John Weston left on a trip to Africa a proud Canadian and returned a proud and grateful Canadian.
Travelling with Cana-dian Food for the Hungry International (CFHI), Wes-ton, the Conservative party candidate for West Van-couver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country, went to see the kind of positive impacts that Canada makes in some of the least affluent African nations. The CFHI motto is "hope for the whole person," Weston said.
"It's a non-governmental organization [NGO] that receives support from donors and CIDA [Cana-dian International Development Agency]," he said. "I thought it was going to be a great opportunity to see what Canada is doing as a country in some of the poorest countries of the world and what we as Canadian individuals could do to make a difference."
The group travelled to Burundi, Rwanda and the Congo.
"The comparisons with Canada were stark," he said. "They are different worlds. It's a country that is so unstable. Canadians don't often contemplate how fortunate they are to live in a peaceful, organized country where there is, by world standards, a good government."
In this part of the world, 70 per cent of the people live on a dollar or less a day. Burundi and Rwanda both suffer huge ethnic conflicts, and many people are familiar with the genocide in Rwanda during the '90s.
"You stretch from feelings of hopelessness to hope, from feelings of total inadequacy to great pride and a sense that as an individual, I can do something," Weston said.
"What I really like about CFHI and its hallmark for success is Canadians working in partnership with people on the ground. We met people who had this tremendous hope despite the hopelessness. I keep coming back to that, because as a Canadian, I felt they were finding abundance in their scarcity while we tend to find scarcity in our abundance. Despite the material difficulties they had this transcendent hope," he said.
A source of inspiration for Weston was a group of female patients at a hospital called Heal Africa in the Congo. Typically, in a lot of these places, it's more dangerous to be a woman than a soldier, he said.
"These women have been brutally raped as part of a military strategy because the women there are even more pronounced in being the backbone of the community than they are here," Weston said. "If you really want to humiliate somebody, then you go and violate the woman of the family in front of them. This is one of the few hospitals set up to treat women who have internal disorders arising from rape."
Weston said after two or three operations, these women couldn't be healed, and so now they are being accommodated in an area that has been put together through the funds of a group of women from the North Shore in Vancouver.
"There are some women who went on a trip like I did, came back and were so touched by the pathos of these women that they raised more than $300,000," Weston said.
The group is called Souls in Stride. They have created some dwellings in a relatively safe place, and the women are being taught some handicrafts and other skills so they can earn a living.
