent of Chief G’psgolox travelled to see the long lost pole and began negotiations with the museum for repatriation.  This took many years.  The Haisla people offered and began to carve a duplicate pole to take the place of the original one in Sweden.  After fifteen years of negotiations, the Swedish government agreed to repatriate the pole.  However, the museum wouldn’t release the pole unless a special climate controlled building was erected to house it.  The Haisla people couldn’t afford that.  As Cardinal tells the story you begin to wonder if the pole will ever be repatriated. 

However, the Swedish public had been hearing the Haisla tell the story of the importance of the pole’s return for them for years.  In an unexpected turn of events, the public started to put pressure on the museum to return the pole.  Cardinal narrates, “an empathetic alliance was formed with the people of Sweden.”  Public pressure grew and the museum relinquished the pole. This was the first time a totem pole had been repatriated from overseas by a First Nation.

To satisfy their own condition, the museum agreed to make a climate controlled shipping crate that would house the pole.  Before it left, the Haisla erected the replica pole in Sweden.  And then in 2006, twenty-five years after it had been found, the old pole began a 9000 km sea voyage through the Panama Canal to Vancouver.  It was housed in the Museum of Anthropology there for two months so that people could see it and so this story could be shared with Canadians.  One Haisla elder hoped it would facilitate reconciliation.

The problem of climate control still existed.  The owners of the City Centre Mall in the town of Kitimat offered to host the pole while the money was raised for a cultural centre in Kitamaat Village to be built as a permanent home.

The Haisla believed that repatriation of the pole was vitally important.   They felt that it was an “invisible umbilical cord to the ancestors.”  One elder said, “The spirit of the people will wake up when the pole is returned.”  The whole community had united together to reclaim their cultural heritage and the negotiations became a “catalyst for cultural renewal.”  And the cultures of the Haisla and the Swedes working together in understanding, promoted healing as well.

Once it got to the mall in Kitimat, the Haisla elders used the pole to teach their children about their history.  There is a lovely scene of a Haisla child asking an elder if the pole would ever be put upright again.  She kindly answered that no, the pole would always stay on its side now because traditionally when a pole fell down, it would be left for nature to take its course. The elders also educated the people of the Kitimat with whom they shared the pole, about the significance of the pole and how it came to be returned.

In a particularly poignant scene, an elder shows the metal yoke that held the pole in place in Sweden.  The yoke became a symbol for the Haisla of the imprisonment of their cultural practices and now that it was off, the people are free to celebrate their culture fully.

At the welcoming ceremony at Kitamaat Village, a thousand people squeezed into the recreation centre including neighbouring First Nations, sponsors, politicians, museum representatives and of course, David Suzuki.  One Haisla elder said he had always felt that “our mission must be to create better stories together.  Stories we can be proud of, that we can tell our children.  The return of the pole is a good story.”

This story is of course best told by Gil Cardinal.  The acclaimed Metis filmmaker, director and writer began work with the NFB in 1970 telling indigenous stories including his own in Foster Child.  He directed dramas for CBC such as Big Bear in 1995 and Indian Summer: The Oka Crisis in 2006 and worked on North of 60.

Jesse Wente, critic and director of film programs for the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto said of Cardinal, “His devotion to truth and storytelling advanced indigenous cinema by laying the path for future generations to follow” (CBC News Nov. 23, 2015).  Filmmaker Alanis Obomsawin spoke of his historical importance to Canada.  And his business partner, Dorothy Schreiber said, “If Canadians take the time to watch Gil’s films, that will be an act of reconciliation” (Globe and Mail, Dec. 18, 2015).

The storyteller is gone but the stories remain.  They are good stories.  You can see many of them on the NFB website.  Perhaps listening to their truth is part of reconciliation and creating better stories together – stories we can be proud of that we can tell our children and grandchildren. 

Many Hearts Beating as One

Alive Inside powerfully tells the story of how music connects people with themselves and with each other.   Filmmaker Michael Rossato-Bennett chronicles the work of social worker Dan Cohen who uses music on iPods with people who are suffering from dementia.  Music that they loved when they were young has the ability to reconnect the people with memories and enhances their physical and verbal functioning.  Cohen founded the non-profit organization Music and Memory that trains volunteers to work with people with dementia using individually selected music.  The results are quite startling as uncommunicative seniors start to sing, speak and move once the music is turned on.  You can watch the trailer or order the film from Music and Memory or Amazon.

The film includes information on biology and neurology applicable to music.  At a few weeks gestation, the human embryo develops cells that begin to “beat together”.  These cells go on to form the heart.  The filmmaker shows these early cells firing together and concludes that we are wired to share a common rhythm, that we are musical beings that are meant to share that music with each other.  This uplifting film won the Audience Award at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

Last spring, I saw the Red Dirt Skinners, a British duo, perform at a house concert in Waubaushene, ON.  On their promotional information they invited audience members to bring used iPods to donate so that they could be used by people with memory loss in England.  It seemed that this idea was happily spreading.

This past weekend, I heard a CBC radio interview from Ontario Morning with Wei Chen.  Sixteen year old Naomi G. has witnessed the changes in her grandfather who has dementia, when he listens to songs by Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole on an iPod.  He becomes communicative and engages again.  This experience and seeing an intergenerational choir in London, ON motivated her to start an intergenerational choir in Kingston linking student volunteers with people in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.  She started the group off by doing a group sing along session for a few weeks and realized that most of the people had smiles on their faces by the end. 

Naomi chose to pair students with seniors so that they could also develop relationships that enrich both of their lives since not all young people have grandparents and not all elderly people have grandchildren. The choir sings what Naomi calls the old classics like You Are My Sunshine, Amazing Grace and When Irish Eyes are Smiling.  Naomi’s goal is “more about happiness than creating a great sound” and she hopes that the happiness experienced during the choir sessions continues when the participants go home.  The students had some training from the Alzheimer’s Society and a staff person from that organization also attends the sessions just in case help is needed.

I belong to a drum circle, Harmony Grace, where people play African drums such as djembes and other percussion instruments.  We play intuitively with no set leader, listening to one another and finding our place, our voice, our rhythm as part of the whole.  Sometimes the creation is amazing and sometimes it is not, but the process of playing together is always good.  In the summer we play outside by Lake Simcoe.  Passing people are welcomed in, accepted and celebrated.  Sometimes children drag their parents over and are delighted to participate with the rhythm instruments we share.

                                             Rob (standing) in good health

A year ago, one of our members passed away.  We had watched him grow thin, then gaunt and tired from the journey of cancer but he still added his wild energy to the group when he could.  A few months after he died, we were back at the lakeshore again. People brought drums that Rob had left to them and we took turns playing them.  As I played one of his djembes, I thought about life and death.  I thought about the drum made from a hollow tree trunk and covered by goat skin.  The African tree and goat and Rob are no longer living physically.  And yet the music we made connected us to those lives.  It helped us to heal, I believe, playing together, sharing memories of our friend, drums beating together, hearts beating together.  I thought of the embryonic heart cells firing together and I had to agree with Rossato-Bennett that we are wired to create rhythm and music together, our hearts beating as one.