Crusading Against Catastrophe :: Healthy Lifestyles and Natural Weight Loss Information

Crusading Against Catastrophe
by author Barbara Yaffe

It is surely naive to imagine that any one human being can save the world. But, Stephen Lewis, in lending his intellect and a large chunk of his heart to several of modern time’s toughest causes, is making a pretty good effort.

The former politician, diplomat, teacher, award-winning author, holder of 22 honorary doctorates from Canadian universities, recipient of an Order of Canada, among Time magazine’s “100 Most Influential People in the World” in 2005, and Lesotho’s Knight Commander of the Most Dignified Order of Moshoeshoe, Lewis has devoted full energy to the challenge of poverty, the blight of HIV/AIDs, the perils of global warming, and more recently a crisis of sexual violence in Africa.

He has universally impressed along the way.

But it’s not about him. It’s about the planet and its most beleaguered citizens. And how the empowered can reach clear across the globe to touch the powerless.

He uses words like carnage, apocalypse, and catastrophe to describe what looms for those in southern Africa whose lives, already devastated by poverty and disease, increasingly are being complicated by the impact of climate change.

The phenomenon will hit Third World countries first and hardest, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has predicted, because those nations are so economically vulnerable and topographically susceptible to droughts and floods.

Global Warming Scorches Africa

The effects of climate change, says Lewis, are beginning to be felt. He cites a documented migration northward in Africa of malaria-bearing mosquitoes.

Agricultural dislocation resulting from a diversion of land for the production of biofuel crops has caused food prices to increase. Prices in Africa were up by 40 percent over the latter half of 2007. The World Food Program is distributing aid to ever more countries and is now being forced to ration its donations.

Down the road, warns Lewis, there likely will be widespread famine in Africa, conflict over dwindling water resources, and a legion of environmental refugees the world will not know how to grapple with.

“It is possible that the wrenching consequences of climate change may be the kind of devastation that you get from dropping a bomb on Hiroshima.”

Lewis’ mission is to connect the two worlds, the North American one of his birth and the other, in sub-Saharan Africa, a region he has been visiting and trying to help for 48 years.

Crush on a Continent

Africa grabbed Lewis by the throat when, in his twenties, he attended a conference in Ghana while working for Socialist International. What he discovered “was a continent of vitality, growth, and boundless expectation.

“It got into your blood, your viscera, your heart. The bonds were not just durable, they were unbreakable. There was something intoxicating about an environment of such hope, anticipation, affection, energy, indomitability–I was smitten for life.”

He set out to recruit what he calls “global citizens” who would be similarly inspired to reach across oceans. And he has found many.

These days, in addition to his teaching career and fending off requests from NDP leader Jack Layton to return to politics, he spends three-quarters of his time on the road, one week of six in Africa, delivering some 200 speeches annually and chairing the five-year-old Stephen Lewis Foundation.

The foundation quickly sprouted after a US poverty activist and friend instructed Lewis, to “stop whining and do something.” He did. The foundation to date has assembled a virtual army of Canadian grandmothers–200 groups, each consisting of between 10 and 100 women–who raise both money and consciousness on behalf of grannies in Africa who are raising grandchildren orphaned by the ravages of AIDS.

Under the foundation’s auspices, posses of Canadian grannies visit Africa, and African grannies in 2006 visited Canada, offering information about their lives and needs. To date, Canadian women have delivered to seniors over yonder about $3 million in aid, raised from such activities as Scrabble tournaments and bake sales.

The cash is deployed in Africa to buy food, pay school fees, and finance health care. Grandmother networks in the US, France, and Britain are also beginning to assemble. Lewis says the effort is galvanizing into “a social movement.”

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Barbara Yaffe is a national political columnist at The Vancouver Sun. Her column is read across Canada in CanWest newspapers. Born in Montreal, Yaffe has lived in Vancouver 19 years.

Source: alive #309, July 2008

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