Canadians Abroad
There is no shortage of selflessness around here!
My first short-term mission experience was to La Ceiba, Honduras, in February 1999, following its destruction by Hurricane Mitch months earlier. Upon my return home from La Ceiba, my brother and business partner, David, was killed in an ultralight accident— a catalyst to my future. Shortly thereafter, in October 1999, I volunteered with another team travelling to Petrolina, Brazil, to work on building a church/soup kitchen.
On a side note, my professional career— from which my skills to carry out volunteer initiatives stem—has been spent primarily in the area of institutional construction in Ontario. For almost 30 years, our family business has renovated government buildings—schools, hospitals, military installations, oces and so on. I studied accounting to manage the company and achieved various accreditations for project management, but most of the knowledge I gained was derived through experience. Our family business continues on to this day, however, I stepped away from my role in 2007.
But let’s not get o track. In March of 2002, I took another trip to Taboão da Serra, with a dierent group of volunteers to build a second-level church and social room.
I began to feel the pull again not that long
after getting home. I joined up with two other men the following year and returned to Brazil on reconnaissance for future projects. We scoped the significant needs of impoverished communities throughout a large part of the country and planned to help more. My specific focus was on projects that would help poor communities in a variety of ways, and with particular attention to the needs of children who often suered collaterally—buildings which would facilitate day care, schooling, meals, health care, recreation, as well as centres of faith. It is important to note, as I learned in Honduras, that people of most faiths in dire circumstances generally build or rebuild the places that bring them together before rebuilding their own homes and lives.
VOLUNTEER GROUPS
Simultaneously, a Brazilian group was formed in 2004 to provide similar construction-related social assistance around the country. Their first project was in the city of Foz do Iguaçu. Our Canadian group in April 2005, together with the Brazilian group, dug and built footings for a church/ community centre in Santo Andre that had collapsed during floods a year earlier. Then in April 2006, a joint team continued with the building ’s third-floor beams.
Always with an eye to the future, I travelled to projects in other cities that required assistance and decided on one in Suzano, Brazil. In total, there were six Canadians and six Brazilians who worked side by side on that project in October 2006.
During the next mission to Ibirité in July 2007, we set out to complete a church/ school, which had stalled development for more than 12 years. During a world conference held in São Paulo in November of that year, the group was recognized and commended for their work and inaugurated as VEM (Voluntários em Missõe—volunteers in Missions), being a joint Canadianbrazilian working group.
I led another Canadian group to continue
the work in Suzano that month as well. During that visit, I discovered the open field near the church/health centre site, where children played, was quickly becoming the area’s dump. I felt it should change.
Following discussions between VEM, Kimberley-clark (the largest regional employer), the mayor and church leaders, an agreement was made to designate that five-acre field as parkland and build a playground there the following July. The park has since evolved into a huge community sports complex funded mostly by K-C.
My team of four Canadian teens, joined by four Brazilian teens, travelled across eight dierent cities in the span of five weeks. In each city, our eight teens joined other youth groups and became involved in a variety of social programs. One program built the playground, making local headline news.
Several of those programs involved distributing clothes, food, school supplies and teddy bears to locals.
In June 2008, when a group of women in Wellington, Ont., learned of our team’s upcoming mission plans in an article in
The Picton Gazette, I was contacted about the group’s intention to donate 100 of their hand-knit gifts. For nearly 15 years, the club has created thousands of these teddy bears, quilts, booties and baby clothes to send with missionaries around the globe. Each one is as unique as its maker with a personal trademark. Their only request is a photo of the bear’s new home, which is kept in one of numerous albums, when privacy laws permit.
November 2018 was my latest mission to Brazil, and, first due to health and then COVID concerns, my last. In the past 19, I’ve gone on 20 missions and distributed over 1,100 teddy bears, from Boa Vista at the top of the Amazon to Itajaí in the south, with many poor villages and monstrous cities between. I have participated in roughly 60 projects with a wide range of activities extended to senior homes, schools and orphanages. I have received materials generously from a few Canadian businesses, including toothpaste and brushes from my dentist’s suppliers, team hats from Tilley Endurables and tools from Picton Home Hardware.
SERVING THE PEOPLE
What draws me back time after time are the people who selflessly devote their lives to helping others less fortunate than themselves. My purpose is merely to help them. Though there are so many, one who rises above is Dõna Francesca.
I was first introduced to her in 2005 and quickly came to appreciate her as one whom others aspire to emulate. Due to misfortune, she created her home using odd scraps of plastic, drapery, plywood and sheet metal—a common practice in favelas (low-income settlements). She raised three children in that favela, now a community of about 2,000. During her almost 40 years there, she has become the matriarch, teaching, caring for, nursing, disciplining and mending the lives of hundreds of children. It was her classic response several years later that made her my hero. When asked, at her advanced age, why she didn’t move to a more comfortable place she replied, “But then who would care for all my children?”
We were exchanging texts two weeks ago when it was brought to my attention that she had fallen ill. I don’t believe it was COVID but she kept herself safe in the comfort of her chácara and has since recovered.
It has become my joy to introduce people in Canada, such as the Wellington ladies, to people like Dõna Francesca in Brazil, as a means of facilitating a purpose in one another’s life, worlds apart.