Thoughts on the death of Ottilia Chareka

Today I have to write one of the hardest articles I have ever been asked to write for the paper; it is on the death of Ottilia Chareka.

Just now reading her obituary makes my throat tighten and brings tears to my eyes. But I have never knowingly met Ottilia. We have been teachers at the same university campus, shopped in the same stores and walked the same streets but I did not know this amazing woman. This saddens me. It's a tangible pain in my chest; knowing that I will never get the chance to meet her.

Ottilia was murdered. She was killed in her home. The accused is her husband.

When I first heard this news I tried to link it to the struggle which I have recently sought to enlighten myself about; that of women, of feminism. My first reaction was to think that people are murdered everyday and it isn't because women and men are treated unequally. After reflecting on how I would summarize my thoughts into a digestible status update for Facebook I realized- This does relate to inequality between the sexes. How many men are murdered in their homes by their partners? It is the inequality that exists between men and women that lead some men to think they can physically harm and even kill women; for women are not their equals, not as valued, not as worthy of life and freedom from abuse.

How did this happen? How is it that female lives are not given the same value?

After reading more about Ottilia, my next question was-How did she let this happen? To that I already know the answer. Even the most powerful woman can feel powerless in an abusive relationship. With mouths to feed, a job, a life- you don't want to push the envelope and tear your own life apart just to be rid of what is bad in it. In our naivete, we never believe the people we love, or have loved, could possibly do us that most grievous harm; to take our lives, to leave our children motherless.

In asking this question I am not trying to blame the victim, I am trying to show that even the most brilliant among us cannot imagine the capability of human beings to do harm.

Ottilia is leaving behind five daughters ranging in age from 3 to 23, a body of work on social justice, and a path of perseverance and goodwill that is an example for us all.

St. FX University in Antigonish released a statement. See it here.

Ottilia was part of a short documentary called the Familiar Stranger by Antigonish native Cara Jones


A Memorial Fund for the Children of Ottilia Chareka has been established at the Bergengren Credit Union in Antigonish, account number 50623-112 and transit number 80143-839. For cheque writing purposes, this can be shortened to Children of Ottilia Chareka or Memorial Fund for Ottilia Chareka.

The Bergengren Credit Union can process donations as long as Ottilia's name is in the title.

Cheques can be sent to:

Faculty of Education,St. Francis Xavier University,PO Box 5000, Antigonish, NS B2G 2W5

or to

Minnie van de Wiel, Deposit Administration Clerk, Bergengren Credit Union, 257 Main Street Antigonish NS B2G 2C1.

Donations may also be made directly to the family:

Cheques can be made payable to Missy Chareka. Mail to: 135 College St., Antigonish, NS B2G 1X9

At this time when we are thinking about her death it is important for people to see her life and her work. Some of Ottilia Chareka's papers can be found at the following sites:

Teacher Education in Online Classrooms: An Inquiry into Instructors’ Lived Experiences

CIVIC DUTY: YOUNG PEOPLE’S CONCEPTIONS OF VOTING AS A MEANS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION

Let us walk the talk: Successes and struggles in implementing global education as a regular course at university level

Multicultural Education, Diversity, and Citizenship in Canada

Fantastic find in Sherbrooke

On Monday I had the good fortune of heading down to Sherbrooke, Nova Scotia to report on a council meeting. I arrived early and took a little walk around.

The first thing I focused on was this brightly coloured bridge that stood out so nicely against our last snow fall.

I stopped into the library to say hello. I worked there last spring teaching computer classes.

Carried on and shot the Post Office. In this area of Nova Scotia we have these lovely Post Offices in most small towns and villages, all built in the early 1900s.

It was a cold and windy day. Hopefully winter's last kick, but I doubt it. I was excited to see someone outside. I asked if I could take his picture and he was more than happy to oblige.

I inquired further and discovered that he and his friends were recording an album in the studio hidden within the unassuming St. Mary's River Lodge.

I was invited inside and got to see this trio of local High School students at work on a dream.

The inaptly named band, The Inadequacies.

I was thrilled to meet these young people and find art in the making on a cold winter day. There is art all around us here in these small communities. Some times it is hidden in the High School kid doodling in their scribbler at the back of the class and sometimes it is in a room at the top of the stairs of an unimposing looking country inn.

In the small village where I live, population 992, on my street alone we have Emmy Alcorn; the artistic director of a theater company who is also a singer/song writer, Jess and Greg, two singer songwriters and myself; a writer. There is talent here everywhere you look and it is inspiring to see these young people starting out artistically.

After a tour of the recording studio I headed out again into the cold afternoon and took a few more shots around town before heading into the the council meeting.

Sherbrooke Coffee shop,The Village Coffee Grind, where I would like to while away the hours.

The 'Old' Sherbrooke Village, which is the tourism draw of this quaint little spot.

It's amazing where life will lead you when you ask a few questions.

Why I'm single

I look out my window and see a man and a woman walking down the street. It's a sunny day on the cusp of spring. The snow has melted and the gravel is soft and forgiving under their footsteps. He's got a full head of white hair and is wearing a grey sweater. It's warm enough for just a sweater if you don't mind the cold and have the sun at your back. She's just at his shoulder; a deep red coat and hat pulled down over her ears against the wind. His arm is resting on her shoulder as they walk down the road.

I see them pass by the stone gate to the Manor Inn, pass the Catholic church and head down a small hill. How sweet, companionship in later years. But that arm on my shoulder; I would have cut it off by now from the discomfiture it caused me with it's uneven and continuously bouncing weight.

Cracked Facade

I couldn't hold it together this morning when I heard the description on the radio of the earthquake, landslides and tsunamis affecting Japan. I cried.

I had an e-mail this morning from Tets that he and his parents are fine; I am not even sure if he is in Japan or not, but that some members of his mothers family are yet to be accounted for.

Hannah saw me crying and asked me why I was crying if, as I had told her, Daddy, Baba and Jiji were alright. How could I explain to her that this event had taken me back in time to the major earthquake I had experienced when living in Taiwan- 21, September, 1999. Over 2,000 lives were lost and we lived with aftershocks on a daily basis for about six month afterward.

It was thrilling in a horror movie sort of way, living in Taiwan at the time. You never knew when the ground would move, for how long or how strong the movement would be. Is the shopping centre your in about to collapse? Is this the last latte you'll ever have in Starbucks?

One weekend several months after the earthquake I was staying in a hotel in Taipei. I often traveled to Taipei from the smaller city of Hsin-chu to have a weekend where I could access western civilization; Starbucks, TGIFridays, English bookstores and English signs. That night in a 20 story highrise hotel I felt the gentle sway of the building like the proverbial baby in the tree top. My first thought was that no one knew where I was. I had not told anyone of my plans to go to Taipei that weekend. If the building went down, I would disappear forever. I turned on the TV and tried not to think about it.

In the Taiwan earthquake the epicenter was mid-island, but due to shoddy and prosecution-able construction practices, high rise buildings in Taipei, over 300 km from the epicenter, went down.

On another occasion I was meeting a friend in Taipei at a department store coffee shop/bookstore. As she was coming to meet me on the 10th floor, the lights started to sway and all the Chinese, usually a very loud bunch, became silent. In the midst of that silence I got a phone call; my friend was in the stairwell coming up to meet me and the lights had gone out. I answered the phone, and she said, “Earthquake?” I said, “Earthquake.”

She arrived at my table about 5 minutes later and after the Chinese all vacated the coffee shop in anticipation of more tremors, we decided to stay. It was the quietest place in all of Taiwan.

I guess I never really thought that this experience had an effect on me but today my facade has finally cracked from the stress fractures it sustained during that earthquake almost 12 years ago.

I was going to the hospital today for some blood work and decided that I would ask for a psyche consult while I was there. I got my family doctor, a lady who I really like, and felt better after having someone to talk to about how I was feeling.

During the discussion I also flashed back onto the Asian Tsunami. There are Tsunamis in Japan now too.

I was living in Bangkok at the time, December 26, 2004. It was a horrible time. The news was worse every day. Everybody knew someone affected. It was Christmas break and most foreigners who lived in Thailand, my friends and acquaintances, were taking their holidays in Southern Thailand. I was in Bangkok, at one of the Irish pubs in which my partnered played in a band. I remember watching the news break on the TV screens. There was silence and wonder as the death toll numbers started to come in.

As far as I know, I didn't know anyone directly involved in the disaster. In the days following the Tsunami my school started trying to call all the teachers, 90 plus, that worked at our school, to make sure they were all safe and accounted for. One teacher could not be reached. He was the biggest white man I had ever seen, he was over 6'6, had a shaved head and a gap toothed smile. If you didn't know him you would surely be scared by him but I often rode the skytrain with him after work and we had some nice chats as he ducked down to clear the ceiling of the train. He was a Brit and had come to our school to teach last year.

We, the teachers at Chulalongkorn Go International school, were all worried. Less than a year before another friend of ours had not come back from his beach holiday. That was Paul, I used to go for drinks with him and some of the other teachers from Go at Texas bar, on one of the small sois in Siam Square, Bangkok. Paul, had slipped in the bathroom of his rented beach bungalow, hit his head, and died. He was 28. Kimber, the teacher now missing, was 26.

The first week back at school after the earthquake was a relief. Kimber walked in for his scheduled classes and was surprised to see everyone's relieved faces. Over the holiday he had moved and when you move in such a transient world as Bangkok your phone number does not move with you.

Our school made it through without any losses to the Tsunami; no teachers, no students were lost but that was not the case at most other International Schools in Bangkok and the stories of loss spread through the teaching community. It was a grievous time. And now they will be searching for bodies in Japan, finding unrecognizable remains and living with death for many months to come.

It's been a hard morning, reliving all those terrifying moments, the months of grief and uncertainty and knowing it is all happening again and will continue to happen now and again in different places and different times. I felt bad when the earthquakes hit Haiti and Chile, but Asia is my second home. I have people there, I have lived through these things there and it ties my throat in knots. So I did the only thing I know how to do to fix this feeling; write.

Feminism, wrote a blog about it, wanna read it, here it goes

I have been thinking about this day for the past few weeks and have so much to say that I am unsure if it will all come out right or end up as goop.

International Women's Day first came to my attention last year, on it's 99th anniversary. What female life had I been living that I was unaware of this day, this powerful movement, this obligation that I have as a woman and as a mother of two females to fight against the inequality over half the planet faces due to what is between their legs? This year, on the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day I am going to start educating myself on the equality that we as humans deserve, righting what injustices I can, and promoting feminism by it's most basic definition: equal rights for all.

Today, like most women, I have been working. My children were under the care of other women. While at work I received an e-mail asking for a notice to be placed in the community calendar section of the newspaper. It started with:
Dear Sir,
I would like to ask.....

At first I chuckled to myself and then I came to see the not so funny underlying message; this woman, for it was a woman who wrote the e-mail, assumed that the paper, an instrument of power and knowledge in the world, was controlled by men. I decided a reply was in order and fashioned the following:
Hi Anne,
I just wanted to make a comment on your mail. It was addressed : Dear Sir- There is not one man who works on the production of The Guysborough Journal. Just a friendly note on International Women's Day.
I hope your supper is a success.
Regards,
Lois Ann Dort
production coordinator and writer


This is entirely true. There is not one man who works in our office. The graphic designer is a woman. The office admin/circulation manager is a woman. The accountant is a woman. The editor is a woman. The advertising manager is a woman. We women work together and put out a local paper every week. It is not a feminist paper, or a fashion rag; just an everyday community paper that happens to be staffed by women.

Tossing this in my brain this afternoon I started to feel that I had never really experienced the professional inequalities that are so often cited in feminist tracks. I have often worked for women; highly placed women in both the public and private sectors. But then again I took a look at our papers' masthead. The first name listed is that of a man. I have never met him, never talked to him and never had any e-mail contact with this person yet his name appears above all the subsequent female names; the names that produce the paper every week. He is the publisher, he is the money and is he the real power? I truly don't know.

There has been a plethora of International Women's Day posts on Facebook today and I want to share a few here that I found enlightening. The first is Daniel Craig's drag take on International Women's Day.The character he portrays is atrocious in terms of human equality but despite myself I have always loved James Bond. It's interesting to say the least to see this man take a stand for women.


Next up is TED. TED Women. This is a short but interesting discussion about the new feminism and I find it more inclusive than the feminism that I have encounter in women who are a generation older than me.


And now I am back to commenting on Facebook posts that I have read on this important day. The first made me cringe and the second gave me hope.

The first post was from a former student of mine who wrote: ALL TIX SOLD OUT! CYA TONITE BITCHES♥♥
This use of the word bitches in a joking/loving manner by young women drives me crazy. I can not accept whatever justification that might be made for calling one another this horrible derogatory word. In the past I have seen other women post, and ask others to re-post, a rant declaring themselves to be Bitches; declaring their strength and take no shit attitude. This isn't being a bitch; this is getting your due. This is what we should have. If you want it call yourself a feminist not a bitch. Women will not win anything by adopting these negative stereotypes.

The other post was a picture of five girls I know from our local High School. I am re-posting it here with permission.

In this picture I see so much potential. Women in nontraditional roles, women who feel free to be princesses, and women together as friends. I love this picture and all it represents. I could not be prouder of the young women at our school.

CBC Doc Zone aired a documentary called: The F word: who wants to be a feminist?
I do. And I hope everyone else does to.

And finally, I had a media moment today which I missed due to the fact that I was at work. Last week I sent an e-mail in to CBC Mainstreet asking them to play Sisters Are Doin' It For Themselves by Aretha Franklin and Annie Lennox for all the women out there, who like me, are doing it for themselves. I have always loved this song and cheesy as it may sound, it did give me the sense that I could do anything as a woman in this world. And what's more, it is a vision of feminism that does not exclude men. I am not a believer in the old women's lib phrase: a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. I like men. I have a lot of male friends. I don't feel I have to exclude them or bring them down to pull myself up. There is room in this world for equality for all not just one or the other sex.

There are still other things buzzing around in my head but I'll end this post by letting Aretha and Annie have the last word.

Day tripping in Canso

Today I had one official and one unofficial reason for traveling to Canso. The unofficial one was the weather; a bright sunny day would be great to get a photo journal around town. The official reason was to interview the Health Minister who is in Canso today at Eastern Memorial Hospital to discuss the John Ross report and the future of the emergency room at this hospital-or so I assume.

On the 50 minute drive down to Canso from Guysborough I saw lots of interesting things that I could have taken pictures of but as usual there was a car behind me and I did not want to get rear ended.

Once in town I headed to the new fish plant to see what sea-cucumbers would look like in production. Outside of the plant I saw a truck with pink ice hanging off the tailgate and a spreading pink ooze on the gravel and ice in the parking lot. I walked up to some fish boxes and saw … a couple hundred pounds of frozen gelatinous cucumbers.

I have seen sea-cucumbers before, in their live state, and was a little disconcerted to see them bleeding in boxes on a freezing day in Canso.

Inside the plant I asked for the plant manager hoping to get a picture for the paper but she didn't consent saying there was nothing anyone would want to see in the paper happening there today.

The floor in the processing plant was full of an oozing slime with occasional surreal pink blood that was not exactly blood; not in the terrestrial sense. There were about 6 lines of workers with 4 or so to a line with what looked like clipboards mounted on a drafting table. Clipped to the boards were the sea-cucumbers which were being flayed; IE processed. It looked so much like something out of a 1960's industrial promotion film that I almost laughed.

The workers wore bright blue aprons and one of the men complained that although the apron was fresh on Tuesday, there was no amount of washing that could get the pink blood stain out of it now on Friday.

The smell was fiercely obtrusive as well. All I could think about was a comment a co-worker once made to me about the smell of the fish plant wafting over our archaeological dig site on Grassy Island, just offshore from the town of Canso, “That, my dear, is the smell of money.”

From the plant I went on a little drive and took some pictures.

Up to the camp road where I used to depart for work each day over to Grassy Island,

to the town office,

out behind the museum

and down a few streets to capture some local flavour.

Anchors and boats weighted in snow.

I stopped in at the newest restaurant in town, The Dockside Grill,and found what I was looking for- chocolate cheesecake. The Dockside always has great cakes. There I chatted with the manager and got the gossip on the local celebrity, J.P.Courmier. None of which I will write here as I hope he'll grant me an interview at some future date.

Then I headed out to the hospital where I am now siting waiting to interview the health minister; although I don't really know about what and I would rather be out taking more photos.

Here is a nicely arranged 'boy, we were caught off guard by swine flu' station.

I have never been in this hospital before. Just in past the front desk they have a trophy case with all the trophy's they have won over the years in the Canso Regatta. There are also some newspaper clippings and a telegram detailing the closing of the outpost hospital station here in Canso by the Red Cross in 1951. There are pictures of the old hospital too. The building- I think- now houses the local daycare centre next to the inevitably closing high school. There are several clippings from the former incarnation of the local paper called, The Guysborough County Advocate, from 1948.

Just past the trophy case and down the hall to the left is a large painting done in a style reminiscent of Alan Siliboy.

A very nice piece. And there is a plaque commemorating the service of a former doctor.

They should be out of meeting in 10 minutes. Let's hope the minister has time for me after all the time I have invested in her today.

Saw the minister for all of 8 minutes but that is how it goes. Listening to her discuss how hospital budgets will be frozen this year, I wonder if this will be enough; probably not.

After that I stopped in at the MLAs office which is in the old Post Office. It's a great building like our old Post Office in Guysborough. It has had many incarnations since it's postal days and some nice art work on the Bell Aliant building next door.

Then back to Guysborough with a few photo pit stops.

My favorite derelict house in Hazel Hill; I always envision it as a writers retreat.

My favourite road; also in Hazel Hill (for those out of the loop; it is the community just outside of Canso).

The Queensport light. My uncle once kept the light here, now no one does.

A splash of RED on the way home.

One of my American uncles bought this house years ago with dreams of a summer home but other projects closer to home caught his attention and he has been renovating my great- grandparents house in Templeton for years. You can see that her bones are still beautiful.

And yes, I am indeed a Dort from Dorts Cove.

And it is still winter.


I stop at my dad's to pick up H-Bean.

The brook at my father's house.

Dad's wood, tractor and barn.

Then it is off to the store to buy a birthday present for a party tomorrow. Home for the fiddle and music. To the babysitters to pick up S-girl. And the Guysborough Intervale to Eddie's for fiddle. Long day.