Mathew Vizbulis

Family Saviour
By Diane Peters

At road level Niagara Glen, eight kilometres north of Niagara Falls, is a tourist attraction. There’s a gift shop and a “park” with over 500 totem poles. But even locals in hiking boots, some toting fishing rods, descend the long metal staircase into the gorge, where water rushes by at 40 kilometres an hour.

Mathew Vizbulis, a 28-year-old artist and jack of all trades from nearby St. Catharines, reached the glen around 3 p.m. one Saturday last July. He was rock climbing when he heard a scream from below. He ignored it at first—the glen was a busy, loud place. But as it grew in panicked intensity, he peered over a boulder. Below, a woman was yelling in a foreign language, and in the water were three people, face down.

Vizbulis scrambled down, thinking he’d jump in. But he stopped at the water’s edge and looked at the swirling eddy. He’d heard about how rescuers often became victims. But seeing that two of the drowning people were small, he took off his shirt and shoes and jumped into the Niagara River.

The current instantly grabbed him. Using the muscles he’d developed as a rock climber and his knowledge of water from kayaking, he kicked hard and used powerful strokes. Six metres out, Vizbulis came to the adult. Slightly bigger than Vizbulis, his arm was draped over a log. Vizbulis pushed the log aside, hooked his arm under the man and started to drag him to shore. He assumed the man was dead, but still yelled, “Wake up! Wake up!”

The man opened his eyes. His face was purple, and his lungs too full to allow him to speak. Just as Vizbulis reached shore, he hit a strong back current, but managed to grab a boulder. As he tried to push the groggy man up the slippery rocks, Geoff Szymanski, a naturopathic doctor with first-aid training, and his wife, Jackie, stopped to help. From St. Catharines, too, they were hiking and had seen a boy fall into the river. “You’re doing a great job,” Geoff told Vizbulis.

Those words, plus the realization he’d saved the heaviest person, gave Vizbulis a surge of confidence. The current that had seemed so difficult when he first jumped in felt like nothing now. He grabbed the next victim, a teenage boy, by the arm and brought him to shore. The Szymanskis yanked the unconscious youth out, and Vizbulis swam off again. He soon reached the final victim, a boy, and got him to safety. “Is there anybody else?” Vizbulis yelled at people on shore. “No!” he was told. With help, he got out of the water himself. It was less than 15 minutes since he’d jumped in.

As Vizbulis slumped to the rocks, the woman who’d raised the alarm thanked him. She told him in halting English he’d rescued her husband and sons; the boy had slipped, and his dad and big brother fell in trying to catch him. None could swim. The father, now pacing, thanked Vizbulis, too, while the 17-year-old boy threw up water. Szymanski tended to the 11-year-old, who wasn’t fully conscious. His mother wrapped him in a sari, and Szymanski held him, talked to him and gave him water. Vizbulis was stunned he’d saved almost an entire family, and sat still, crying off and on.

Twenty minutes after the rescue, two police officers and a paramedic arrived and arranged for a jet boat to take the boy to hospital (He went home later that day). Vizbulis and the family were able to walk up to street level. The victims were reunited with their extended family, who had been picnicking and had no idea what had happened.

Not long after, the Lifesaving Society nominated Vizbulis for a Rescue Award of Merit. He was also nominated for a Carnegie Medal. Says Const. John Gayder, the first officer on the scene, “If Mathew hadn’t done what he did, we’d have been dealing with a triple drowning.”

Mathew Vizbulis has returned to his paintings and his work as a part-time DJ and construction worker. Sometimes he thinks about that moment on the rocks, when he asked himself a couple of questions before he decided to risk his life: Have I had a good life? Am I happy? These kids haven’t even started their lives.

PHOTO: © MATTHEW PLEXMAN

Hetty van Gurp

Waging Peace
Alison Ramsey

With the stately posture befitting a schoolteacher, Hetty van Gurp stands at the head of a U-shaped table crowded with principals and vice-principals from Montreal’s Lester B. Pearson School Board.

“Both my boys were enrolled in public school,” she tells them, “and one day my elder son, Ben, came home and told us a bully was bothering him. Shortly after that I got a call at lunch saying that Ben had fallen. Thirty minutes later, they suggested I go to the hospital: They had called an ambulance. He died on the operating table.”

Gasps are audible: They can too clearly imagine the horror of this happening at their school. When Ben was pushed by the bully that day in 1991, his back rammed into the school stage. His rare medical condition of neurofibromatosis, which weakens blood vessels, may have contributed to his spinal artery being severed.

When van Gurp, who has since retired as a school principal, returned to teaching after Ben’s death, she daily promoted peaceful relationships in her class. “My dream,” says van Gurp, founder of Peaceful Schools International (PSI), “is that peace education becomes part of the curriculum across this country.”

She’s made a good start: There are 212 PSI schools in North America, Northern Ireland and Serbia, where hundreds of thousands of students share her goal of promoting peace and conflict resolution; and where bullying is banished and students learn to interact without violence. Each school determines its own process, and, on average, two new schools a week earn the right to fly a PSI flag. Wads of money aren’t required; a collective commitment is.

At Annapolis East Elementary in Nova Scotia, principal Heather Harris, staff and parents drafted a violence response procedure wherein kids are reprimanded for punches, lies and encouraging others to fight. Staff dealt with 128 reports their first week as a peaceful school. By week 14, reports had dwindled to under 20.

“You either commit the time in prevention, or in response,” says Harris.

At Lakeview Elementary in Meadow Lake, Sask., staff give one-on-one mentoring to at-risk kids. The time they spend—sharing lunch, doing crafts—has improved the kids’ self-esteem, and they get into trouble less often.

“The assumption is that co-operation is taught by the family, but that’s not always happening. And someone has to do it,” van Gurp says.

Van Gurp uses her own funds to travel to schools to initiate the concept and develop materials. She also writes a monthly newsletter, has written three manuals, runs a website and galvanized the National Film Board to create two DVDs for a PSI tool kit.

She works from home, and it’s hard to imagine a setting more peaceful than her 200-year-old Acadian cottage cupped between low mountains. Dressed in jeans and faded red gardening clogs, van Gurp emanates a peaceful aura. Nothing upsets her, because “I don’t think about the tragic genesis of my work, but its positive legacy.”

That legacy has extended to battle-weary neighbourhoods overseas. After a Loyalist feud in a Belfast neighbourhood, traumatized schoolchildren began “playing out” what they’d seen. “They were hitting each other, some brandished knives, and a teacher was threatened with a gun,” says the principal. The school joined PSI, and within two years, outbreaks were rare.

The basic outline for a PSI program is that staff collaborates with students, parents and the community to identify needs and goals, then writes an action plan. Teachers learn anger-management and conflict-resolution strategies, which they model in dealing with students. Selected students become peer mediators. Often, the student body breaks into small groups with adults to discuss issues, and learn to identify bullying, to problem solve and to monitor their own words and actions.

Mounting the stairs to van Gurp’s tidy office, one sees a discreetly painted quote: “It is good to have an end to journey towards, but it’s the journey that matters in the end.”

“Ben’s motto,” says van Gurp. “It’s a good role model for me.” She slips between two desks to reach her computer, tucked under a gabled roof. Work draws her in the night, when she can’t sleep. “It’s not a job,” she says. “It’s what I do. It’s the way I live my life.”

PHOTO: © NANCE ACKERMAN

Ashid Bahl

Kids Come First
By Alisa Smith

Twelve-year-old Erika Lemke lived with her leukemia in a dreary low-income housing complex in Calgary. She had a little swing set in her yard, but she was too tired to play. She could see it out her window—along with the neighbourhood children who were allowed to use it for lack of anything better. She wished there was a playground for them, she told Ashid Kumar Bahl, founder of the For the Love of Children Society of Alberta, while he was visiting her one day. He was overwhelmed by such generosity in a dying girl and knew he had to help her.

“She said, ‘Do you think it’s possible?’ And I said, ‘Everything is possible,’” Bahl recalls, sitting in his charity’s small office in downtown Calgary. So they began plotting a $100,000 playground.

As Erika’s ambitions added another slide here, another swing there—all disability-friendly—the cost grew to more than $300,000, and it became one of the biggest playgrounds in the city. Erika died before it was completed, but her memory lives on in Erika’s Dream Park, now the cheery heart of the housing complex in the Shaganappi neighbourhood.

Bahl’s charitable principles are simple: If he is the last resort, he helps. It drives him to raise over $1 million a year and motivate 30 core volunteers, a far cry from his $5,000 one-man start-up 26 years ago. While holding down a job as an airport customs officer and raising a family, Bahl has helped more than 100,000 kids. In his adopted home of Alberta, he usually assists with expensive medical treatments—or quality-of-life improvers such as wheelchair lifts and custom walkers—that aren’t covered by medicare. Internationally, the needs are basic: schools, wells, even just blankets and pencils.

Bahl’s a little busy. He organizes fundraisers such as his successful annual golf tournament, recruits individual donors and corporate sponsors, and collects local celebrity support from the mayor to the entire Flames hockey team. His growing reputation even drew Angelina Jolie to his cause; she bought artwork at his 2005 silent auction for a Ghana school.

His voice’s slight lilt marks his origins: His affluent Indian family lived in Kenya until political conditions soured. They fled to Canada 33 years ago, when Bahl was 20. His path to the broad-ranging charitable work began then, when he and a few other volunteers revived the moribund Calgary Immigrant Aid Society. With their help, Bahl settled about 20,000 refugees into new homes and began to meet the neighbours. “They would say, ‘Mr. Bahl, I know we’re not foreigners, but could you help our children as well?’” he recalls. For the Love of Children Society of Alberta was born.

As he met children with spina bifida, kidney disease and other difficulties, Bahl realized he wanted to offer them joy as well as necessities. Sixteen years ago, he dreamed up the annual Santa’s Express. Using his airport connections, he wrangled planes to fly 100 kids and parents past the Rocky Mountains to the “North Pole” (otherwise known as the Calgary Tower)—with a peek at Santa in his private helicopter. Real customs officers stamped souvenir passports, a kindly sniffer beagle was the “candy inspector” and, of course, Santa handed out presents.

Bahl continues to stay in touch with the city’s immigrant community, and he hears about people’s needs around the globe. He dug a well and founded a school in Kenya; he bought a school bus for children in Orissa, India; he founded a centre in Nepal for children fleeing Tibet; and he supports seven orphanages. After the 2005 Pakistan earthquake, he crossed into the volatile region with blankets, lamps and rice.

What drives a man to spend his holidays in war-torn regions and to spend 40 hours a week working for free? “ Canada gave me a home, so I need to give back.” It seems certain that the debt, if there ever was one, has been repaid, and that every Canadian could learn something about giving from this gentle man.

PHOTO: © BRODYLO/MORROW

Stephen Lewis

Passionate Activist
By Chris Tenove

On an overcast day last fall, Stephen Lewis stepped out of a taxi in front of a school in Vaughan, a community north of Toronto. The brick and glass school was so new that it glittered, but what caught Lewis’s eye was its name, spelled out in tall silver letters.

“I always thought you had to be dead to have a school named after you,” he joked later to an assembly hall full of students, “and I am delighted to be both alive and in your presence today.”

For the last half century, Lewis has stood before countless audiences and delivered passionate calls to action—as a campaigner for Tommy Douglas in Saskatchewan, as the leader of the NDP in the Ontario legislature and as Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations in the 1980s. In 2001 Lewis began his most important campaign of all. His friend Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, chose Lewis to be his special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa. And so, when he stood before the students of Stephen Lewis Secondary School, Lewis was eager to make new converts to his cause.

He reeled off statistics: Twenty million people in Africa have died from AIDS, some 12 million children have been made orphans by the disease, and more than 3 million Africans will contract HIV this year. But numbers alone can’t convey the tragedy.

“I have to tell you about a moment that will live with me forever,” Lewis told the students. “It was during a visit to a hospital in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital. In the pediatric ward there were five or six infants in every cot, all suffering from AIDS and malnutrition.

“Then I heard a scream that reverberated around the ward. I saw a woman weeping on the floor by a cot. A nurse had put a sheet over the infant. The woman’s child had died.

“Every ten minutes in that hospital another baby died, another woman wept. I thought, This is madness!”

Lewis has told this story before, but his voice catches as he describes the shrouded child and the mother’s wail.

Lewis’s daughter, Ilana Landsberg-Lewis, remembers a vacation the family took to Costa Rica in 2003 after her father returned from one of his research trips. “In the past when he returned from Africa, he would be upset but he would still be able to reconnect with us,” says Landsberg-Lewis, 41. “But this time there was an agony I hadn’t seen before. He was having nightmares. He couldn’t escape the images in his head of people dying.”

Lewis was haunted not just by the deaths he witnessed, but also by feelings of powerlessness. As the UN special envoy he could talk to govern- ments and organizations, but he could not get funds to the clinics, orphanages and community groups that urgently needed support.

During that vacation in Costa Rica, Lewis talked with his family and decided to start a foundation that could quickly assess and fund grassroots projects. Landsberg-Lewis, a lawyer, quit her job at the UN to become the foundation’s executive director. She set up office at her kitchen table and planned to raise $250,000 a year. She hadn’t anticipated how eager people who had heard her father speak were to donate. In the first 31⁄2 years the foundation raised over $12 million and used that money to fund over 140 projects in 14 different countries.

“If you’re going to defeat AIDS, you have to do it with urgency,” Lewis says. For example, in 2003 government officials of tiny Lesotho told Lewis they feared AIDS would decimate their country. Lewis quickly helped mobilize aid from groups such as the Ontario Hospital Association, Doctors Without Borders and the Clinton Foundation. Their work has saved thousands of lives.

Lewis stepped down as special envoy last year. And now, at 69, he plans to write a book and continue as social sciences scholar-in-residence at McMaster University. He will also be a senior fellow at Harvard’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Centre for Health and Human Rights. Most importantly, he will continue his campaign to defeat AIDS.

“AIDS violates every principle of justice and equality I believe in,” he says. “Every single person who has seen what I have seen would respond the same way.”

If only that were true.

PHOTO: © LOUISE GUBB