Habitat for Humanity, 4200 Kingston Rd.

I have had this post in the works since early February, but since it is not materializing as I hoped it would, for lack of time on my part, I will just post this whole thing at once, and go back and elaborate on each day’s tasks as time goes by (again, if I actually GET the time)!

Habitat for Humanity, to provide a definition, is a not-for-profit organization whose goal is to build decent homes for those living in poverty housing, with an emphasis on the fact that they are not a charity; they do not just give to the poor, but they teach them how to create their own communities, and work hand-in-hand with the recipients of these homes to give them the skills they need to take care of their homes, and truly feel a sense of pride, independence, and ownership for the places where they will live.

Habitat is an international organization which has been in operation since 1976, not only building houses throughout Canada and the U.S., but also creating communities abroad, providing people with the opportunity to learn about building houses anywhere from Africa to Alaska.

If you follow my blog, you would know that I volunteer for Habitat, and have done so since May 2006. As a volunteer with them, I have now worked at three buildsites in Toronto, (McLevin Woods, Lakeshore, and 4200 Kingston Rd) and find this experience truly rewarding, not only for the tasks I accomplish each time I go, but also for the specific group of crew leaders I worked for (and now, in effect, with) at these sites. I have happened to inadvertently follow them through the completion of McLevin Woods over to 4200 Kingston Road, and I am glad I have, as they continue to dedicate themselves whole-heartedly to their work, the homes, project management, the recipients and the volunteers.

Since January 26th, I have been working once a week (almost every week) at 4200 Kingston Rd, and I TRY to get there on time every day, which has gotten progressively earlier as the year has unfolded, from 10am the first day there this year, to the shocking time of 8:10am this week, in light of my recent ‘promotion’ to crew leader. It seems as though I was already able to become a crew leader, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the only thing holding me back was that the specific person (*ahem!) who doles out the orange shirts was waiting for me to get there at the time the crew leaders SHOULD be there in the morning. (grrr!) Although I do appreciate the recognition, and will do all I can to live up to, and learn up to my position in the orange-shirted ranks.

If you look back through my blog, you will find each day’s events posted as an entry, so that the text is broken up. To be taken directly to the posts, you can click on the months at the side, and find the post corresponding to the date. The posts will not be too hard to find, as I don’t write in this blog a lot.
Without further ado, here are the dates where you will find my Habitat postings:
January 26th
February 2nd
February 9th
February 16th
March 2nd
March 9th
March 16th
March 23rd
March 29th
April 13th
April 20th
May 4th
May 11th
May 18th
May25th
June 1st
June 8th

June 22nd
June 23rd
June 30th
July 7th

Dust if you must

A poem my Mother just e-mailed me. It's short and sweet, and a good way to bring in the New Year. It was penned by Rose Milligan, and more than that, she made it up, too!
Enjoy!

Dust if you must,
but wouldn't it be better to
paint a picture or write a letter,
bake a cake or plant a seed,
ponder the difference between want and need?

Dust if you must, but there's not much time,
with rivers to swim and mountains to climb,
music to hear and books to read,
friends to cherish and life to lead.

Dust if you must, but the world's out
there with the sun in your eyes,
the wind in your hair, a flutter of snow,
a shower of rain.
This day will not come around again.

Dust if you must, but bear in mind,
old age will come and it's not kind.
And when you go -- and go you must --
you, yourself will make more dust!


Maybe it's not what you gather, but what you scatter
that tells what kind of life you have lived.

What is it "to learn"?

To be a carpenter takes more than just owning tools and having a workshop; like any successful professional, being a carpenter takes passion and drive. It takes a commitment to learn and improve.

I was talking with a woman last night, and her story helped to explain this one. She started out as a neurologist in China, where, at the time she graduated, you worked in the hospitals. Medicine was considered a service, and you couldn’t make much money from it. She worked in a hospital in Beijing, and was talking about her experiences there.

She loved it – all the time there were new and different cases, not like in a private practice in Canada, where you see the same people every day, maybe a little cough, some common sicknesses – no. In this hospital, there were many different cases, some that not even the chief of the department had seen before. That’s what she liked about working there; you were always learning! The chief was a professor as well, and sometimes you get doctors from the United States coming in to give seminars, so you were always learning! She loved these challenges, much more than doing the same thing all the time. She loved learning new things, and bending her mind around new challenges.

Twenty years ago (in China at least, if not in medicine in general) neurology was NOT a big thing; most of the profession was focusing on the heart. She was focusing on the brain and the neurons. She emphasized that one of the key points in her learning and her positive experience in the hospital was her ability to be flexible. She was able to learn to think laterally to solve problems, and that helped her to learn a lot.

It was an environment there of learning, yes, but the stakes were high. She made a point of discussing the importance of residency before you could open a practice. If you don’t have the residency, you don’t have the experience; you can’t think in your own way, and you can’t solve problems. You can’t always just translate from the textbook. To highlight the importance of experience, and being able to solve problems outside of the textbook, she used a very potent example. One time a patient came in while she was still learning, and she diagnosed him as having bleeding in the brain. He had lost consciousness, as she said, it was deep. So she went “the textbook route”. She did a spinal tap to get some blood, to see if it was dirty or clean. Se was also doing emergency treatment … but he died before she could finish. What the chief of the department said to her afterwards (he came in after the spinal tap, but before he died) was that you did everything you were supposed to do – you did everything right. The only thing is that if there is bleeding in the brain the pressure will be so great that to remove blood from the bottom of the spinal cord will reduce pressure in the spinal cord, and the greater pressure in the skull will kill the person.

She was so upset by this whole situation – it was a human life at stake, and no-one told her to do things that way, she did things by the textbook way, but the lesson she learned there was that the textbook way is not always the way to do things. She learned right there that there is no substitute for experience; no substitute for someone more experienced than you are looking over everything you do, correcting you, guiding you. You need that interaction in the beginning, or you may not learn very important lessons, not just cased based, but in how to solve problems, and how to think.

Someone comes into the hospital with a condition that no-one knows. As the resident, you do the best you can to diagnose the patient. The Chief of the department can go in and look at the patient too, they will check all the tests you did, and look at the patient, and give their opinion. It still may not be right, but they will still have more experience than you. They will have seen many more iterations of different diseases and conditions, and may be able to diagnose them better than you can.

Being a carpenter, like being a doctor … or more accurately being an apprentice, like being a resident, takes a constant yearning to learn and challenge yourself more to reach for new things and new experiences, new chances to grow. Once you stop learning in any particular job, it’s time to move on.

Garbage in, Garbage out

I am interested in health food, and eating healthy. There are a few contributors to this interest, and I have written on this subject before. The SPECIFIC spark to this blog entry comes from a young woman discussing a media-diagnosed disease; orthorexia, and her reaction to it.

I may never be as healthy as this woman (and people like her may hang their heads and say "that's a shame" but read the whole entry first!), but I am interested in that kind of diet, and I am behind not only her health-conscious eating decisions, but also her reaction to society's diagnosis.

If I may contribute to one of her comments, convenience food has been a huge contributor to the malnutrition of our society. One factor I know about is our magnesium deficiency. Far be it for me to not at least look something up before I blog it, I found a book "The Magnesium Factor" by Mildred S. Seelig and Andrea Rosanoff which talks about magnesium being refined out of our foods, and not being added back in in the remixing (yet another reason why processed foods are not good for you!) Magnesium deficiency means that you are more stressed, your muscles are not relaxed, you are at a higher risk for things like heart disease, and potentially even obesity.

When you eat foods out you can almost guarantee that they were made using refined flours and sugars; even the "healthy, whole wheat stuff". If it's not a specific organic/vegetarian/health food venue, their health food is mostly just advertising.

Now to the media, tell me that all your health food advertising isn't a "trend". Tell me that this explosion of awareness of health isn't purely a product of your marketing departments; the same departments that will advertise whole wheat on Tuesday, will advertise a cereal on Wednesday that, with 2-3% more sugar, could not be legally called cereal, but would instead need to be called candy.

Is it any wonder then that there are intelligent, health conscious people out there, who, even if they do not conduct the research themselves, and re invested in the research that takes place, and are interested in making more actively healthy decisions in the ways that they eat.

This week, I ate out a few times, actually more than I normally do. So let's go through that, so I a)don't pretend to be perfect, and b)prove that I am aware of myself and my eating habits. On Monday night I went for the first time to Live - at Spadina and Dupont. The food there was so good that it WILL be a repeat. And was that alcohol on the menu? Wow, if I wasn't going to class afterwards, I would have probably indulged, as the company was as good as the food!

On Thursday night, I went out to the Bombay Bhel, which has a fairly healthy menu, but it's not vegan, and no doubt they use white flour to make their naan.

On Friday for lunch and dinner I went out. On Friday, I was cornered into a meal, but I did not say no to it. I can't even write it down here, but needless to say, it was one of the corporate pimps of the food industry.

Ahem. On Friday night, I had broccoli and chicken, with some sort of sauce, and sticky rice at Spring Rolls, and a glass of wine.

So, I ranged from Live vegan valhalla, to food prostitution in a week. What a range!
Well before we met my stepdad, my Mother had cut beef and pork out of our diet. That was a health decision; not a religious one, but one day I had a hamburger, and shortly after threw up. It wasn't even worth it. It wasn't good. So, I do not eat beef ever, and I only ever eat pig on my pizza. But I do enjoy seafood and poultry, alcohol and coffee, chocolate and ice cream, but all in moderation. It's good to monitor what you eat. But then again, it would also be good if I had more walnuts and water! Oh well, nobody's perfect!