Liz hails from Philly. She was in town last weekend with her daughter.
“I love it,” she said in the park. “And all the Canada flags. You know we can’t fly ours any more because the MAGA people have taken the flag over.”
Just another fissure between societies. I told her the Freedom Convoy anti-vaccine rebels had tried that during the pandemic, absconding the flag and sticking it all over trucks bound for Ottawa. But we got it back. Now we’re all just happy not to be, (no offence, Liz), Americans.
Dennis Lefebvre’s also a Yank. “I live across the ditch,” he told me, as we met in a big yellow aluminum building near the mouth of the canal.
But he’s no tourist. He’s been diverting used, repaired bicycles to this side of the river since the Trump administration “took a hatchet” to the group in Buffalo that had been giving them to farm workers, refugees and migrants.
“He doesn’t understand they’d make fine Americans,” he says. “Trump doesn’t realize that everyone in America, as in Canada, came from somewhere else. They need hope. We give it.”
We were standing in a hopeful place. It was also one of chaos. Behind us a senior citizen in shorts whipped around on a noisy towmotor, stacking pallets of former banana boxes above our heads, all of them bearing hand-written Post-it notes. The forklift’s back-up beeper was deafening.
Six feet away two women hauled fabric from bags, laying it out on eight-foot tables for inspection. These were old bedsheets from the Prince of Wales Hotel, Queen’s Landing and Great Wolf Lodge.
Behind us, piled vertically were rows of metal hospital beds, some brown, others grey, mattresses attached. Above them, shelves with wheelchairs and medical equipment bristling with tubes that Brian Springle brings in from area hospitals, old folks’ homes and clinics.
Another senior roared by with an electric pallet mover, heading for the sewing room where Glenda Jarvis was marshalling a squad of women on machines.
They were turning those bedsheets and ripped hotel bathrobes into slings for the Ukrainian army, personal bags for new mothers in Liberia, baby blankets for Cuban infants and pads for Ugandan girls so they could go to school.
There are also tiny white outfits made for the neonatal units of local hospitals. Nurses put them on babies that don’t make it.
Above us, up a dodgy staircase, Darl Boehler stood undaunted amid sacks of eyeglasses. Thousands of them. Collected by area Lions clubs, they were being cleaned, sorted by size, put under a lensometer, graded by prescription and packaged.
One whole wall was full of bags labelled “dirty” — specs a crew of people would take home and carefully wash in the kitchen sink.
Adjacent was the computer room with bins of hard drives, piles of keyboards, mice galore and laptops in various stages of surgery. Downstairs, outside the loading doors and beside the two white vans donated by Rotarians, more retired, unrelenting men were stuffing a 40-foot seagoing container.
And overseeing it all, the towering tiny figure of Mary van der Zalm. Eighty-seven and eternal.
This is the Niagara Warehouse of Hope. Mary and her squeeze, Ted, started in their garage almost 40 years ago. She now operates out of the big structure a crew of believers built in a single day and ships containers around the world with the help of at least 150 volunteers.
It costs ten grand a pop to send one of those things. Not a dollar comes from government. And not a shred of fabric, a torn jacket, a metal bed frame, a broken USB cord or plastic milk bag is wasted. (The bags are shredded, braided and made into hot-climate mattresses.)
The last container went to Guatemala days ago, where Mary’s son travels each year to build water wells for the poor. A woman just wrote a cheque for another load that will be headed for victims of Vladimir Putin’s war. A Toronto man is on his way to Cuba to meet a shipment landing there.
Lately the world needs more hope. More Canada. More Mary.
Garth Turner is a NOTL resident, journalist, author, wealth manager and former federal MP and minister. garth@garth.ca
