For the second year in a row, the Human Library took place on the University of Guelph campus, this time on Mar. 4 and 5. The area in front of the Williams Coffee stand was reserved for one-on-one conversations; human books, people who face misconceptions and assumptions about their views and lifestyles, and the readers who sign them out, had half-hour conversations. Stories were told, myths were debunked, and perspectives were challenged.

The aim of the Human Library is to provide a safe environment where people can sit down face-to-face with those who come from stereotyped, misunderstood, and occasionally marginalized groups. The goal, in many ways, is for readers to leave with a more complete understanding of their worldviews. The human books are people who have volunteered their time for the event; there was no charge for anyone interested in participating.

When the Ontarion editorial staff chose to participate in the Human Library, we each selected topics that particularly resonated with us from the list of available books. The task of writing about such a personal and subjective experience was a difficult one to take on. So, we each took a different approach. Each of the editors was free to respond to their conversation with their human book in whatever way they saw fit. There were no parameters on the writing, no rules for how to describe the experience. Some chose to retell the story relayed to them by their human book, while others focused more heavily on their reaction to the one-on-one interaction.

Regardless, all four of us left the experience with a story that in one way or another affected us on a personal level. We retold stories to each other. We debated about the ideas that our books brought up.

The experience was like no other.

 

 

Pro-Life

by Daniel Bitonti

She isn’t a religious fanatic, she doesn’t ram her views down people’s throats and she doesn’t subscribe to every socially conservative viewpoint out there.

Cara is pro-life.

Before meeting Cara, I don’t think I had ever had a conversation about abortion with a pro-lifer. I was drawn to her as a book because over the years the media had shaped my conception of what it meant to be pro-life.  Images from the southern United States of violent protests outside of abortion clinics and government buildings, with solemn citations from the Old Testament, was what came to mind when I thought about someone who was pro-life.

Cara is nothing like this at all. She is religious, but her views on abortion are not intrinsically linked to her faith. She’s pro-life because she’s convinced by scientific evidence that life begins at fertilization – to her, the unborn represent the most vulnerable members of our society.

Our conversation touched on many different things. I was curious about what it was like to hold openly pro-life views on a university campus, where I presume pro-life is a minority viewpoint. Cara told me that more people than I might think hold pro-life views, but more generally speaking, the curriculum at universities has now become pro-choice.  She says she sometimes feels like an outsider.

I couldn’t help but remember a story I had written for the Ontarion in November of 2008. The pro-life group on campus, Life Choice, had not been accredited by the CSA. One of the commissioners at the time publicly stated that it was the CSA’s position that the abortion debate was now closed.

Now, I didn’t expect to come out of my meeting with Cara as a pro-lifer. I have always been pro-choice. But Cara challenged my views on abortion, raising questions I hadn’t considered. “How is it really pro-choice?” she asked. What Cara meant was that perhaps the underlying issue is that women are sometimes left in a position where there are in fact few choices when deciding whether to have a baby: either have an abortion or bring a child into a life of financial despair, or into a life where the parents don’t want the child. “Is that the best we can do as a society?” she asked.

Did I agree? Not necessarily. And I left my meeting with Cara surer of my pro-choice views. But this was because for the first time she forced me to explore the reasons why I was pro-choice: before it had been almost instinctual for me to say that I was pro-choice, without even questioning why. I had only ever talked about abortion with people who held similar views. For the first time I was asking why.

No one can deny that I had a conversation with a person who came to her beliefs based on her own rational thinking. No one can deny two people we were sitting together on a university campus discussing abortion. She challenged me. I challenged her.

Debate on this issue is not closed. And it should never be.

 

 

Living a vegan life

by Nicole Elsasser

I am a proud omnivore. I “went vegetarian” once and gave it up one fine day for a chicken shawarma. Without intention, I had surrounded myself with a group of equally omnivoric friends, and therefore had a very foggy understanding of what it was that urged a person to be a vegan. My totally uneducated assumption was that most chose the lifestyle for its health benefits.

It was this incomplete understanding of the vegan lifestyle that caused me to find myself standing in the library, waiting to sit down for a block of time with a total stranger. The idea of exposing myself to a totally different dietary philosophy was an exciting one.

When the time came and I sat down with my “vegan book,” I was instantly put at ease. My book had been doing this all day, had brought some notes in case there was a lull in conversation, and could talk endlessly about his choice to be a vegan and the difficulties he faced in this decision.

As he explained, there were multiple prongs to his decision to be a vegan. Interestingly, the nutrition aspect that I had assumed would dominate this decision was dwarfed by his genuine love and compassion for the animal kingdom. Tears seemed to appear in his eyes as he discussed the prospect of killing and consuming any animal. He rocked back and forth in his chair while he discussed a dinner party he had been at where a comment from a fellow diner, “As long as it once looked over a gate, I’ll eat it,” actually put him off all the food on his plate, though totally vegan it was. My book was so dedicated to this philosophy that he didn’t even feel totally comfortable about owning a pet rabbit, one that he had rescued, even though he allowed it to roam free in his bedroom and never trapped it in a cage.

I had not expected to encounter such genuine and unfaltering compassion for the animals I eat regularly. I was taken aback. I had become so accustomed to the common environmental or nutritional explanations for the vegan lifestyle that I didn’t know how to rationalize this.

My mind, now guiltily, rushed to the pork chops I was planning on eating that night for dinner, to the leather boots on my feet, and the article I had written just days before advocating the wearing of fur. For a moment, I felt frivolous.

And then I remembered myself, my reasons for eating meat, wearing leather and living the lifestyle that I did.

I kept these to myself, however. I had no desire to validate my choices to my book; he never asked me to. When I rose to leave the table, and my book, I left not with a changed mind, but with a kind of relief that only comes from some necessary self-reflection. That while I do eat meat, I don’t do it blindly or without understanding. I could stop feeling frivolous.

 

 

Co-infected: Hep C and HIV positive

by Daniel Bitonti

By 1997, Pamela had spent more than a decade doing hard drugs and working the streets of Vancouver’s downtown eastside. She says she was worn out, emotionally raped long before she was physically.  She now wanted out.

Her downward spiral began in 1984 after she made the decision to put her first child up for adoption. During the pregnancy she had contracted Hepatitis C through a blood transfusion.  She turned to drugs to deal with the pain. She was just 20-years old.

In a Vancouver hotel room she was now getting high for one of the last times. She had convinced herself to get into rehab.

She had used all the veins in her arm, so she had a friend inject the needle into her neck. He prepared both a clean needle of hers and one for himself. He was openly HIV positive.

He ended up sticking his needle into her neck. Pamela thinks it was because he had put more heroin into her clean needle and wanted it for himself. She says she didn’t think twice about it at the time.

When you meet Pamela, you believe her when she says she once was a model and a dancer with the National Ballet School. She’s tall with blonde hair and piercing blue eyes, incredibly charismatic and ready to speak candidly about her life.

She asked me why I wanted to read her. I had a simple answer: I had just been tested for HIV, after years of prolonging out of fear. I was negative, but I wanted to explore where my own fears stemmed from. During my worst neurosis, I feared that having HIV would essentially be a social death sentence. How would my relationships change? Could I ever meet anyone romantically? How would I possibly be able to get up in the morning?

When Pamela entered rehab she had a meeting with a doctor who told her she had contracted HIV. She told me it was from the needle she had shared with her friend.

The news put Pamela into a catatonic shock. She says she doesn’t remember what happened in the days following, becoming completely paralyzed. Pamela had out of body experiences, finally coming back to consciousness 30 days later.

My meeting with Pamela was now challenging the worst fears and presumptions I had about HIV.

First of all, Pamela was not a gay man. Even though I know damn well HIV affects more than just gay men, as I was waiting to meet this book I couldn’t help but anticipate a chat with someone who was gay.

I also thought everything would shut down if I had HIV. For Pamela everything had shut down, at least initially. In my own imaginings, after having accepted my HIV, I thought I would be a social outcast among my friends and family. Pamela says it’s still hard. On one occasion she met someone from high school who inquired whether it was true that she had HIV – she lied and said she didn’t.

Pamela hasn’t used drugs since finding out about her HIV. She moved back east after that. She started a new life.

There is no question her life is different living with both Hepatitis C and HIV. There are, of course, the obvious medical issues.

But she’s had lovers, HIV negative ones, and they all have accepted her.

In fact, she says HIV saved her life. If it hadn’t been for her diagnosis, she believes she would have ended up back on the street.

She now has incredible relationships with her other children, all of who are aware of her past.

She does say it’s still tough to get out of bed sometimes. But she’s on a mission to educate and to debunk the myths and assumptions about HIV. This is what gets her up. She does countless workshops and leadership programs. “It should be in the school curriculums,” she says about educating people about HIV.

What is most amazing about Pamela’s story is her resiliency and her ability to take ownership of her life.  “It would be easy to blame what has happened on alcoholic parents or something like that,” she says. “But that wasn’t the case. I had a silver spoon.”

A couple of years ago she was able to be beside her mother as she died, becoming the daughter her mother always wanted her to be.

And just a month ago the son she gave up 25-years ago reconnected with her. “It’s been amazing,” she says. “It’s all come full circle,” the both of us trying to hold back tears.

 

 

Disabled Runner

by Mike Treadgold

You can imagine my confusion when I first sat down with Cyndy MacLean, the ‘Disabled Runner book’ from last week’s Human Library. You see, when I met Cyndy, she was in a wheelchair, hardly something I expected to see with a runner. She later explained that her ‘book title’ was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. I’ll explain later.

In 2000, MacLean, at the age of 30 and an avid recreational runner in near-perfect health, decided that she would run one marathon per year, until she turned 40. And, after fulfilling this goal in each of the next two years, she began training in Utah for yet another marathon in the summer of 2003.

Accompanied by her father and dog, MacLean began her return journey to Guelph, where she was an employee at the university’s Health and Performance Centre. And during a short hiking trip through Michigan, her life would change forever.

While trekking through some particularly hilly terrain, MacLean’s father turned to speak to his daughter. All he saw, however, were Cyndy’s boots in mid-air. She and their dog had slipped and fallen off the cliff. Leaving his camera behind, MacLean’s father rushed to the base of the cliff, some 30 metres below where his daughter had fallen. The date was Friday, June 13, 2003. The number 13 would live on forever in MacLean’s life.

Upon reaching his daughter at the base of the cliff, it was clear that MacLean had suffered a serious injury. Paramedics soon arrived and she was airlifted to a hospital in Minnesota, suffering from three broken vertebrae and a severe spinal cord injury. Cyndy MacLean was paralyzed from the waist down.

After MacLean was airlifted from the scene of her injury, her father returned to the edge of cliff where he had left his camera. Prior to his descent, he had taken exactly 12 pictures, before leaving the camera on the ground. When he developed the film, however, 13 pictures were on the roll of film. Inexplicably, the thirteenth picture was a bird’s eye view of the rescue scene, taken by an unknown passer-by while Cyndy was tended to below. To this day, the photographer remains unknown.

While recovering in hospital, MacLean was contacted by Rick Hansen, who asked her to bring his Wheels in Motion program to Guelph. MacLean happily obliged and she continues to be the chairperson of the Guelph chapter. Interestingly, the program was set to begin on June 13, 2004, exactly one year to the day of her injury.

While rehabbing in Hamilton, MacLean was presented with the idea of playing wheelchair tennis. A previously unfamiliar sport, MacLean was interested and as she became familiar with using her wheelchair, her love of the sport increased. Cyndy’s injury also forced her to find new living accommodations. The apartment number of her first accessible dwelling post-injury: 13.

MacLean has since been named to the Canadian national women’s wheelchair tennis team, one of only two women in the country to play at such a high level. The date of her first international competition in Italy: June 13.

Now I return to MacLean’s puzzling ‘book title.’ As she explained to me, Cyndy calls herself a ‘Disabled Runner’ because despite her injury, the only thing that she cannot do now is run. Otherwise, she lives a complete, healthy, active and productive lifestyle, uninhibited by her injury.

The hour that I spent with Cyndy MacLean, hearing her inspirational story, was a time that I will not soon forget. Her dedication and commitment to hard work was as heartwarming as it was fascinating. She is truly a role model and an inspiration for both disabled athletes and women in sport.

 

 

Survivor of Suicide of a Loved One

by Zack MacRae

I remember getting the call. It was early September and I was riding my bike to the grocery store to get a few things for dinner. I hadn’t even made it off my street when the phone rang. Mom was on the other end. She was crying; her voice was exhausted and muffled.

“Baby, something bad has happened, your uncle is gone.”

Stumbling from my bike and leaving it to lay on the street, I sat against a brick wall, head bowed between my legs sobbing frantically with my mom. Her brother, my uncle, had committed suicide.

If you’re a survivor of suicide of someone you love, you know that there are many extremely complicated emotions and a great deal of consequences that follow.

When I read the booklist for this year’s Human Library, one title stuck out: Survivor of Suicide of a Loved One.

Arriving at the library to take out the book, I had more than one reservation. I wasn’t sure how helpful the conversation would be. Was half an hour really enough time to delve under the surface of such a complex and personal topic? Would we unearth anything constructive?

From the first page, I can tell you that I was immersed. The book told a story of how on one particularly normal afternoon, her father, without any warning, committed suicide in the driver’s seat of his car.

There were no signs to tell her that her father might be contemplating such a heavy topic. He wasn’t depressed, he was in good health, and to all who knew him he was a caring and jovial man.

As we compared stories, the similarity of feeling was eerie. My hands became clammy and the relationship and understanding that we had forged together intensified.

We talked about feelings of confusion and resentment. Why did her father want to leave? Was it selfish that my uncle took his own life? Many of these questions cannot be answered, but we landed on one conclusion concerning judgment. She told me that it was important not to judge the actions of our loved ones, that the decision was made by them alone and that we should not be ashamed.

The inspiring part about her story was her perseverance and ability to think positively of such a horrible situation. Since her father committed suicide, she has spoken to numerous groups and has started an event called the suicide watch walk, where people come to walk and talk through the feelings associated with suicide. She showed me the importance of honouring the person you loved; through small, everyday occurrences the memory of my uncle can live on and become something physical.

In her last anecdote, the book left me with a detail from her father’s suicide that she will always take comfort in. When she was able to see the car that her father had died in only days before, the passenger seat of the car was littered with pictures of her family. A hint that tells her that his final thoughts were with his family and that his love for them was above everything in his life.

Your anonymous comment may be printed in The Ontarion's print publication.