By Wally Dennison

IF NOTHING ELSE, the ongoing global food crisis should prod First World nations – and all of us so overflowingly blessed in our abundance – to seriously act upon the healthy advice spotlighted in a wall photograph in Kelowna’s Martin Avenue Community Centre.

The sign spotlights the word ‘Teamwork.’

Why are we, in our shameful complacency, so hypocritical about this concept? Why do we remain so negligently remiss to pleading cries from the Third World’s starving millions?

Why, indeed? Human decency demands that people and their governments stand up vociferously, sometimes at precious sacrifice.

The sign shows four kids climbing a mountain slope, each with a hand clasped into the hand of the one behind – an interdependent quartet from leader to anchor, so gloriously epitomizing the caption: “There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching out and lifting people up.”

That photograph mirrors magnificently the spirit which shone during Global Citizen Week in Kelowna earlier this year, when people and groups focused on all kinds of potentially world-benefitting actions, wholeheartedly convinced our ‘neighbour’ is not just next door or across the street, but across the globe.

The trouble is, we forget all too readily that every week demands global citizenry if we, as our religious leaders remind us, are all earthly brothers and sisters. That kind of sustained worldwide mindset could even result in achieving the Millennium Development Goals set by the United Nations.

Our kids, meanwhile, appear to be galaxies ahead of adult generations in acting globally.

Almost every week, the media report some exceptional act: schoolgirls packing school supplies for African kids as part of a Canada-wide Valentine’s Day observance of Project Love, championing international literacy; kids during Global Citizen Week bodily experiencing what it would be like living in Third World huts, and being taught in schools consisting only of mats; two Kelowna school boys initiating a campaign collecting children’s books, with a buck for each book donated to their brethren in Uganda and Sudan.

Mind you, there are adult standouts locally, although they seem dwarfed by the kids’ commitments. Still, their outreach shines globally. For example: Yourtechonline.com Inc. is  offering tech support to expedite and improve treatment of African AIDS patients, and Rotary clubs are helping build 100-plus wells or springs in rural Ethiopia, to ensure more than 70,000 people can have adequate and safe drinking water close to their homes.

The Adopt-A-Gran program is helping impoverished, aged grandmothers in India – an enterprise inspired by Kelowna’s Jeannie Haynes-Stoll, an Anglo-Indian Canadian who spurred Help the Aged (Canada), and a volunteer-run Calcutta agency to team in the effort.

The Kelowna Gifts to Grandmothers Group has church women crafting and selling tote bags as a fundraiser, in support of Nigerian grandmas who are raising grandkids orphaned by AIDS.

Meanwhile, momentum may be inching ahead in Kelowna for a citizen mindset of thinking and acting both locally and globally.

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To mark its 30th anniversary, the Kelowna Gospel Mission launched the 30K Club, a fundraising campaign that invites local residents to consider donating $30 a month in a drive to help end homelessness and drug addiction here.

High profile community leaders like the mayor, former mayor and RCMP superintendent are already aboard.

The bottom line is that our North American governments spend outrageously and selectively on conflicts attuned to their political biases – but coldly ignore the murderous toll being taken on people by other wars, ignited by disease and/or arms in the Third World.

We should be rallying behind Stephen Lewis, who calls the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing the “genocide Olympics” because of an “unholy alliance” which has China receiving Sudanese oil for weapons supplied to the Darfur killers.

We should be rallying behind Senator Romeo Dallaire, who, in a Kelowna Daily Courier column, declared that “We Canadians should be mad as hell that the Darfur genocide  . . . rages on unimpeded, while our leaders stand by and do nothing.”

The former UN Force commander in Rwanda, and author of Shake Hands With the Devil, further contends that Canada “should set aside its economic interests and show its mettle by expressing to oil-thirsty China our willingness to cut PetroChina out of the Alberta oilsands project if it continues to arm the Sudanese.”

Thank God, however, that we have some columnists and citizens attuned to the same “we’re-all-in-it-together” vision of many readers and community leaders – who are often more astute weighing questions of integrity than newspaper editorial boards and profit-enslaved corporations.

Notable is a Kelowna columnist, who called for a Canadian boycott of the Beijing Olympics, because of China’s heinous human rights record, and its vicious killings of ‘free Tibet’ campaigners.

She was countering her newspaper’s earlier editorial, which dismissed any move toward a boycott – since the Olympic athletes, who had trained so hard, would suffer as political pawns.

Yet, as she argued, athletics are insignificant in the face of seeing those flagrant atrocities unfold. Surveyed readers agreed – voting 66 per cent for a boycott.  

Similarly, another columnist has sided with representatives of the Okanagan First Nation, declaring that water – a life essential – shouldn’t ever be turned into a commodity to be bought and sold on the free market for profit.

A good shot in the kisser to the World Bank, which for the past 15 years has so magnanimously lined the pockets of transnational corporations by having made privatization of nationally-owned water utilities a condition for loans to developing countries.

Guess it’s anything for a buck – even feeding off nations desperately struggling to uplift themselves.

Good thing pressure is building to have the UN, as the columnist points out, “spearhead an international covenant that would make access to clean drinking water a recognized human right.”

Such an initiative will not only preserve a life force vital to human survival, but will also inspire further hope that we can become truly genuine global citizens – brothers and sisters to one another!

Wally Dennison, a retired newspaper journalist, is a member of Kelowna’s Trinity Baptist Church.

June 2008