translink – discovery

a beautiful day

Since I got back from Uganda, my team and I have been working together to fundraise money to send back to Busolwe, Uganda, to continue the kindergarten project that we started there. Today, the school is a registered primary school, and offers five different grades including our original Kindergarten. It is called Mango Grove School. The advantage that our school offers for our students is that it is attached to the community library, which means that teachers have more resources to teach the students, encouraging them to be creative and love reading. We have raised over $3,000 with Cedar Grove Elementary School since last year, and today we did our second presentation at Irwin Park Elementary School.

Our presentation is 30 minutes long and includes pictures and video clips of a few of the things we did in Busolwe for the Kindergarten project. Our presentation script tells the stories of the children who live in Busolwe. We want to share the story of the students in Busolwe with students here, to give them a peek into the lives of children halfway around the world. The purpose of sharing their stories is not just to fundraise money to support the school in Busolwe. We also hope to inspire some students to be thankful for what they have and perhaps one day also go abroad to interact with other cultures.

All the students were so attentive during our presentation– they really enjoyed hearing about daily life and school of the people we knew in Busolwe. We showed them the pictures of the classroom before we painted and renovated it, right before the picture of our completed classroom, and their response was so heartwarming… they started to applaud. We then showed an even more recent picture of the classes set up there now, and it made me so happy to hear them “oooh” and “ahhh” at the progress that Mango Grove School has made. All in all, I think that knowing that they have a story of Africa that is different from the story of poverty and disease that many charities depict is fulfilling enough for me.

Today was a beautiful day. The weather was the perfect backdrop to the many acts of kindness and wonderful interactions I shared with friends and strangers all day long. Vancouver can be such a wonderful place to live in. On my way home, a girl about my age was crying at the bus stop and was afraid to approach my bus driver for directions. She was clearly lost, physically and emotionally. My driver encouraged her to calm down, then promised that he would help her get to where she needed to go, right after giving her a free ticket transfer. I think if it weren’t for this kind driver, she would have been wandering around lost, all night. She was just waiting for someone to reach out their hand to her. Apparently it was her first time taking the bus, ever, so clearly she needed to get away from somewhere quick. I hope that her night turns out okay. At least she knows that a stranger cares enough to listen to her and promise to get her help if she needed it.

It’s been a long week. I haven’t seen my close friends in so long. There are so many overdue coffees and lunches, it’ll be such a relief when I finish my exams. At least then I won’t need to worry about them on top of teaching and trying to accumulate enough work hours.

familiarity

It is when staring off into space that I feel most connected with myself. On the bus, I do this. It is as if my mind is thinking on another dimension, and in the moment that I slow down and just sit and listen to myself, I realize how focused I have been on the physical reality of the world. It is easy to ignore thoughts– but never the emotional ripples (sadness, yearning, nostalgia, hope)– in the grinding pace of daily schedules. Perhaps ignore implies too much control (should/could be misplace, forget, disregard, instead?).

These are the tenses that define us now: past tense, back then; future tense, not yet. We live in the small window between them, the space we’ve only recently come to think of as still, and really it’s no smaller than anyone else’s window. (Atwood, Moral Disorder)

Buses mean a lot to me. It’s been constant (the lines always run along the same streets, minus a few detours here and there). When I snap back to reality, I realize that I’ve been staring at a row of grey, plastic loops that thousands of people hold onto throughout the week. Each of those people in their own worlds, holding on until they let go and ring or buzz the bell and leave and touch the next thing. It is that connection that I love about bus systems, in all the cities I’ve been to, but especially my Vancouver; That people sit in a seat that another person has sat, with a completely different story (or eerily similar, as chance often humours so). That people from all different cultures and countries and personal backgrounds are on one bus, each going to a similar destination (same bus line, after all), yet lead such different lives based on tiny nuances.; That busses pass through so many different neighbourhoods, shaped differently by History (and continuously so by different stories); That so many personalities come together on a bus, reacting and acting according to how they have done so in their past, now reflecting and demonstrating to everyone else what ‘normal’ should be, or not; That commuters form a little society of their own, representative of the greater society.

And I snap out of that moment, of relishing all the things I appreciate about being part of a city in the bloodstream system called Translink, and I start compulsively checking my Blackberry, changing my songs on my iPod every few minutes, texting, reading, checking Facebook, and it’s back to living in the ‘now’, as if I zoomed back into my (irrelevant, small, egotistical, shallow, little) world and that holistic moment of appreciation and feeling of membership (or city-zenship, pun intended) passes.

[I got off the bus, and]

…[t]he sun is piercing through the pouring drizzle of rain. Not pouring rain, not drizzling rain. A downpour of floating drizzles of rain. These sun’s rays reflect off the fiery leaves of the trees along the street. Today has been characteristic of Vancouver autumn: waking up to a warm cocoon (my bedsheets unconsciously, increasingly more wrapped around me throughout the night), fighting the urge to stay in bed all day, grabbing a quick coffee in my to-go cup (Vancouver is a green city), speed walking to the bus stop in the morning rain… fast forward to the chilly afternoon, the downpour of rain (I resolved to baking cookies and making myself a cup of tea by this point in my day), and finally the piercing rays of sun to wish us goodbye and a happy dreary next five months. In the time it took me to write this paragraph, the sun has disappeared behind more rain clouds.

—-

What madness is, a seemingly random collection of objects and places we see in our daily city lives, represents our familiarity with a place that we recognize as home. Landmarks, to an extent, are only really recognized by those who live within that place. We see the same park and bus benches, new and abandoned bus stops, buildings and street lamps, littered throughout the city (/who doesn’t sigh with relief while confirming that the bus stop bench at Third/ and Arbutus is still there… [Harris, The town is so damned rational]); these objects intersect the lives of Vancouverites. (Chiang, 2011)

“Without familiarity, your rational town becomes less so. In contrast/complement, without familiarity, outsiders seek rationality but only find the irrational.” (Duffy, 2011)