Joe Simon

Keeping Cool Under Fire
By Diane Peters

It was 11 p.m. and brushing –30°C outside when the phone rang at the Northern Store in the remote native reserve of Pauingassi, Man. Store manager Joe Simon, 34, picked it up. “A boy’s been stabbed and he’s dying. Can you help us?” said the strained voice of Susanne Keeper, an assistant at the reserve’s nursing station and daughter of Edna, a store staff member.

Keeper quickly explained that Nicholas Fisher, who taught art at the local school, had just been stabbed by his sister. She called Simon because he’d had a little medical training and she herself had had only a CPR course. Simon knew there were no nurses in Pauingassi; they’d been removed just two weeks before because of escalating violence in the troubled community of 500.

“We’ll be right there,” Simon said without hesitation. He and his assistant, Bobbi McLean, jumped into their truck and drove to the nursing station.

In fact, Simon had only received basic first-aid training close to a decade before. Both he and McLean had left their retail jobs in Fredericton to join the Northern Store chain a year before. Simon, a Mi’kmaq, was deeply saddened by this troubled remote community.

A group of people lounged outside the nursing station, all intoxicated. Simon saw a huge man lying in the doorway of one of the examination rooms; around him was an expanding pool of blood. As McLean, queasy, turned away and began comforting Fisher’s mother, Simon took charge, getting Keeper and her mother, Edna, to elevate Fisher’s feet to keep more blood in his brain, and adding more gauze to the man’s wounds—one at his neck and the other in his chest.

While struggling to get the bleeding under control, Simon thought, I’ve done all I’m capable of. I’ve got to call for help. He called the nursing station in Little Grand Rapids, a native community 20 minutes across the lake. “There’s nothing we can do,” the nurse on call told him. “I’m not sending a nurse over there. The ice is too thin.”

Simon dialled the RCMP unit in the same town. They also refused to come, saying that snowmobiles could fall through the ice and their small helicopter could not fly at night.

Fisher began to shake violently, a sign he was going into shock. Outside, it had started to snow and the wind had whipped up. Desperate, Simon called 9-1-1, a move he thought fruitless because of their remote location.

“I’m going nuts here. Please, help me,” he begged the operator. Within minutes, he was talking to ER physician Dr. Robert Grierson at the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre. Simon nearly cried with relief as the doctor began asking him questions about himself and the victim.

The doctor handed Simon over to Michael Perrella, a nurse with 13 years experience, many of those in remote communities like Pauingassi. “If we don’t get fluids into him,” Perrella told Simon, “he could die. You’re going to have to put an IV line into him.” The saline solution from the IV would temporarily replace the blood Fisher had lost, stabilizing him until he could get his wounds sewn up by a surgeon.

Simon told Perrella he’d seen the procedure before. He and Keeper gathered up the equipment. He tied a tourniquet on Fisher’s upper arm and found what might be a vein. He tried to stab at it with a needle—but it failed to go in. Fisher’s veins had collapsed because he’d lost so much blood. This was a job even experienced nurses struggled with. As he tried over and over, Simon wondered if he might be killing Fisher. Then, on about the 15th try, the needle hit. He threaded a catheter into the vein, hooked it up to an IV bag, and the bag began to drip.

“He got it in!” Perrella called out, and Grierson and the Winnipeg ER staff cheered. Within 20 minutes, Fisher’ vital signs had stabilized. His life was saved—for now.

Meanwhile, Grierson had been calling in vain for help. The province’s air ambulance couldn’t land in Pauingassi, and the military was worried about the weather. Finally, just before 4 a.m., Grierson got Simon, himself and the military on a conference call. SAR Techs (search-and-rescue technicians) from Winnipeg wanted to help, but they needed a place to land if they were to parachute in.

“If you send paratroopers, you’ll have your drop zone,” Simon told them. Then he called out to the waiting room: “I need six trucks to meet me on the ice.” In minutes he had his trucks, lights on. In the freezing night, he arranged them in a circle. An hour later, everyone heard the rumbling of a Hercules military airplane, and three SAR Techs parachuted from the sky. The cavalry’s finally here, Simon thought, and began to shake, the stress finally setting in.

The SAR Techs quickly took over and sent Simon home. Fisher was flown by helicopter to Little Grand Rapids and then by air ambulance to Winnipeg. He was discharged from hospital in a few days, scarred and weak, but alive.

In March, the North West Company, which runs the Northern Store, flew Simon and McLean to Winnipeg for its annual awards ceremony. There, the company president presented Simon with a President’s Award for community support, then introduced him to Grierson and Perrella.

Later, the three men sat at a back table and talked about the night they’d always remember. “To me, he epitomizes the word hero,” says Michael Perrella. “There aren’t a lot of people who would jump into a situation they’re not trained for and say, ‘I’ve got to do something to help my fellow man.’”

Charlie Turner

Seeing God’s Face in the Poor
Alison Ramsey

When elementary school vice-principal Charlie Turner, a long-time Halifax resident, retired in 1992, he had dreams of writing his memoirs and “a book of prayers for common people.”

Those dreams were sidelined, however, when Don Britt, a student-intern at Turner’s church, called a meeting to suggest merging food banks run

by area churches: having one loca-

tion would pool resources, enabling them to help more people. Turner thought it a sensible plan. And when he sees a good plan that lacks volunteers to enact it, Turner’s in-

stinct is to fill the gap. “I said I’d take it on, thinking I would be there for three years, maximum,” he recalls.

It was easy to join, but not so easy to leave. Every Thursday since October 2, 1993, Turner has driven to the Halifax West Ecumenical Food Bank at 7 a.m. to prepare for the first of the day’s two shifts of volunteers.

His title is coordinator, but he works side by side with the 34 people who prepare and distribute 1,000 bags of groceries to up to 110 families each week, leaving only when the last bag is filled. Like the skilled former teacher he is, Turner smoothly blends authority and a love of dealing with people.

“There’s a nice atmosphere here,” says volunteer Channie Vincent. “Charlie jokes with the kids, and holds babies sometimes when their mothers’ orders are being filled.” Yet, when necessary, Turner becomes the heavy. Those who try to sneak more than their share are given one chance, then are cut off for a year. That’s not a food bank staple: it’s Turner’s rule. His operation is so rigorously organized, it has been called a “boot camp,” but volunteers are tenaciously loyal. Most are retired, some in their 80s.

Turner himself turned 70 last May, but his energy hasn’t ebbed. On Mondays he restocks the shelves, on Fridays he does paperwork for Feed Nova Scotia, the umbrella organization that coordinates and supplies 154 food banks in the province. He arranges local fundraisers that raised $28,000 this past year, and he helps with food drives. He does pickups at the 17 participating churches and has been known to swing by the food bank to wash the floor.

Volunteers praise Turner’s organizational skills, his dedication and his compassion. “The thing you notice about him is his interest in everyone he meets,” says Carolyn Earle.

One rainy day, a young man came in with no ID and no health card. Anyone lacking credentials would normally be turned away. Turner glanced down, saw water squelching out of the man’s sneakers, and couldn’t refuse him. “He kept coming for awhile, then stopped,” says Turner “Then one Christmas an 18-wheeler pulled up in the yard. It was the same fellow—with cases of oranges for our holiday baskets.”

Each month the bank helps feed an estimated 1,090 people: the working poor, students, new immigrants, part-time workers, the unemployed, the infirm and the elderly. “It’s their mission to the community,” says Graham Steele, a Halifax MLA and a volunteer. “There are pockets of real urban poverty here, people struggling to put food on the table each day. Life is hard enough without facing it on an empty belly.”

Of his older volunteers, Turner says, “It will be a generation that’s hard to replace. People retiring now don’t want to do this sort of thing. Some find it too upsetting.” Even those suited to the work can have difficult days.

Turner sustains himself by positive thinking, taking action and reading scripture. “Look up Matthew 25, verse 35. Jesus says: ‘For I was hungry, and you gave me meat; I was thirsty, and you gave me drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in.’

“That’s what I tell the volunteers. When you look at a client, see God’s face in them.”

Esther Matsubuchi

Paddling for Life
By Alisa Smith

Across the gunnels of the dragon boat, she put down the wooden paddle that had her name burned into it: Esther Matsubuchi. It was etched by the husband of another breast-cancer sufferer; but unlike Matsubuchi, his wife hadn’t pulled through. However, the hundreds of women in brightly painted dragon boats bobbing on the gleaming waters of False Creek in Vancouver on June 26, 2005, had made it. Each held the stem of a carnation to be tossed in unison into the sea, making the waters pink with hope and remembrance.

At that moment Matsubuchi wasn’t a 68-year-old housewife with four loving children and four rambunctious grandchildren. She was a pioneer—one of 24 women who, ten years ago, agreed to be guinea pigs in a risky experiment: Could women who’d had breast cancer do upper body exercise?

The conventional wisdom was no. Doctors counselled these women not to garden, play the piano, knit or vacuum. The consequences were dire, they said. One in four breast-cancer survivors would develop lymphedema, which causes a debilitating and permanent swelling of the arms. No one really knew why.

But because Matsubuchi conquered her early fear of lymphedema, she and her crew were now competing with 62 teams from around the world at the tenth-anniversary Abreast in a Boat race. There are now more than 150 breast-cancer teams, each with 20 women who paddle like crazy in unison for the three minutes it takes to skim 500 metres across the water.

“The number of breast-cancer crews grows by the day,” says Mike Haslam, executive president of the International Dragon Boat Federation. And their increasing presence at international regattas gets people talking about the disease, which in many countries has previously been considered too embarrassing to mention. In their bright-pink T-shirts—and often wacky accessories, from pink feather boas to wigs—they grab attention wherever they go.

“Esther is one of the very few who have paddled every year,” says Dr. Don McKenzie, the University of British Columbia sports-medicine expert who first approached local breast-cancer support groups with his revolutionary idea. She has paddled all over the West Coast, as well as in Poland and New Zealand.

Back in 1996 there was very little research on lymphedema, but the attention received by the Abreast in a Boat movement has changed that. There are now at least four major lymphedema research centres around North America specializing in the relationship of breast cancer and exercise. And thanks to the numerous papers McKenzie has published on the benefits of upper-body exercise for breast-cancer survivors, physicians are changing the advice they give their patients.

“To see a woman of Esther’s age running around with such pep is incredible,” says Beth Greer, a 45-year-old Vancouver schoolteacher and cancer survivor. “For mental recovery from cancer, the important thing is to connect with such women. No amount of doctor’s words can do as much.”

In her North Vancouver home, fronted by a Japanese garden, Matsubuchi gives the impression of glowing good health in her pink Abreast in a Boat vest. Her face is hardly lined and she looks much younger than her 68 years. “I feel 25,” she says.

Matsubuchi has always borne hardship calmly. As a child during World War II, she was part of the mass evacuation of Japanese-Canadians from the British Columbia coast because of hysteria about “enemy aliens.” Her family spent the next few years in an internment camp in Slocan, in B.C.’s Interior. “It was just part of life,” she shrugs, and makes no complaint.

Just as it is hard to get Matsubuchi to expand on her accomplishments, she won’t expand on her difficulties. It is daughter Wendy who breaks into tears when recalling the months of chemotherapy and radiation treatments her mother endured in 1989 and 1990. However, Matsubuchi pulled through, and after about three years, the pain from her lumpectomy went away.

In the meantime she found out she had diabetes, for which exercise is strongly recommended. She tried skating, but because she was careful not to do exercises involving her arms, she still felt weak. She had been cancer-free for six years when, in 1996, she took McKenzie up on his challenge. He showed the 24 prospective women a video of dragon boating so they would understand how it worked. They were awed by how fast the boaters’ paddles moved. Then McKenzie rewound the video and played it again—it had been in slow motion.

For Matsubuchi, tired of not being able to tinker on the piano, garden or knit—her favourite activities—dragon boating turned out to be the best thing she could have done. “It was after dragon boating that I felt recovered,” she says. She keeps at it year after year because she wants to pass this feeling on to all breast-cancer survivors.

“She’s been one of those kind of people all her life,” says Wendy. “What I call a quiet hero.”

Brian Keating

Caring for Our Wild Places
By Chris Tenove

Brian Keating shielded his eyes from the monsoon rains. In the rainforest canopy overhead, monkeys leaped from branch to branch. But he could see nothing in the swollen, chocolate-brown waters of the Black Volta River. Where were the wriggling ears, the gaping nostrils and the cartoonish, baseball-size eyes?

For five years the Calgary Zoo had funded the Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary in Ghana, West Africa. Now, in July of 2001, Keating had come to check up on the project. He wasn’t going to leave until he saw the hippos.

The local Lobi people both venerated and feared the animals. So did Keating. On a bright afternoon in Zimbabwe five years earlier, he and his wife, Dee, had been happily canoeing down the beautiful Zambezi River. Then: CRUNCH! The canoe lurched violently. Keating looked down, right into the bristled snout of an irate hippo. With one chomp it tore a hole out of the fibreglass hull. It opened its enormous jaw for another bite…and flipped the canoe over.

The hippo disappeared. But now they had another problem: crocodiles. Brian and Dee held on to their sinking canoe and kicked furiously for the distant riverbank. Later, after their bodies stopped shaking from adrenaline, they made a promise to each other: They wouldn’t be deterred by one grouchy hippo.

So here was Keating five years later, searching for hippos again.

His Lobi guides swung the boat around a bend—and there he saw them. Two adults and a juvenile hippo floated in the river, half-submerged, plumes of mist rising from their nostrils. Keating and his party reverse paddled, careful to keep their distance.

As a kid, Keating was infatuated with birds and skeletons. He loved to collect roadkill and then boil the carcasses until the flesh lifted clean off the bones. He would then reassemble the skeleton and try to figure out how the living creature worked.

To no one’s surprise, Keating grew up to work at a zoo. But he was troubled by the role zoos had played historically—crude menageries where exotic animals were crammed into cages to be gawked at. That was changing by the time he joined the Calgary Zoo in 1981. “Zoos have stolen from the wild for centuries,” Keating says. “Now we’re trying to give back.”

As the zoo’s head of education for 15 years, Keating didn’t just want people to learn more about nature, he wanted them to fall in love with it. He began taking tour groups on “ZooFaris” to exotic wildlife destinations.

He introduced a sleepover program for kids so they could tuck themselves into sleeping bags and listen to the lions roar, the hippos bellow and the elephants play.

“In the morning the kids wake up absolutely buzzed,” Keating says. “It’s an experience they never forget.”

The trim 50-year-old travels the globe in search of inspiring animal encounters. These exploits then become raw material for TV documentaries, children’s books and public lectures. And some of his video footage ends up in the Calgary Zoo’s studio, where it is edited by Bruce MacAlister, head of media development.

“Here, take a look at this,” MacAlister says. On his computer, a pod of beluga whales glides through the inky-blue depths of the Arctic, their bodies so brilliantly white that they are ringed in coronas of shimmering silver. MacAlister hits a key and now two whooping cranes dance in a small clearing in some reeds. They trumpet their desire for each other and the calls echo across the marshlands.

“I spend a lot of my time looking through Brian’s eyes and hearing through his ears,” says MacAlister. “We need someone like Brian, someone who tells us what is going on out there in the wild places of the world.”

In 1994 Keating created the Calgary Zoo’s conservation outreach department, which funds conservation projects around the world, such as the Wechiau Hippo Sanctuary in Ghana.

“Those hippos wouldn’t exist now if it wasn’t for Brian,” says Kathleen Hewitt, who nominated Keating as a hero of the year. For years Hewitt had been mesmerized by Keating’s adventures. Then in 2003, at age 61, she was hired as a public relations officer at the zoo.

Because Keating can see the grandeur written in nature, it pains him to watch as humankind rubs so much of it out of existence. Take the island of Borneo. Once known as a green jewel for its incomparable wildlife, the island has been ruthlessly logged. When Keating travelled there in 2000, he crossed a vast, desolate landscape where nothing moved except the heavy trucks carrying the last available timber. “It was horrendous,” he says. “What a sin it is to cut down forest like that. A place so rich and alive.”

But as soon as these angry words are out, Keating launches into a story about a pocket of rainforest that still remains intact. In the predawn dark, he and Dee crawled up to a tree platform. The nighttime calls of the frogs and crickets dissipated. Then, in the silvery dawn light, the birds began to sing, weaving layer upon layer of melody until the whole forest was ringing with life.

As the symphony began to quiet, Keating saw a hairy red arm grab a nearby branch. An orangutan had been hanging beneath them the whole time. For the next hour he and Dee watched it swing between trees and chew plump fruit.

“It was just the most magical morning,” Keating recalls. “We sat there, glowing.”

Roméo Dallaire

Soldiering On for Peace
By Liz Crompton

The rain pelts down outside Roméo Dallaire’s fourth floor Senate office on Parliament Hill. Inside, the retired lieutenant-general is putting in yet another jam-packed day.

Over the past year, Dallaire has worked on a fellowship at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, advised the federal government on matters relating to post-traumatic stress disorder and spoken at countless events, from university commencements to mental health conferences.

Soon after his appointment as senator in March, he sponsored his first bill (the new Veterans Charter). He’s overseen the foundation he created for disadvantaged children in Canada and in Rwanda, and researched and advocated a brand-new approach to resolving conflict in this post-Cold War era. And, as a husband and a father of three, carved out some family time, too.

Dallaire is driven to keep busy. “I think there’s something wrong when you look at a calendar and you have all those boxes and don’t see something in them,” he says.

He shifts constantly as he speaks, his hands frequently punctuating his statements, his grey-blue eyes intense. He’s a trim 59, and his hair and moustache are greying.

Most know Dallaire as the Canadian commander of the United Nations mission sent in late 1993 to Rwanda, a former Belgian colony in east-central Africa populated by the Hutu and Tutsi tribes. His mandate was to help implement a peace accord signed between the Hutu-dominated government and a rebel group of Tutsis that opposed it. The accord was a sham, with the government mobilizing to eradicate the rebels—not just political opponents, but anyone who belonged to the minority Tutsi tribe.

Over 100 days in the spring of 1994, government forces and Hutu militiamen slaughtered 800,000 people: Tutsis and moderate Hutus. While there was evidence this atrocity was being planned—Dallaire had sent his bosses many warnings and outlined how he could stop it—the UN was unwilling to intervene. It ordered its commander not to get involved.

Caught between orders and his conscience, the career soldier eventually defied orders to leave the country. Instead, he chose to protect tens of thousands of civilians at the UN compound in the capital, Kigali, with scant resources. The horrors he witnessed and the guilt he felt over the mission’s failure resulted in an ongoing struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2000 Dallaire received a medical discharge from the Canadian Armed Forces. Shake Hands With the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda, his harrowing account of his experiences, was published three years later.

Many applaud what Dallaire did accomplish under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The fact that he publicly takes responsibility for the mission’s failure and openly speaks about the stress that led him to attempt suicide has led many people to call him a hero.

“In this Year of the Veteran, Lieutenant-General Dallaire represents all that Canada expects of her warriors: honesty, bravery and determination,” says Lt.-Col. Michael McFadden (ret’d), a helicopter pilot who was stationed at Valcartier, Que., at the same time as Dallaire.

“The people in his regiment were fiercely loyal to him, and he was fiercely loyal to them,” he recalls. “I know him as a highly professional soldier—the stuff legends are made of.”

Dallaire bridles at the hero handle. “I commanded a mission that totally failed and I was neck-deep in bodies,” he says. “You can’t simply say that

you did the best you could; that just doesn’t fit the mantra of command.”

In refusing to evade his past, Dallaire hopes to make the world a better place. Human rights figure prominently in his current projects. For his Harvard fellowship, he’s researching the use of children as instruments of war. He believes that human rights need to be as fundamental to a nation’s policies as its economy, health care and defence, and that international development is the solution to many of today’s conflicts.

“To me, the aim of the exercise is to go to the source of the rage and attenuate it there.”

While he could be excused for condemning the UN, Dallaire believes it’s more relevant than ever. “The nut to crack is how the nations prove that they want that body to be effective,” Dallaire says. He espouses a new vision for resolving conflict today, an approach that calls on a broader base of knowledge and aims not to beat one side into submission but to allow the various sides of a dispute to come to a solution for living in peace.

“As long as people will listen, I’ll talk. And hopefully they’ll be kind enough to tell me when I’m simply full of bullshit. Then I’ll shut up.”