Counting

On January 1st this year, I wrote, "I refrain from counting my steps. I don't need a machine to tell me when I've had enough exercise." At the moment, however, I am counting the kilometres I cover per week after all, because I joined a team of women who are virtually walking to Kabul. We are talking about this in order to raise awareness of the plight of Afghan women who feel their hard-won rights are imperilled by the recent resurgence of militant fundamentalists in their country and by the demands made by Taliban delegates at the recent peace talks in Doha. There are widespread fears that, in spite of their ambitions to influence future developments in Afghan society, Afghan girls might once again, as at the start of the 21st century, be forcefully prevented from attending high school, from learning to read books other than the Qur'an, from wearing clothes other than the burqa, from refusing to get married at a very young age, from engaging in sports or making music in public, and so forth.

The most disturbing indications that this is a possibility are the recent murderous attacks on prominent Afghan women who have been advocating for equal rights or acting as reporters; it is alleged that the Taliban has a hit list for assassinations, and that some of the women we personally know are on that list.

As of yesterday, we University Women Helping Afghan Women (UWHAW) and friends had covered enough kilometres between us, starting in Ottawa, to have reached Amsterdam. This entailed some magical walking on water as we crossed the Atlantic last week. We virtually walked through the major cities in eastern Canada — Montreal, Quebec, Halifax, St. John's — reaching each of these at the weekends, strangely enough, and are now starting to head across Europe. Jill Moll, the organiser, is keeping track of where we are. The last I heard (yesterday), we had 4921 km behind us. In reality we're all just strolling or cycling round the block in our neighbourhoods, or doing our shopping on foot, or skiing in the parks, or even covering some distance on exercise machines (a doubly virtual activity!) but so many people are participating that it quickly adds up. We are allowed to count our families' mileage / kilometrage(?) too, so I have added the approximately 20 km that Chris puts beneath his feet on the treadmill to our weekly totals. In my case, for the last three weeks, my daily kilometres have so far ranged from 2.5 to 12; my average seems to be about 6 km a day, ~8000 steps.

On March 18th some of us "stood on a bridge" (in this case the Flora MacDonald footbridge) as an obligatory part of the Walk to Kabul challenge, along with a CTV camera man who brought the footage back to his studio. CTV-Ottawa showed us on the news that evening, wearing masks, holding up our banners, flags and placards, and then walking on, as a group. One of us, Leslie Baird, stood back to take photos of the photographer, like this one, on the right. Below is a screenshot from the TV clip, with me holding the RIGHTS poster.

Preparations

One thing leads to another. We had a Zoom chat with an English friend from Welwyn Garden City at the weekend. Naomi sent me a follow-up message afterwards and I asked her if she'd like to come to my next Environment Action meeting. Later, she told me her brother might be willing to give our group a presentation on glacier monitoring. That would be interesting! 

That question got me wondering whether the group would want me to organise another series of presentations for the next season, so I sent them a query about it and got twelve positive responses straight away, along with suggestions for other activities besides: river clean-ups, planting community gardens and the like. I mentioned that to Emma, who helped me start the expert speaker series last autumn, and she thought I should find out how to start planting a "tiny forest."

The Club's Board members are talking about Succession Planning. I'm useless at this, because I don't have the requisite persuasion skills; six people have so far turned down my request to take over from me as the next editor of the newsletter.

The preparation of the last issue of the Club's newsletter had me writing about a retired Lieutenant-General of the Royal Canadian Air Force, who has been persuaded to speak to CFUW-Ottawa members as a replacement for two top people from Ottawa's Public Health Service who are too bogged down with COVID-19 mitigation to come to our meeting.

I may be able to apply for a vaccination soon. This ought not to be at the same time as the back-tooth extraction I'll have to endure, having broken off the crown and cracked the roots of one of my molars. Not a pleasant prospect. My dentist seems reluctant to take that responsibility and is referring me to a specialist, who'll most likely operate on me at the end of April, not on my birthday, I hope.

Sue's hat and other momentos

I was on four continents yesterday. After a Messenger chat with Sessie in Johannesburg, S. Africa, over breakfast, I hosted an extraordinary Zoom meeting for the German conversation group. We had brought treasures along to show to one another, objects we were proud of or which had precious family associations. 15 people took part, signing in from Canada, German, the USA, Mongolia and France. We heard about artifacts from Brazil, Latvia, Italy, Germany, Lithuania, Switzerland, China, Britain and the Netherlands: toys kept since people's childhood, heirlooms, ornaments, souvenirs. 

 

 

Later in the day one of the group, Sue, posted my picture of her and her hat on Facebook, saying,

This photo was taken by Alison this morning during our German Conversation Zoom meeting. Today we each presented an object that personally meant something to us. I am wearing a hat made by my great uncle's hat company. Before WW2, he had a store in Hamburg Germany plus one in London and Paris. But he was Jewish, so he lost everything due to the Nazi regime, and fled with his wife to Shanghai China in 1940. He started a hat company there and employed both Chinese and other German Jewish refugees. It was successful. After the war, they moved to South Africa. My mother inherited my great aunt's hat when she died.

I showed the others the homemade paper fan presented to my father by his fellow prisoners in the POW-camp where they were incarcerated from 1941 to 1945 and where they performed The Mikado by Gilbert and Sullivan. All forty men involved signed their names on the fan, listed as Principals, Chorus and Orchestra. My father, who had been the conductor of this "Comic Opera", carried it proudly in his haversack for 1000km on the long and deadly march across Germany at the end of the war. It is a wonder that he and the fan ever survived, but they did; otherwise I wouldn't have been telling the story.

 

This reminded Sarah, a friend who was not at my meeting but saw my post on Facebook, of a possession that dates back to the same war:

I have inherited a Nazi flag, covered in metal badges, ripped from the wall of the officers' mess at Monte Cassini by my grandfather. I've been researching the battle that he was in then, from a little handwritten sketch he drew and the Internet records. It's quite a story, involving German paratroopers, a commanding officer who directed his troops while strapped to the bonnet of his Jeep, having been shot in the leg early on, and some of the nastiest house to house fighting of the war.

 

Advice for safety engineers

Instead of the British Safety-Critical Systems Symposium for which I'd have accompanied Chris to Bristol, had this been a normal year, all of the SCSS February 2021 meetings took place online. I watched the recording of one of the "after-dinner" speeches over his shoulder, Emma Taylor instructing the delegates how, if their messages are going to make the right impact on those who make decisions, engineers need to be "prepped, skilled and aware." This was all to do with communications.

"People weren't happy with what I was saying as a safety engineer," she confessed, and she wasn't getting through to those who should have been taking heed of her warnings, but then, while watching Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, who undeniably "pack a punch" when they are addressing the crowds, she experienced "penny-drop moments." How could she adopt their rhetorical techniques for more beneficial purposes? 

The recipe for convincing rhetoric is 50% pathos, 40% ethos and 10% logos. An appeal to the emotions stands a much better chance of being remembered than a reasoned argument.* Watch popular action movies, suggests Ms. Taylor, and consider how the hero journeys through a series of crises supported by his friends, triumphing over his enemies. That's the basic formula. All you [engineers] have to fight with are your words. When you're talking to the "enemy," be sure to start with an arresting phrase or image that will catch his attention.

For a year or two Emma Taylor left software engineering and ventured into politics, and while she was an MEP candidate in England, although she lost the election she learned a thing or two. She learned to acknowledge, rather than answer, challenging questions. Journalists are not your friends, she realised. Your words can be twisted, weaponised against you, so you need to recognise these tactics (and the hurtful effect they have on you) and in return, use the right catch-phrases, act confident ... 

"Landing" a message about software safety is the same. You have to be both bold and brave. Don't be inhibited, don't worry, don't obfuscate the truth, don't lie. Do hold on to your curiosity, do be aware, do keep practising.

She recommends the book Never Split The Difference by Chris Voss, who relies upon certain key strategies when negotiating for the release of hostages: "The best way to deal with negativity is to observe it without reaction and without judgement. Consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, solution-based thoughts."

Safety engineers can get angry with the people who oppose them, so they need persistence and resilience. 

The same applies to anyone else who hopes to persuade.

* I remember studying Shakespeare's Julius Caesar at school and comparing the speeches Brutus and Mark Anthony made after the death of Caesar: same thing.

Nine-year-olds learning French

Back in January I wrote of Tom and Freddie, not to mention their parents and grandparents, being flummoxed by the so-called "partitive articles" they had to learn in French homework assignments. For a couple of weeks, by Zoom, on Wednesday mornings (afternoons, in their zone) I tried to teach them the phrases they were meant to be learning, until it dawned on me that this was doomed to failure because they hadn't a clue how to read French aloud from a page and were thoroughly disheartened by the whole subject. Nobody had ever taught them how to pronounce French words.

So once a week, over the course of a month or so, before their school reopened, I began to give the boys some basic rules and simple exercises that entailed a great deal of reading and repetition: they had to mimic the sounds I made, not so easy given the technical frustrations of video calls and the background distractions. Once or twice the ploy worked, perhaps for half a minute at a time, and Tom at least gained a little confidence. 

I pity the poor primary school teachers in London who most likely know hardly any French themselves; what probably happens in the classroom is that their teacher gives the children videos to watch in French, while they sit there quietly (or not so quietly) ignoring it all. Tom and Freddie didn't seem to know that the letters -t, -z -s, -x ... at the ends of words are rarely pronounced, and hadn't a clue how to sound out the vowel combinations ou, eu, oi, or that é and è sound different. So that's what we concentrated on. As an experienced French speaker it's easy for me to forget that anglophone beginners have no idea that Qu'est-ce que c'est? literally means What-is-it-that-it-is? and that Qu'est-ce que...? is pronounced kesskuh, not kwestkuhkwuh. The problem, especially with girls in the class, is that boys feel stupid when they're obliged to make stupid noises and, worse yet, get them wrong. Then they're liable to sulk, teenagers even more so.

I endeavoured to make a joke of it and got them to repeat a few quirky, surrealistic sentences like "Deux ours jouent avec une boule rouge sur la route." or "Qu'est-ce que c'est dans l'hélicoptère? C'est un éléphant énorme!" Whether that really worked, I'm not convinced, but they didn't run away the whole time to play with the cat or the guitar in the background, only occasionally. We also tried intoning the nasal sounds -ain -in -an -en -on -oin and so on (first while holding our noses and then not holding our noses) and the French "u"-sound. Once they got the hang of it, that didn't cause so much trouble.

Part of a French conversation I got the boys to read aloud and practise went like this:

Tu veux jouer aux boules?

 -- Non, je veux jouer à Minecraft. Minecraft est mon jeu favori.

Tu veux jouer avec moi?

-- Oui. Allons-y!

It's true that Minecraft is their favourite game. And they learned to read the words for the numbers one-to-twenty, for which they already knew the sounds but not the spellings.

If you want to find out whether or not your child can read French, see if (s)he can pronounce these English words (cognates) in the French way:

six, point, cage, Paris, judo, orange, queue, plan, secret, long, cause, accident, danger, fruit, instruction

If that goes badly, that's proof that (s)he needs some more tuition and reading practice. Try typing some of those words into Google Translate, select "French", and click on the sound icon. It could be a revelation!

Writing about writing

Now that the pandemic has been kept us away from other people and other places for a whole year, it's just as well to have a compulsive occupation, even if I never get paid for it. 

I finished another article for the Lowertown Echo this week, this one about the eco-friendly, ethical coffee shops in our neighbourhood; my article about Shopping Locally appeared in the last issue. The background for the coffee article was fun to research, because sampling the different products gave me the excuse to walk from place after place, scribbling notes wherever I stopped, playing at being a journalist.

Last week I watched a touching Netflix film about a man who falls in love with a short-lived octopus: My Octopus Teacher. At one point he exclaims, "She's only a mollusc!" but even so. Karen, leader of the movie-going group, selected that film for us this month, and now we have to send in reviews. We were lavish with our comments about Karen's previous choice, American Factory. I led a discussion about that documentary that followed the progress of a management team from China employing blue-collar auto-workers in Ohio. At least four of us in the discussion meeting had been in China, with different opinions about the experience; mine was the most positive. Susan, like me, had visited Hangzhou, but that was in the 1980s, before its boom in commerce, construction and tourism, when the city was very different.

I might be getting an introduction to Nonviolent Communications from Susan. From what I've heard so far this is largely to do with the words one chooses. I wonder how much will seem new to me, not a lot, perhaps. I was a regular attender of Friends' Meetings at one time; Quakers began to speak about nonviolent communications in the 17th century and still do, in the pauses between their deep silences.

I promised to describe a presentation last week by two CW4WAfghan speakers about the state of the current "peace" negotiations in Doha and what the consequences will be for women and children if the Taliban are allowed too many concessions. This is a hard report to write, but the people struggling to make a difference need to be acknowledged. My recent blogpost about supporting the Afghan girls, including that photo of the exam candidates in the snow, prompted me to share the image with my MP as well. She is a Minister in the Cabinet so if she was touched by this, one never knows, she might bring some influence to bear on the government's foreign policy ... just a hope. I Bcc'd some of my friends and the letter's being shared further.

Every week I write to my Konversationsgruppe in German; in those messages I aim to sound cheerful, looking forward to whatever's coming next. The emails that require the most concentration are the ones expressing sympathy and condolences, especially if I have to write those in German or French. I refer to linguee.de and linguee.fr for help, most days, for one piece of writing or another. Opening Facebook and Twitter is a writing exercise too; I'm the sort of person who can spend ten minutes composing one tweet.

When I was very young, my father made me write essays for him to mark, telling me in no uncertain terms when they were unsatisfactory, and my nervous fear of upsetting people with an inadequate choice of words is still chronic. My father was a compulsive writer himself and my mother was still trying to jot down her deepest thoughts in a notebook at the end of her life when she was nearly blind, in a dementia care home.

Scholarship winners

On March 1st, CFUW-Ottawa hosted an online evening meeting to congratulate the winners of this year’s scholarship awards: students from the University of Ottawa, Carleton University and Algonquin College. 

Numerous CFUW members were there, and some of the students’ brought family members along. In the past, this annual event, usually held in a church hall, always included short recitals by the music students. On this occasion a single video recording replaced those, an undergrad from Carleton University giving a multiple-voice rendition of the rock song Edge of Seventeen, by Stevie Nicks (1982). I can't say I liked it but she did all the voice parts and carried it off with aplomb. "Ooo baby... ooo... said ooo / Just like the white winged dove... / Sings a song... / Sounds like she's singing... / Ooo baby... ooo... said ooo" etc. for 12 verses.

We also honoured a musician from Mexico, studying the cello with Paul Marleyn as her tutor (it would have been nice to hear her perform) and a student of Nursing, and young women working towards degrees or further qualifications in Law, Criminology, Fine Arts, Political Science and Sociology, Forensic Psychology, Mental Health, Physics, Mathematics, Statistics, Acting, Information Systems, Women’s Studies, Applied Linguistics and Aerospace. A few of the award recipients had made video recordings of their thanks; others expressed their gratitude “live” during the meeting, telling us something about their studies, their career goals and their background. A few of the young women CFUW-Ottawa supports are furthering their education while also raising a family, an impressive achievement. One of them was a few days away from giving birth!

Sorrow and light

The world seems very bright again, this morning, with the sun rising at 06:26 and the white snow reflecting its light. It is going to feel like Spring today, because the air temperature's forecast to rise above zero mid-morning and will continue rising to +6, for the first time in months, marvellous. We have not had as bad a winter as I'd feared, this year, and I and most of my friends have raved about its beauty. 

The dark side to this season is that too many people have been lost, or distressed. One friend had news of her mother succumbing to the coronavirus in hospital in Saudi Arabia. Goodness knows when the funeral will be allowed. Yesterday another friend of mine tearfully told a small group of us that her sister was taken to hospital in Milan suffering from Covid a week ago; she had heard nothing since. Yesterday was a bad day for news of this kind. I heard of someone's husband whose health is deteriorating to a worrying extent and of a woman suffering a chronic condition which prevents her from moving --- that stopped the flow of conversation too. Midday I had to cancel a meeting I should have hosted because a sudden bereavement prevented the chief participant from attending. Shock upon shock. Towards the end of the day Chris and I had news that an admirable, frail but determined old gentleman from the flying club (a couple of weeks ago Chris was helping him to clear his plane of snow to prepare it for another solo flight!) has just died too, we don't yet know how. In his case we are at least aware that he lived his life intensely and well, right to the end.

Somehow I must keep my mental balance in the face of this fragility. I shall go for another walk this morning and keep a look out for transient miracles, for as long as I can.

Blogpost written on March 9th; photos from February 25th.

International Women

This evening I was at an International Women's Day event (another Zoom meeting of course) hosted by the women's club I'm in. We were encouraged to wear purple for the occasion, and half way through the meeting each of us raised a hand in solidarity, pledging to challenge some injustice; we could decide for ourselves what this might be. Someone in my "breakout room" mentioned the poor water quality in Indigenous reservations as an example of what is worth challenging. Someone else said that what we need to challenge is old, white men. Non-violent communications are key, said another participant (I must follow this up because Marco Bertaglia offered us a training course in that subject.) The glass ceilings thwarting women's progress and fair pay in business or government institutions were on people's minds, as were the glaring injustices and inequalities between men and women in places like Uganda, Rwanda and Afghanistan. 

Challenges and networks have to be global. Our umbrella organisation, Graduate Women International, is well placed to make change happen, since it has the ear of the United Nations, and a long history of noble deeds.

To draw attention to what Afghan women are up against, volunteer activists from CFUW-Ottawa are virtually "walking to Kabul" this month, adding up our kilometres covered on local walks or stationary bikes or skis, and so on, and talking about this. I'm in a team with others and can add my husband's treadmill miles to the total, apparently. It all counts. Our University Women Helping Afghan Women group is among the instigators of the walk, raising awareness rather than funds this time.

This morning I posted on my Facebook page a picture I shared from the page of an Afghan contact, Hasina Rasuli, which showed a class of teenage Afghan girls spaced out in rows, sitting in a field in hilly countryside, taking their end-of-school exams. I presume they do not have a school to go to; the Taliban has destroyed many girls' schools in their country. These girls were wearing their long robes as always and I assume (I hope) something very warm underneath because the field was covered in snow. Such a picture is more powerful than any amount of talk.

I have mentioned Hasina in my blog before. This morning she added the comment, "I am sorry for the photo being a bit harsh. Education is the only hope that Afghan women can win their rights."

I wrote in reply, "We need to know the truth. Don't be sorry."

Meeting Seth Klein

The talk I'm reporting here is also recorded on YouTube.

A contact of mine from Oakville, ON, invited me to join a meeting of the GASP group at which the author and environmentalist Seth Klein was to give a talk. February 25th, he signed into that meeting from his home in British Columbia. The book he wrote, A Good War, appeared last September and people are finding it hopeful. It is structured around people's memories of the 2nd World War.

Klein grew up in the 1970s as a pacifist in a pacifist family. Nonetheless, he draws lessons relevant to the world's climate crisis from Canada's experience of the war.

What we have been doing so far isn't working. We have failed to "bend the curve" of reducing GHG emissions despite decades of trying and of promising to act while accomplishing precious little.

For about six years, during and after the war, the country faced a comparable existential threat and found common cause in responding to it. There was social collaboration across the barriers of class, race, age and gender. (There were also "things that caused us shame" in those days, reminiscent of the treatment of today's refugees.)

A wartime government

1. spends what it takes to win;
2. creates new economic institutions to get the job done;
3. shifts from voluntary and incentive-based policies to mandatory measures;
4. tells the truth about the severity of the crisis.

During the current climate emergency, the government is failing to do any of the above. Klein's book spells out what it will take to win this war too.

In the 1940s there was a tenfold increase in government spending, because "if we lost, nothing would matter." At present, $5-billion a year is being budgeted for climate mitigation in Canada, not much if you compare this with the budget of $5-billion a week for dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic.

The wartime population of Canada was a third of what it is today, yet in that small country a huge amount of military production took place and institutions were quickly created. If today's government really saw a climate emergency it would study what's needed and similarly establish new Crown Corporations to deal with it.

Admittedly, there's plenty of encouragement for change, but nothing mandatory and no deadlines. This is not making it clear to the population that this is a serious matter. Why is the government not using its power of state to make change happen? There's a sapping of the imagination, a lack of belief that we can do grand things together.

In the 40s it took work to mobilize the public. The leaders we remember did that and managed to impart a sense of hope all the same. Today, as in wartime, there ought to be daily press briefings to show that the media takes the emergency seriously, but this isn't happening, and the government is sending contradictory messages, besides. It is high time the CBC got involved. We need a broadcaster of Ed Murrow's ilk, who would start to change people's opinions.

One lesson from World War II is that inequality is toxic to solidarity. If we pay attention to avoiding inequality, we win. In the 1940s the social welfare system was initiated. A Green New Deal in the 2020s would link bold climate action with social awareness, so that no one gets left behind. Robust just-transition programs are needed now.  

In the USA, the new "platform" is excellent, with half a trillion dollars (50-billion a year, in Canadian terms) now being set aside for climate change mitigation. The USA aims to decarbonise its whole electric grid by 2035. Canada's leaders are saying nothing like this, said Klein, comparing our efforts unfavourably with those of the UK, Ireland, New Zealand and Denmark. Norway has fossil fuel reserves that are deliberately being kept in the ground.

Klein has hopes for action at the municipal level. In Vancouver, for instance, impressive plans for legislation are in place. The Vancouver city council has very long meetings and no political party is in the majority there; even so, they recently passed a unanimous vote in favour of positive action. These plans "have teeth" and may be the most ambitious in North America.

The David Suzuki Institute is about to start a campaign to ban the advertising of fossil fuel products. Environmentalists of our older generation should form alliances with the student Fridays for Future strikers; intergenerational activism is important.

The C-12 Act, targeting zero carbon emissions by 2050, isn't going to take effect until 2030, but there will be a different government in power, by then. Are we on the right path? Klein thinks not, and will pressurize the government to bring about rolling 3-year carbon budgets. He supports carbon pricing, but that won't achieve what we need to achieve. We need to mobilize, to rally behind the idea of setting clear, mandatory deadlines. Canada has been nimble in tackling the pandemic but the red tape measures associated with climate policy are painfully slow in comparison.

Why work so hard at reducing our GHG emissions when China is still emitting so much? This has to be a global effort, and per capita, Canada's emissions are among the highest in the world. You can't sit out this war, says Klein; you win with allies around you.

Unfortunately many people are already becoming "climate fatigued". We all wrestle with despair and live in ambiguous times. Being ordered to stay at home because of Covid was an anathema to our social instincts, but it's encouraging to think that we have done it all the same. To counteract global warming, on the other hand, we're being asked to go out and do something together, and that's good. In the 2nd World War a million Canadians enlisted without knowing they would win. They rallied, regardless, and surprised themselves with the outcome. That is the spirit we need.