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One boat, one storm? Some youthful inspirations for mutual support

News reports last week said that levels of hunger in Central America have almost quadrupled in the past four years, a consequence of the economic crisis caused by COVID-19 and years of extreme climate events. 

That news set me to thinking about that comforting notion that the pandemic has somehow placed us all in the same boat—and then as well to the reactions to it: we may be in the same storm, but we’re in different boats. 

I first encountered the metaphor of a lifeboat to represent all of humanity when I was very young, perhaps 12 years old. My parents thought it was important that we hear a presentation by Dr. Robert McClure, the renowned medical missionary who was serving as Moderator of The United Church of Canada (1968-71). He was best known for his years of service in China in the decades before the triumph of the revolution in 1949, but he served after that in many parts of the world. 

The auditorium of Kelowna’s First United Church was full, and we sat near the back. My memory is that Dr. McClure used the technology of the time, an overhead projector, and that one of the images was a simple line drawing of people in a boat. Most of them were at one end of the boat, and the boat looked like it was about to capsize. On the other hand, it may be that his words enabled me to make in my mind a drawing of the boat that he described. His point was about global distribution of resources. Some of us have too much; others nothing at all. It is one boat one planet: your stuff won’t save you.

Not quite a decade later, I met Dr. McClure again. We were both at the United Church’s Naramata Centre at the end of April 1978. 

And, surprise, I found my notes of the event. He was in Naramata to speak at a United Church men’s conference; I was there with a very ecumenical group of about 40 youth that was attached to the Kamloops Okanagan Presbytery, and with which I stayed connected over several years during breaks from my studies in Ottawa. I had not remembered this, but my notes say that our resource person for the weekend was Gary Paterson, then the minister of the United Church congregation in Winfield, BC; decades later he too would be a Moderator. And it was Gary who introduced Dr. McClure to our group in a Saturday afternoon gathering in the upper room of a building called The Loft.

He began by “taking us” in a Concorde super-sonic jet, six-and-a-half-hours from London to Singapore. “Our world isn’t shrinking. It’s shrunk, and will continue to do so.” He spoke for about 35 minutes, and concluded: “Canada is your blessing. Now: what will you do with it?”

In between, he told us of his life in Toronto, where he lived on the 19th floor of an apartment building. He told us of the rules designed for safe living: you are not to talk to your neighbours; walk only in well-lit areas, etc. 

Then he spoke of the river people of Sarawak (a Malaysian state on north coast of northern Borneo). “They live in long houses, like an apartment building turned on its side.” The long houses were divided into small apartments, side-by-side, each family having a part that was its own. “They’ve been there for 3,000 years,” he said. “They adopted this system of mutual support.” The apartments were joined together by a long, covered verandah over the river. “Neighbours are close and friends are forever.”

He offered an example. “My hospital was near the river mouth. A woman came down—a week-long journey in each direction—for a hysterectomy. I asked her, ‘Where are your children? How could you leave your children?’ ‘Oh, but doctor,’ she said, ‘we’re long-house people. The neighbours will care for them while I’m gone. Next month when my neighbour comes down, I’ll care for her children. We’re long-house people.’”

That’s mutual support. “When you’re invited to a wedding in Borneo, it’s a commitment for you too. You pledge to see that Joe and Sally will stay together, and when problems arise, you go see Joe and tell him to get his act together, and you can bet Sally will be told something by the women. One marriage in a thousand breaks down. That’s mutual support.”

He talked about the role of youth in other countries that he had visited. Read 42 years later, some of his examples of youthful collaboration seem debateable—Singapore in the years when Lee Kuan Yew exercised firm control—but the point was that governments should trust youth with more responsibility for positive social change, and that youth should take advantage of the responsibility they have now.

Twice, then, I was inspired by McClure to think of issues in their global dimensions. In subsequent years, I learned more about him and about China and about the role of Canadian missionaries there. 

Dr. McClure is sometimes held in tension with the life and witness of Canadian supporters of the Chinese Revolution, including Rev. James Endicott, a United Church missionary, and Dr. Norman Bethune (son of a Presbyterian minister) who died in 1939 while serving as a battlefield surgeon with one of Mao Zedong’s revolutionary armies. 

While I tend to the Endicott and Bethune sides of those political and theological reflections, I also celebrate McClure’s choice to live most of his life among the impoverished and marginalized peoples of the Earth, and his challenge to the rest of us to use our blessings to care for each other and the planet.

As I was putting together these notes about my memories of Dr. McClure, I was invited by a friend to see actors in a Zoom reading of a new play, China 1938, by Diane Forrest held March 8. Forrest is a writer and editor long involved in Alumnae Theatre’s new play development group and is also co-author with McClure of a 1988 volume, Vintage McClure. The play tells the story of the single encounter between McClure and Bethune in China in 1938, and is told from the perspective of the one woman who knows what happened: McClure’s widow, Amy. This play is also an inspiration, and I hope that (after the pandemic), it gets a full stage treatment.

After UN Security Council calls for vaccine equity, WHO pushes for action on patents

In a rare show of unanimity, the UN Security Council approved a resolution Feb. 26 that encouraged Covid-19 vaccine equity and called for a “sustained humanitarian pause” to local conflicts.

Speaking with journalists afterwards, World Health Organization (WHO) chief Tedros Ghebreyesus argued that more could be done.

“I understand full well that all governments have an obligation to protect their own people. But the best way to do that is by suppressing the virus everywhere at the same time,” said Ghebreyesus.

“Now is the time to use every tool to scale up production, including licensing and technology transfer, and where necessary, intellectual property waivers. If not now, then when?”

The WHO leader’s words add weight to calls inside the World Trade Organisation (WTO)—calls that are already supported by about 100 countries—for a waiver from certain provisions of patent rules to allow greater production of vaccines. 

Given that Canada is not yet among the countries supporting the waivers, Canadians are invited to sign a petition to the House of Commons in support of the proposal.

Together with calls within the G20 nations and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to release $3 trillion of global reserve funds (“Special Drawing Rights”) to support crisis response and recovery efforts in developing countries, action in the WTO on patents represent the two largest challenges to “standard operating procedures” in the IMF and WTO seen in many years.

We’ve done this before

These systems have been challenged before. In the IMF’s case, it was the demand for debt relief by so-called “highly-indebted poor countries” in the 1980s and 1990s that inspired massive Jubilee campaigns in many countries, including Canada. Now, more than 215 groups from around the world have sent an open letter to G20 Finance Ministers and the IMF calling for a quick allocation of global reserve funds – Special Drawing Rights – to support developing countries’ global coronavirus crisis responses and recovery efforts.

“Stop AIDS! Keep The Promise!” was the cry outside the International AIDS Conference in Toronto in 2006. (Jim Hodgson photo)

With the WTO, it was the need to ease patent protection so as to produce less costly generic versions of medicines used to treat HIV and AIDS. Again, efforts were broadly supported by churches and NGOs around the world. Eventually, in at least partial responses, less-costly generics and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria helped save lives in many countries.

Vaccine Equity

The WHO has long called upon rich countries to ensure that vaccines are shared equitably. The global organisation is one of the leaders of COVAX, a program that aims to supply 1.3 billion vaccine doses to low- and middle-income countries this year. But so far, COVAX has had a slow roll-out.

The British-drafted resolution in the Security Council, co-sponsored by 112 countries, recognized the importance of extensive use of vaccines in this pandemic time as a “global public good for health.” It emphasised the need to develop international partnerships to scale-up manufacturing and distribution capacities.

Further, the Council requested the Secretary-General to provide a full assessment of the impediments to vaccine access in the pandemic response. It said it would review situations brought to its attention by the Secretary-General where hostilities and armed group activities are impeding COVID‑19 vaccination and to consider what further measures may be necessary to ensure such impediments are removed, and hostilities paused to enable vaccination.

It emphasized the urgent need for “solidarity, equity and efficacy,” inviting donation of vaccine doses from developed economies and all those in a position to do so to low- and middle-income countries and other countries in need, particularly through the COVAX facility.

These are complex initiatives but they—together with action for patent and debt relief, and additional funds for vaccines and other public health need—are essential for overcoming the global pandemic and for the reconstruction that will follow.

People in Canada are also invited to sign a petition to ensure full access to Covid-19 vaccines by all migrants regardless of immigration status. See the Vaccines For All petition here.

What does development mean?

Maybe you have already figured out the relationship between the word development and the idea of a closed envelope—something that needs to be opened up or unwrapped. De-enveloped, if you like. Inside the envelope, there must be something that already exists.

The Spanish word desarrollo is similar: unroll something to see what is inside. In Portuguese, desenvolvimento implies unwrapping.

After more than 20 years of work in support of development organizations and projects, and employment by at least two organizations that had included the word in their names, I finally got the point in 2007 when I got around to reading several books by Octavio Paz, including his classic, The Labyrinth of Solitude.

The word means the opposite of what a lot of people do in the name of development. Too often, we try to impose ideas and structures that come from some other place, and fail to see the values and systems that are already present among the people. Think of the European arrival in the Americas. Think of the resource extraction companies that refuse to consult—much less gain the consent of—the Indigenous communities whose land they seek to exploit.

Development Vision

Evo Morales, the former president of Bolivia, decried decades of misnamed development and vowed that his people will find solutions for the problems of health, education, employment, unequal distribution of resources, discrimination, migration, exercise of democracy, preservation of the environment and respect for cultural diversity.

La Paz, Bolivia (2015)

Morales and others are critical of approaches that facilitate the advance of globalized capitalism led by giant corporations. Those approaches focus strongly on building infrastructure (roads, ports and canals) to support an export of raw materials or cheaply-produced manufactured goods. Most free trade agreements contain provisions that facilitate the movement and protection of capital investments—and that also inhibit government action to protect local economies, health systems and ecology. 

Thought of this way, we begin to see that the so-called “developed” countries of the global north have our development issues too. The much-reported water crisis in the city of Flint, Michigan, is a development failure. Why can’t a country that can deliver a cruise missile to a target in Yemen or Afghanistan get clean water to people’s homes? Canada’s inability to get clean water, quality education and decent health care to First Nations communities is also a development failure. But we can dig up one-eighth of the province of Alberta for a fossil fuel that will soon be superfluous, and expand a pipeline across British Columbia to get it to tidewater. A provincial government in Ontario begins to allow factories into the long-fought-for green space around greater Toronto: that’s a development issue too. In our different contexts, let us ask ourselves: what are our development priorities?