Soon after that job came along, so did another. I met a woman, Sandra Cairns, at a dinner party given by Christine. When Sandra asked me what I did, I told her I was looking for work.
“Come work for me,” she said. Sandra operates a small business organizing the relocation of employees transferred to new jobs in different cities, and she wanted someone who could drive and was computer savvy. I had to tell Sandra that I had lost my licence for three months (from the drunk-driving charge) and had never used the Internet.
But something about my story must have intrigued her, and soon I found myself—neatly dressed in new clothes given to me by Justin and Sacha—sharing an office with five other women upstairs in an old house in downtown Ottawa. This was not just a generous birthday present but one more step on the road to recovery. I now started caring about my appearance again, after years of not really minding how I looked.
Here I was, arranging the lives of other people when I could barely arrange my own. There was something decidedly comic about that. But I soon found that I had a knack for matching people’s requests to reality, getting children into new schools, finding ballet classes in Ottawa, taking the wives of senior executives on tours of the city and showing them where to shop. I now had a reason for getting up in the morning. I learned to use the computer and the Internet, I met interesting people and I loved the coffee breaks with my fellow workers. I was particularly grateful for the kindness of all who worked with me at Dada Destination Services.
Sacha, who was still watching over my finances, had assured me that the children’s allowance to me—for Sacha and Justin had inherited all of Pierre’s money—would not be altered by anything I earned. The wages would simply be icing on the cake.
I was so grateful for the freedom my wages gave me. Finally, I had enough money to go to the theatre and to travel. I had my life back, though I did discover that skin-deep tolerance of mental disorders remained. When I applied for general insurance, I was obliged to reveal that I suffered from bipolar illness; this was enough to ensure that I would be rejected for any long-term disability coverage.
My road to recovery was also marked by volunteering, and I would begin to see and understand the value of setting my own problems aside and helping to solve the problems of others. Fresh, clean water is a precious resource that we take for granted in this country. Some of the happiest times in my life—at Harrington Lake, Newboro Lake, at my grandmother’s place by the ocean—have been by water. But clean water is in short supply around the world, and it made perfect sense that access to water would be my next mission.
My interest in water goes back to the time of the 1976 United Nations Conference on Human Settlements at Jericho Park in Vancouver, which I, as the prime minister’s wife, helped to convene. Pierre was hosting world government leaders; I was hosting on the non-governmental side. Of all the duties I performed during my seven years as the prime minister’s wife, this was one of the most important.
I was already interested in water and the crucial role it plays in people’s lives. I had travelled widely at Pierre’s side and I had seen with my own eyes that often the difference between a community that thrived and one that didn’t was the quality of the water—and access to it. Margaret Mead, the celebrated American cultural anthropologist, was there at that conference (she would die, sadly, two years later), and I was thrilled to meet her, for I had studied her work at university. So was Barbara Ward, the British writer and economist who believed that wealthy countries had a moral obligation to help poor countries. For her, redistributing wealth and conserving resources were linked, and she argued that the future of the planet depended on it.
I remember Barbara, frail and standing in the cold and the rain with a glass of dirty water in her hand—a prop as she talked to reporters about the dearth of good water in the world. Barbara said something most important as the paparazzi milled all around me.
“You should be like a pot of honey to these bees,” she said in an aside to me. “But give them real nourishment.” Barbara was saying: use your name and celebrity to spread the word on water. It took some time, but I finally did take her advice. Over the years, I had read articles about droughts and water shortages, about the parts of the world in which women have to walk many miles each day in search of clean water for their children. Then one day, many years later, when I was a field-trip mom accompanying Ally and her class on a visit to the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, I saw a stall with photographs describing the work done by WaterCan. I was told that this Canadian charity, which got its start in 1987, partners with local organizations in Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Kenya, bringing to villages clean water, basic sanitation and education about hygiene.
In these parts of the world, water is women’s work, and women are also expected to ration the supply and take turns keeping away animals that might spoil the source. Some of these women must walk many miles to get clean water, which they then carry back home in containers perched on their heads. All this time devoted to fetching water eats up time, time that would be better spent educating their children, cooking, running a business, educating themselves or in well-deserved rest. Alone and vulnerable to rape on these water-related sorties, these women are prime targets for men with guns and Jeeps. Digging a new well in a village, as WaterCan does, transforms that village and empowers the women in it, helping them out of poverty.
Here, at last, was the “nourishment” that Barbara Ward had had in mind for me. Joining forces with WaterCan appealed to me greatly, and in 1996 I did just that—I started giving interviews and making speeches about the plight of the world’s one billion people who lack access to clean water.
When Michel died, then executive director Nicole Bosley helped me to answer some of the many letters of sympathy that came to me. And in 2002, WaterCan invited me to become their honorary president, an offer I was proud to accept.
I have taken three trips to Africa to see for myself the work that WaterCan does. Several years ago, I took my daughter-in-law Sophie with me, a CTV camera crew in tow. We saw children with the distended bellies of protein deficiency, and women rising before dawn each day for the long trudge to collect water. I saw wells surrounded by animals defecating into the water, which was then borne back on women’s heads in cans. Grandmothers, I was told, dipped a finger into the water when a baby was born and gave it to the infant to suck; if the infant tolerated the water, then that child would survive. I have been struck by the incredible drudgery of these women and the uncomplaining way in which they lived their lives.
I now redoubled my efforts for WaterCan, exploring with them ways of raising money for hand pumps (so basic that their upkeep requires no sophisticated technology), for concrete latrines and for containers to catch and store water in the rainy season. On a second visit to Uganda, I found that a woman in a remote village had been much affected by the well we had installed there. She had been to Kampala to learn to read and write, and had become the village secretary.
“What difference,” I asked her, “is water making to the people?”
“The children are no longer dying,” she replied, adding that since many more boys and girls thrived, they now needed books and pencils and soccer balls. (Though WaterCan reserves its funds exclusively for water and sanitation, we passed on their request to other organizations.)
Another woman, now spared daily walks to distant water holes, had begun to grow and sell vegetables. With the money she made, she bought herself a sewing machine and was making clothes for other villagers. Clean water not only improved the health of villages, it empowered the women.
For the first time in my life, I was using my name and my curious status as a celebrity to some important end. I continue to raise money for WaterCan, to host fundraising dinners, to speak in schools to raise awareness of water, and to speak out on Water-Can’s behalf.
The second time I went to Uganda, I decided to open a well in Michel’s memory. When the moment came, I was overcome by tears, but ev
ery woman present came to hug me when it was explained that my son had died. So many of their own children had died of disease caused by waterborne illness, and I felt we shared a common grief. From African women I learned many new lessons on my road to recovery.
We went to another village in northern Uganda, at the border with Sudan. WaterCan had provided a well the previous year and we were there to check on its success. But unlike other villages we visited, this one had a forlorn and desperate air. The villagers were duly grateful and welcomed us, but they never smiled. We discovered that two weeks earlier, raiders had come in the middle of the night, pulled eight young boys out of their beds, roped them together and led them away into the darkness crying and struggling. They had been conscripted as child soldiers and had not been seen since.
I believe deeply, passionately, that access to clean drinking water is a God-given, universal right, one that should be protected. And I was embarrassed to observe what happened in 2002, when the United Nations Commission on Human Rights considered whether water, along with the right to food and shelter, was indeed a basic human right. Fifty-three countries voted on the resolution, with thirty-seven voting yes, fifteen countries abstaining, and one voting no. The lone naysayer was Canada.
Christina Lubbock, then executive director of WaterCan, was as appalled as I was. “I can’t begin to think who would turn down the idea of water being a right, especially from Canada, where we have such an abundance of it,” she said. Canada is home to 0.5 per cent of the world’s population and 20 per cent of the world’s freshwater supply. “All of us who work for WaterCan,” Christina said at the time, “would believe this is a human right to have safe water to drink, just as it’s a human right to have safe air to breathe.”
Maude Barlow of the Council of Canadians calls water “blue gold,” and she’s absolutely right. Multinational corporations such as Monsanto and Bechtel know that global consumption of water is doubling every twenty years and they want to control the supply, of course. Greed has already diverted and polluted so much water. Imagine the huge economic ripples if water became a commodity, to be bought and sold to the highest bidder.
In Ethiopia, on a visit with WaterCan, I made a point of visiting a psychiatric hospital begun in Addis Ababa by Dr. Clare Pain, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto. Until she came along, there had been almost no psychiatric medicine in the country. Even though the three newly trained resident psychiatrists were making huge improvements in the capital, I saw a vision of mental illness that haunts me yet. I realized how unbelievably fortunate I was to have been born in Canada.
I was taken to see what they called an “asylum for the insane,” and there I found men and women in black-and-white striped pyjamas, numbers painted on the back, some wearing shackles and shuffling around. What few drugs were available tended to be those no longer used in the West, dumped as part of aid programs. Because there was no money for modern drugs, the patients were kept in a semi-comatose state. I asked the one nurse in a woman’s ward of forty beds how she managed to look after them all.
“The only difficult time,” the nurse told me, “is in the morning when they wake up, before the medication calms them.” Near the ward was the room for electroshock treatment. Until the new director stopped the practice, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was used to discipline unruly patients. I was reminded, with horror, of the film One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
During all my stays in hospital, I had never been given electroconvulsive therapy. I had discussed it with Dr. Cameron, but I had been reluctant to submit to what is usually still regarded as a last resort, a genuine shock to the system. I did not fear ECT, since I knew that modern methods are humane and many people have been vastly helped by it. But I was worried about the memory loss that ECT can cause, and painful as many of my memories are, I still didn’t want to lose a single one of them. In any case, I felt that I had already been shocked by all that had happened to me; I needed balance, not further shocks. What stuck in my mind, however, was this fact: some psychiatrists claim that were they to find themselves in a deep depression, their first choice of treatment would be ECT.
Though no one ever pressed me to try ECT, I had witnessed good results for myself while I was in hospital. A young girl who was very severely depressed had been taken away for electroshock treatment, and I talked to the nurse about how it worried me. The girl came back sleepy and disoriented from the sedation, but in the days that followed, her depression lifted.
Not long before Michel’s death, Speakers’ Spotlight, an agency that books lecturers, had invited me to join their bureau. My first booking had been at a street event in Toronto, a fundraising gathering for a battered women’s shelter, and I had decided to talk to them about water. There were about a thousand people present. I had written it all out, drawn up my bullet points and was not unduly nervous about the event. A combination of my years with Pierre and my short training as an actress had, I thought, taught me to handle such things. But my talk was not altogether successful, and I found the careful preparation and the bullet points hindered me. I was stilted and lost my place. A poor performance, I thought.
Early in 2006, I was asked to a cocktail party for volunteers and fundraisers to help launch a new Royal Ottawa Mental Health Centre to replace the shabby and old-fashioned complex of Victorian buildings. I felt so grateful for what the hospital and its staff had done for me. Before I left that evening, I asked the chief executive, Bruce Swan, whether there was anything I could do to help. He said he would think it over and get in touch with me; I imagined he would come back and suggest that I join a fundraising gala committee.
A week later, he invited me to his office. With him was a colleague, Kathy Hendrick, who was the director of communications for the hospital. They wanted me to become a champion for mental health. I had the profile, I was articulate, people would listen, and had I not offered to help? What was more, this was to be paid work—I could charge for any talks and lectures I was invited to give.
But I should not fool myself, Bruce and Kathy warned me: the work would be hard and demanding. This was a daunting prospect—actually coming out and telling the world what I had been through went far beyond anything I had contemplated. I went home and considered it carefully. Told about the offer, Sacha worried that the strain of such work might lead to a relapse, and he had my doctor talk to me about his fears. But the doctor agreed with me: work would make me feel needed, and not since mothering small children had I felt that.
I rang Bruce to tell him I would give it a go. The whole idea suddenly filled me with a feeling of purpose I had never experienced before. This was scary, but exciting. As a first assignment, I agreed to hold a press conference.
This next step could well have turned me off the whole idea forever. The press had been invited to gather in the gymnasium of the hospital, and when I walked onto the platform, I faced a sea of skeptical and not altogether friendly faces. Many belonged to political journalists I had known during my years with Pierre and who had seldom been well disposed towards me. However, I knew that I was well on the way to recovery myself, and better than anyone I understood how tough recovery could be.
All the same, I had not quite bargained for this. As it happened, the press conference went well and I had less difficulty than I had expected in standing up and declaring, “All my adult life, I have suffered from a mental illness.” Just saying those words offered me an overwhelming sense of relief. I had said the unsayable and survived. The reaction of the press was warm. Several journalists I considered my foes later came up to me with words of encouragement.
What happened afterwards is what I found so disturbing. A reporter with CBC-TV had managed to persuade the organizers that I would do a special personal interview with her. She had decided that the best place for it would be in the dark tunnels connecting the different parts of the hospital, and because I so wanted a new building—light, airy and friendly—I agreed that this grim backdrop would mak
e the point perfectly that the hospital needed replacing.
However, I wasn’t prepared for her questions. Before the interview, she asked, “This is where you live? Where you spend your time?” She clearly hadn’t bothered to find out that I had left the hospital five years before; nor had she listened at the press conference. I cut off the interview. Her producer, who had done her homework, was deeply embarrassed and apologized profusely later.
As we were leaving the tunnels and about to get into the elevator, the reporter said seriously, “I’m as nuts as you are, I have to use the stairs.” She was claustrophobic and wouldn’t enter an elevator. This exchange could have put an end to my work for mental health. On the contrary, the episode—and the reporter’s slur against people with mental illness—had an electrifying effect on me. Absolutely clear to me now was my obligation to break through the prejudice and myths, the lack of sympathy and understanding that surround people who suffer from mental illnesses. Mental disease is a frightening and lonely place. Not needed, at all, are jokes about mental retards and misperceptions about insanity.
So the thoughtless reporter actually did me a huge service. She taught me that most people do not understand mental illness and find it easy to ridicule. That journalist propelled me into a job, a campaign and a cause.
The most surprising thing for me was that I turned out to be a natural public speaker. I had none of the terrors that I had expected, and once I got into my stride, I found that I had much to say and a great passion to deliver it. Some time before, Speakers’ Spotlight had booked me to talk at a Women of Courage event. I decided to use the occasion to launch my new crusade. The venue was the dining room of a conference centre in Mississauga, west of Toronto, and when I rose to my feet, no one knew what I was about to say. I had spoken often in the past, but this was something different. I had my notes, a few quotes from people who had written on courage, but that was all. The hall fell silent; the vast audience of women looked at me.
Changing My Mind Page 26