Chicken Soup for the Canadian Soul (40 page)

As we approached, there was not another vehicle in sight. I called the provincial dispatcher asking for any information on conditions. To our surprise, she told us the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) had a car on top waiting for us. Sure enough, as we made our way slowly up the steep slope of the Skyway, there was an OPP cruiser waiting for us at the top. Buffeted now by a severe crosswind as we followed our escort, I hung onto the wheel with white knuckles as we slowly crawled across the top and then back down the other side. Our OPP escort left us at the first exit, and we continued on our way to Hamilton.

After four-and-a-half hours on the road, we finally pulled into Hamilton’s McMaster Centre, and I gratefully shut the ambulance down. While the special incubator team went into the hospital, Joe and I tried to relax and stretch our legs. It had been a stressful four hours and the night was only half over. Forty-five minutes later the team returned, and we loaded the incubator into the ambulance. It now contained a small baby wrapped in tiny blankets, with a little tube in its nose and an IV in its arm. Standing back in the hospital’s foyer, clinging to each other, were the frightened, but hopeful, parents. The life of their precious baby was now in our hands. Once everyone was safely on board, we pulled out and headed back into the night.

With Joe now driving, I would normally sit in back. But with the medical team there, I remained up front. Driving conditions had worsened: The snow was very deep, and the highway hadn’t been plowed yet. We were now travelling even slower than earlier, and the west wind driving at our back made it difficult to steer.

Again, we were the only vehicle on the Burlington Skyway. Now, however, the violent wind was causing the ambulance to fishtail back and forth. Between the fishtailing and the deep snow, Joe had to really hang on. I think if we hadn’t had the extra weight in back, we might have blown right off the bridge. But Joe was a very skillful driver—determined and very steady—and he brought us through.

When we had arrived in Hamilton earlier, we had had just over half a tank of fuel left—more than enough to get back to Toronto. As we approached Oakville there should have been a quarter of a tank left, but suddenly, in what seemed like just a minute, the fuel gauge fell to just over an eighth of a tank. As we drove past Oakville and into Mississauga, I watched the needle sink even further. We were burning more fuel than usual because of our slow speed and the bad conditions.

As we approached Toronto, Joe and I were both watching the fuel level and not saying a word. We couldn’t get off the highway now. We would likely use up as much fuel trying to find a gas station as we would to just go for the final destination—Sick Children’s Emergency. It was not a calculated gamble: we had to go for the hospital. We set our sights on pulling the ambulance into Emergency without running out of gas a block before we got there.

By now the plows had cleared the Gardner Expressway to some extent, and once there it was pretty clear sailing. As we went down the ramp at York Street, however, I saw the needle going into empty as we rounded the curve. We were watching for the fuel warning light to come on any second. Now, on the home stretch, we put on our full emergency lights, and with everything flashing, we headed straight up University Avenue. As we passed Dundas and made that right-hand turn onto Gerrard Street, I swear I heard the engine make a little cough. I’ll never forget that tiny sound as we crawled past Toronto General, took another right-hand turn into Sick Kids, kicked it up the ramp and stopped right in front of the doors.

We shut off our lights, our engine—everything. Joe and I both took a deep breath, looked at each other and with a huge grin gave each other a high five! We called the dispatcher to say we were “10-7,” meaning we were out of the ambulance and had successfully completed our mission. It was now nearly five A.M. A round-trip that should have taken just over two hours had taken over nine!

A team was waiting for us at the Emergency doors, and before we even had the ambulance shut down, they had whisked the incubator with the baby through to the elevators and up to the fourth-floor cardiac ward. We later learned the surgery was a success, and one set of parents that day had cause to celebrate life. We were totally wiped, but also elated, knowing that because of our efforts, a baby had lived. When I got home later that morning, I dropped into bed exhausted—but fell asleep feeling good about myself, and my life.

Gary Robert Walsh
Toronto, Ontario

©1997 John Cadiz. From
Lost in the Wilds of Canada
by John Cadiz. Used by permission,
McClelland & Stewart Ltd. The Canadian publishers.

A Piece of It All

I have travelled a great deal in my life. I’ve been all over the world, to every city in Canada and pretty much every juke joint in the United States. I’m on the road 250 days a year. It’s my job. It’s what I do.

Every few days, I’m off again to another town, another show. Not quite as glamorous as I had imagined it would be oh-so-many years ago. I had thought there’d be limousines and champagne and tall handsome men carrying my bags. I really did! But no, I carry my own bags, and I have learned to pack light. Yes, I thought that I, Jann Arden, a seasoned, ripened traveller, had seen it all.

I was shamefully wrong.

In 1998, I was contacted by a humanitarian organization called World Vision. They invited me to go on a media trip to Africa, to be spokesperson in the infomercials they air to raise awareness and money for child sponsorship. I could take a friend. Was I interested?

First I said yes, and then after a bit of thought, no, then yes and then another no. I was so afraid of going. I’d seen those infomercials and felt my heart break and my hope fade, wondering what I could possibly do—me—just one person, to change anything. I was horrified at the thought of seeing that hunger and sickness and poverty with my own eyes. I didn’t want to go. Why travel anywhere when I would have been so happy to just stay home during my wee bit of time off?

In my heart I knew I’d be missing the opportunity of a lifetime. So I spoke with my parents and friends, discussing the various horrible and wondrous possibilities. When I finally chose my country—Tanzania, and my travel partner, I was still frightened.

I had to get several immunizations and take malaria pills two weeks before I left. I’d heard nightmare stories about those malaria pills. That you could die from just taking them the first time. I’ll never forget popping that first pill and waiting to see the Lord.

I didn’t.

Two weeks later I was flying over Africa with my mouth hanging open. Twenty-seven hours on a plane, and voilà I was there—in the middle of nowhere. The most beautiful nowhere I’d ever seen. I fell in love with Africa looking out that tiny, nose-smudged window. I woke my friend Kerry and said, “Look, oh my God. . . . Kerry look at Africa!”

“I know,” she said.

My mission was to tell the story of the Masai in the northern plains of Tanzania. Drought had nearly wiped them out entirely over the past several years. Killed off most of their precious livestock, starved their fields, dried their treasured water holes and left them dying. I didn’t know what to expect. I surely didn’t expect these poor and starving people to change my life forever. I was there to help them, not the other way around.

The first day we awoke to a glorious breakfast of eggs and tomatoes and chicken and French fries. I had to smile. Every effort was made to make us feel at home. I myself think french fries are an excellent source of . . . breakfast. We were all starved and ate well. It was a beautiful morning. I could just make out the tip of Mount Kilamanjero—“Killy” to the locals.

We piled into the Land Rover and headed off into my wildest dreams and my deepest fears. Both would pale in comparison to what came next.

We left the main road after several hours and began our bumpy journey toward the Masai. (You need a good bra in Africa). The dust and dryness, the cracked earth and the burning sun made us all thirsty just looking at it. We drank bottle after bottle of water. I’ve never thought the same about drinking water since. As we rounded the last bit of brush, there standing proudly in the middle of their village were fifty or so members of the Masai tribe. I felt like I was in a
National Geographic
movie. The men were wrapped in bright red cloths and had long iron spears. The woman had children on every hip and jewelry weighing heavy everywhere else. I could not believe my eyes. Time folded over me, and I became lost in it. It seemed I had travelled back to the beginning of time.

The huts, or “bowmas,” were made of cow dung and straw and sticks. There were newborn goats dragging their umbilical cords beneath their little bellies, naked children covered in flies, dogs with large beetle-type things attached to their armpits and feeding off of their very lives. I couldn’t move. I did not want to get out of the Land Rover. I wanted to put the movie on pause and call my mother.

They stood looking at us like we had fallen off the moon. I didn’t blame them. We looked uncomfortable with our own selves. We were. My friend Kerry is a big girl, and they were so taken with her. They had seen few white women, never mind big ones, and they were fascinated. The village chief asked the translator what she ate, and Kerry told him she ate everything. We all laughed. The chief laughed, the men laughed, the women and children laughed. It was the laugh that melted the ice. We started talking as fast as the translator could go. The camera crew was shooting film the whole time, but pictures do it no justice. They cannot show with a true heart these precious, beautiful people.

How could these starving poor people without a spoon or a bowl or a chair to sit on, laugh like that? These people whose skin hung from them like a sheet.

They had nothing, but somehow they seemed to me to have everything. It showed in their eyes. The peacefulness. The calm. The serenity. This was not what I thought I would find. Everything I knew I wanted, but didn’t know how to get, they had. They had more joy in their hearts than I had ever known in my life. They knew who they were. Why they were. Where they were.

They didn’t think of themselves as poor. They were hungry because nature had been cruel these few years, and they were thirsty and their children were dying. Everyone at some point in their life needs help. Everyone.

We began our filming, concentrating our profiles on the lives of two little girls. We would tell their stories as accurately as possible: Who they were and why they needed our help. How our helping them would benefit the entire village. How through child sponsorship we would somehow be saving ourselves. But I didn’t know that yet.

Eight-year-old Nariamu had never been to school or seen a doctor or bathed in clean water. She walked up to fifteen kilometres everyday to fetch wood, and did it with one horribly disfigured clubfoot.

We began with her. As you can imagine, she was very shy, not really understanding what we were trying to do. It was hard for me. I tried to be as comforting as possible, but ironically, it was she who comforted me, making me feel welcome and safe and fine. She always wanted to hold my hand. I felt so special and honoured. I don’t know how else to explain it. It’s hard to find the words.

We followed Nariamu around for four days—while she gathered wood and fetched water. I’ve never seen a more disgusting pool of disease and sickness anywhere than the water hole where she dipped her old plastic detergent bottle. The water she collected for the family to cook with and to drink was green and thick with animal feces floating in it. I’d been drinking clear, clean, bottled water for days, and she was about to drink this slop. She was grateful to have any water at all. I was ashamed.

I can’t explain how sick I felt seeing her carry that water home on her head. I was so moved at her pride and how brave and accepting of her life she was. She knew nothing else. No heroine in a book or movie ever compared with her dignity and grace. After that visit to the water hole, I never again heard the camera crew complain about carrying their gear. In fact, I never heard anyone complain again about anything.