February 3, 2011

It looks like Kimberly is back playing Farmville. Yay!

The crane was dancing this morning again. During the night sometime several more cubes arrived and all of them were rearranged. In the further distance one can now see that a whole new layer of cubes has been added to the prison, a little southwest of the rest of the building. Perhaps there is an entire new section going up. How big are sixteen hundred cubes when they are stacked up!?!

The bits and pieces for the Savannah trip are beginning to take shape. Mike and I are getting down to the wire, which means organizing things like travel insurance, lodging down and back, scheduling the nights that I will do workshops for Chatham Savannah Citizen Advocacy. On Tuesday I “acquired” two small painting kits with brushes and mini tubes of all the basic colours. These kits came inside of canvases that Laser Eagles had bought at a dollar store. They were going to be discarded because we use 2-litre size bottles of paint. I get a chuckle when I think about how often I have found significant resources by just such acquisition – from picking up garbaged furniture, to taking other people’s leftovers after a restaurant meal, to sorting through clothes that others are about to recycle. I wonder if I will post notices in the ROM exhibit of all the paintings that were created out of scrap materials. It might very well fit the theme!

Part of the kit that I was assembling today for Savannah is my medications for diabetes, pain support and nutrition (chewable vitamins and calcium). It’s kind of like gathering my armour for a battle. These create my sense of security and safety as much as knowing that there will be enough money. The last important $500 came in this morning with a commitment from Peter Block to hire me for one morning on the way down. It is like putting the last brick in the wall and I bless his generousity.

I believe this will be the sixth time that I have journeyed to Savannah. It forms a kind of rhythm in my life. Savannah is the place I go to to warm up, to eat well, to feel great with good friends, to see the Spanish moss and the pelicans and, perhaps most importantly, to become clear on what slavery does to human relationships and creativity. It was in Savannah that I learned that I am a slave. I learned this listening to a man present his book about how slavery has been recreated in the United States. The fundamental element of slavery is the buying and selling of a person’s body¸ especially without the permission of that person. Of course, people who are labelled with disability are bought and sold constantly and most often have very limited or no choice about their location. I myself cannot leave Ontario for more than five weeks in a year. This would not be considered a huge problem to most people who are labelled disabled, but since the majority of work I have been doing in my life has been outside of Canada, I have frequently been an outlaw. It used to be that people turned a blind eye on my behalf but that ended just before Gabor, Erin and I left for the Tour in 2008. Now I must be careful!

It is paradoxically refreshing to be in a place where people are polite but very explicit about the intention to keep racism and slavery alive and well. The clarity of the experience allows for genuine dialogue. It also allows for grounding reflection on the personal experience. This, of course, gives me a solid base to become more creative. The wishy washy soft talk of Canadians about economic imprisonment can leave me and others quite befuddled.

Anyway, it is almost time and I can feel so strongly the urge to leave!