25/07/06, Erin A. Weir, It's more than photo ID
Post
Canada is an exception to a powerful rule; for the most part, this world of ours is not a safe place to be. That passport is piece of home.
My most valuable possession is not a house, or a car, or an iPod. It is a little blue book with CANADA stamped across the front in neat gold print -- just 24 (formerly) blank pages and an unflattering picture: my Canadian passport.
I did nothing to earn it. It is mine by right, by accident of birth; a jackpot in the universal lottery. The official cost is just $87 CAD, but for millions of people it is completely, absolutely unattainable -- the stuff of dreams.
I used to think of my passport as a sort of all-purpose ticket to the world. But, the more time I spend filling up those little blank pages, the more I realize that the real value of my passport lies not in the places it takes me, but in the promise of where (and to what) I can always return. Adventure with an escape hatch: The world on a platter, with the option to buy, lease, or go home.
Still, it sometimes takes a crisis to remind me just how lucky I am. For days now the papers have carried front page stories of the mass exodus from Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of expatriate Canadians, Brits, Americans, all boarding boats and buses destined for safer places. Like clever rats fleeing a sinking ship, the world is mounting a total withdrawal. Of course, not everyone can leave.
I am expatriate Canadian. Born and raised in the quiet suburban monotony of Mississauga, Ont., I have spent time in some of the world's least monotonous places: Rwanda, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and now Ghana -- an oasis of relative calm in the otherwise tumultuous assortment of countries that make up West Africa.
Against the best advice of family and friends I have chosen a career -- a life -- that will surely take me again and again into the most difficult, dangerous regions of the world. But for all the hazards, this life is ultimately my choice. Every risk that I take and every hardship I endure is one that I have consciously taken on. I can be comfortable in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, safe in the knowledge that I am really just a tourist here. When the water runs out, or the bullets start to fly, I am one of the privileged few who will be shuttled off to safety. Home -- with all the stability and security that that entails -- is just a plane ride away.
Evacuation scenarios play themselves out again and again, often with little press coverage or international awareness. In the book Shake Hands With The Devil, Romeo Dallaire (force commander of the ill-fated UN mission to Rwanda and witness to the wholesale slaughter of thousands of civilians) wrote about the efficiency and professionalism with which Canadians were rounded up and shipped quietly out of harm's way. Other foreign embassies and consulates made similar arrangements, with the French famously evacuating even the embassy dog. In the end it was just the Rwandan people left behind with a handful of foreign peacekeepers and aid workers to witness the spectacle of a society come completely undone.
Eleven years later, in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, a young man greeted me in quiet French. He came from Congo, where one of the most protracted and vicious conflicts was (and, to some extent, still is) playing out just three hours away. When the troubles started in Congo -- when rebels started mutilating civilians, when children were being kidnapped and taught to fight, and when husbands were forced to watch as their wives and daughters were systematically gang-raped -- there was no quick clean exit, no bureaucrats to help him escape. He had fled on foot to Rwanda, one of the poorest, most densely populated countries on earth, a country still recovering from its recent bloody history, and still preferable to the hell left behind him. He was waiting to make a refugee claim.
I was just waiting for an interview.
At this moment people from some 82 countries have similar stories to tell. There are the big conflicts of course, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon that rate time on the evening news. But there are also dozens more, in Chad, Sri Lanka and Haiti, the jungles of Colombia, and the forests of Congo -- all of which have ordinary people living in fear. Canada is an exception to a powerful rule; for the most part, this world of ours is not a safe place to be.
In Ghana, I am reminded of this a half-dozen times a day. Every taxi driver who proposes marriage, every street vendor who asks for help with a visa application, every desperate person who would give (or risk) anything to have a safe place to hide when politicians and warlords and world leaders fail them -- all of these people recognize much more acutely than I do the value of my little blue passport, and of the freedom of choice that it confers.
So, as we wait anxiously for news of family and friends in the world's hot spots, as we berate the government for moving too slowly to evacuate Beirut, even as we mourn the loss of eight of our own, all of us should take a moment to recognize what it means to be a Canadian in this world, and to appreciate the heartbreaking rarity of a safe place to go home to.
Erin A. Weir works for the Conflict Prevention Management and Resolution Department of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana.
(Back)
My most valuable possession is not a house, or a car, or an iPod. It is a little blue book with CANADA stamped across the front in neat gold print -- just 24 (formerly) blank pages and an unflattering picture: my Canadian passport.
I did nothing to earn it. It is mine by right, by accident of birth; a jackpot in the universal lottery. The official cost is just $87 CAD, but for millions of people it is completely, absolutely unattainable -- the stuff of dreams.
I used to think of my passport as a sort of all-purpose ticket to the world. But, the more time I spend filling up those little blank pages, the more I realize that the real value of my passport lies not in the places it takes me, but in the promise of where (and to what) I can always return. Adventure with an escape hatch: The world on a platter, with the option to buy, lease, or go home.
Still, it sometimes takes a crisis to remind me just how lucky I am. For days now the papers have carried front page stories of the mass exodus from Lebanon, hundreds of thousands of expatriate Canadians, Brits, Americans, all boarding boats and buses destined for safer places. Like clever rats fleeing a sinking ship, the world is mounting a total withdrawal. Of course, not everyone can leave.
I am expatriate Canadian. Born and raised in the quiet suburban monotony of Mississauga, Ont., I have spent time in some of the world's least monotonous places: Rwanda, Liberia, Democratic Republic of Congo, and now Ghana -- an oasis of relative calm in the otherwise tumultuous assortment of countries that make up West Africa.
Against the best advice of family and friends I have chosen a career -- a life -- that will surely take me again and again into the most difficult, dangerous regions of the world. But for all the hazards, this life is ultimately my choice. Every risk that I take and every hardship I endure is one that I have consciously taken on. I can be comfortable in the most uncomfortable of circumstances, safe in the knowledge that I am really just a tourist here. When the water runs out, or the bullets start to fly, I am one of the privileged few who will be shuttled off to safety. Home -- with all the stability and security that that entails -- is just a plane ride away.
Evacuation scenarios play themselves out again and again, often with little press coverage or international awareness. In the book Shake Hands With The Devil, Romeo Dallaire (force commander of the ill-fated UN mission to Rwanda and witness to the wholesale slaughter of thousands of civilians) wrote about the efficiency and professionalism with which Canadians were rounded up and shipped quietly out of harm's way. Other foreign embassies and consulates made similar arrangements, with the French famously evacuating even the embassy dog. In the end it was just the Rwandan people left behind with a handful of foreign peacekeepers and aid workers to witness the spectacle of a society come completely undone.
Eleven years later, in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, a young man greeted me in quiet French. He came from Congo, where one of the most protracted and vicious conflicts was (and, to some extent, still is) playing out just three hours away. When the troubles started in Congo -- when rebels started mutilating civilians, when children were being kidnapped and taught to fight, and when husbands were forced to watch as their wives and daughters were systematically gang-raped -- there was no quick clean exit, no bureaucrats to help him escape. He had fled on foot to Rwanda, one of the poorest, most densely populated countries on earth, a country still recovering from its recent bloody history, and still preferable to the hell left behind him. He was waiting to make a refugee claim.
I was just waiting for an interview.
At this moment people from some 82 countries have similar stories to tell. There are the big conflicts of course, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon that rate time on the evening news. But there are also dozens more, in Chad, Sri Lanka and Haiti, the jungles of Colombia, and the forests of Congo -- all of which have ordinary people living in fear. Canada is an exception to a powerful rule; for the most part, this world of ours is not a safe place to be.
In Ghana, I am reminded of this a half-dozen times a day. Every taxi driver who proposes marriage, every street vendor who asks for help with a visa application, every desperate person who would give (or risk) anything to have a safe place to hide when politicians and warlords and world leaders fail them -- all of these people recognize much more acutely than I do the value of my little blue passport, and of the freedom of choice that it confers.
So, as we wait anxiously for news of family and friends in the world's hot spots, as we berate the government for moving too slowly to evacuate Beirut, even as we mourn the loss of eight of our own, all of us should take a moment to recognize what it means to be a Canadian in this world, and to appreciate the heartbreaking rarity of a safe place to go home to.
Erin A. Weir works for the Conflict Prevention Management and Resolution Department of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre in Accra, Ghana.
(Back)
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