Toronto Sun Article: Volunteering Miracles
By Michele Mandel
IT SHONE like a beacon of white light. In the heart of Scarborough, where the stories are too often of shootings and stabbings, mayhem and ugliness, streaks of pure goodness radiated yesterday from a modest school auditorium.
Gathered inside Ellesmere-Statton Public School was a group of Toronto EMS, police and fire workers who were being recognized for their incredible efforts, on their own dime and their own time, in helping out in Sri Lanka, Cambodia and Grenada. While at their feet were some of the 750 students who have spent the last few months painstakingly gathering 25 boxes of school supplies that the volunteer aid workers will now take to the children in tsunami-ravaged Sri Lanka.
Paramedic Rahul Singh looked out at the scene -- the wide-eyed children, his selfless colleagues and the boxes piled high by the stage -- and knew that somewhere, his best friend was smiling.
Social worker David McAntony Gibson was 33 when he died in 1998 after rejecting his liver transplant. "He was the greatest guy in the history of the world," said Singh, 34. "You want to honour the memory of someone who was so great."
So he established the David McAntony Gibson Foundation (DMGF) seven years ago where Toronto emergency volunteers deliver aid and disaster relief to Third World countries as quickly and as efficiently as possible. While many world agencies lumbered in slow, bureaucratic mode, he says DMGF had seven paramedics, a doctor and a water sanitation expert on the ground in Sri Lanka within two weeks of the tsunami. In their two weeks there, the team treated 4,168 patients, delivered $40,000 worth of medication, built a clinic in Saukkady and cleaned 480 wells that returned clean water to 110,000 people -- all on a shoestring budget of just $15,000.
Like the other team members, paramedic Carl Rotmann paid his own way there and used his vacation time to help, even personally delivering medications by commandeering a fishing boat to cross a river whose bridge had been swept away by the tidal wave. "We call him Sylvester Stallone," joked Singh.
For Rotmann, it was an experience he will never forget: the desperate widows with hungry children left alone after their fishermen husbands were swallowed by the tsunami; the sad-eyed man who lost his only two daughters in the swells; the hundreds of survivors he treated with badly infected gashes suffered in the torrent of debris. "You just wish you could do more," he said.
It was a sentiment echoed by the school's students, many of whom lost relatives in the disaster.
Guidance counsellor Kalpana Makan was overwhelmed after the Christmas vacation with children in tears -- one student had heard that all of his old classmates had been killed in the tsunami; another had learned that his four sisters and three brothers had died. Makan felt a school aid drive would not only help the kids cope but would also fit nicely into that term's emphasis on empathy and compassion.
But she knew many of the parents had already given monetarily and she didn't feel comfortable asking them again. Instead, she asked students to donate whatever supplies they could and together they would ship over a "school in a box."
Every summer she volunteers in a different Third World village and she knew firsthand that the Sri Lankan children would be thrilled with things as simple as stories and English lessons.
"The first thing they always ask me is if I have a pen," she laughed. "And then they want to know if I can teach them English."
Students showed up with pencils and erasers, notebooks and calculators. Some wrote elaborate fairytales and then had them translated into Tamil. They packed chalkboard paint and chalk, pencil crayons and markers while teachers photocopied math and English worksheets for every grade level.
By the time Makan and the Grade 8 students sorted all the donations, they had filled 25 boxes to overflowing.
"I was in tears last night when I saw all the boxes. The kids are really amazing."
They beamed as Singh told them what a wonderful job they had done. "This is not the richest community in Toronto," he said later, "and they pulled this together."
As the students packed their boxes into an EMS ambulance, Singh was already planning on sending another mission to Sri Lanka to build a new school to house the donated supplies.
Somewhere, his late friend would be proud. "I hope he'd be pleased with what we're doing," Singh said with a smile.
He certainly couldn't miss it. In the heart of Scarborough yesterday, a small school shone with the brightest of lights.