4

British Columbia

—

Odessa visit called ‘a bridge for peace’

It was the trip that almost didn’t happen.

But happen it did, when a delegation of
city officials and a 30-member group of
citizens met with their counterparts in Van-
couver’s longest-standing sister city last
month.

Perhaps it was the feeling engendered by
glasnost, the political and social openness
that has ushered in a renewed climate of
international goodwill between the Soviet
Union and the Western world in the past
few years. Or just as likely, the warm wel-
come the Vancouver visitors received in the
Ukrainian port city of Odessa was always
waiting for them.

Whatever the reason, those who travelled
to Odessa, with a brief stop in Moscow
between Aug. 8 and Aug. 18, had words of
praise — some overflowing, some cautious
— for what they saw, and expressed hope
for future relations between the sister cities
and the two social and economic systems
they represent in microcosm.

For Ald. Libby Davies, who travelled as
a city representative along with Ald. George
Puil, as deputy mayor, and senior city staff,
the fact that the official visit happened was
of key importance.

(In 1986 Odessa mayor Valentin Simo-
nenko and other officials visited Vancouver
and signed a peace protocol at city hall.
Vancouver was to reciprocate in 1987, but a
mayoral recommendation on sister-city
relations downgraded the Odessa relation-
ship and cancelled the visit.

(Pressure placed on the mayor’s office
from city councillors and citizens reversed
that process. A special Vancouver-Odessa
sister city committee was established and
the visit in August was set.)

“Everywhere we went, the attitude was
very positive and we were very well received.
The city council and people of Odessa are
enthusiastic to develop concrete relations
with Vancouver,” Davies says.

“Our cities have a lot in common. We’re
both sea ports, on the west coast with laid-
back people and a beautiful natural set-
ting,” she observes.

In meetings with both Odessa and Mos-
cow civic leaders, the delegates found sim-
ilar problems to those facing Vancouver,
such as housing shortages and transporta-
tion problems, and even a tussle over prop-
osals to expand the Moscow Zoo in which
the alderman found echoes of the Stanley
Park zoo debate.

But Davies thinks that far more impor-
tant than the official relations were the one-
on-one meetings between Vancouver and
Odessa citizens — including artists, trade
unionists and peace activists. (Davies, a
member of the B.C. chapter of the Congress
of Canadian Women, met with deputy
mayor Galina Izuvita, who heads Odessa’s
women’s council.)

Babs Chula is one who agrees. A Van-
couver actor who performed with col-
leagues Ken MacDonald and Morris
Panich the critically acclaimed show Simple

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Folk for an emotional Odessa audience,
Chula found revelations about Soviet thea-
tre and people.

She is assertive about her discoveries:
“The image of Soviet people as slow and
humourless is all crap. In fact (the promo-
tion of that notion) enrages me now.

“Contrary to common belief, there aren’t .
all these people clamouring to get out of the
country.”

Chula and her friends spent almost every
waking hour touring the city and meeting
with Odessa citizens in their homes. She
says she found “people who are worried
about feeding and raising their children, the
same as here.”

Simple Folk, produced by Tamahnous
Theatre, enjoyed packed houses in two runs
at Vancouver theatres in the past year. Con--
sisting of Chula, Panich and MacDonald
portraying a folk trio from the early Sixties
singing period songs and reciting personal
recollections of the civil rights era, the pro-
ject that started out to be a satire wound up
becoming a serious commitment. (The
Simple Folk trio performed several songs at
the Vancouver Walk for Peace rally last
April.)

Performing the show for a Ukrainian and
Russian speaking audience was a leap into
uncharted waters. An initial translation for
the dialogue which the group brought over
had to be rewritten into colloquial idioms
by Odessa performers.

But as Davies attests, the production
brought Odessa audiences to their feet as
the closing strains of “We Shall Overcome”
resounded through the theatre. Chula says
she found audience members were familiar
with most of the songs — which were not
translated — and remarks that, with the
changes rocking the Soviet Union during
the government of then-premier Nikita
Kruschev, “the Sixties were happening
everywhere.

“The audience wept. They cried and we
cried. Each person it seemed came back to
hug us and give us flowers.”

As a result of Tamahnous’ contribution
to the citizens delegation, the company and
its Odessa counterparts have petitioned
their respective civic governments to fund
an international theatre project. The plan
calls for performances in alternate years in
Vancouver and Odessa, with actors from
both cities collaborating on what Chula
calls a new kind of theatre that, without
being mime, will keep dialogue to a min-
imum.

Chula’s experience with the production
and the contacts made by other Vancouver
artists convinced her that art is a key com-

~ municator: “That’s the way we'll bridge the

peace gap.”

BABS CHULA . .. joint Vancouver-Odessa theatrical production planned.

Another concrete result of the trip is an
agreement to exchange 20 students for
approximately one month this academic
year. Vancouver school board chairman
Ken Denike, who was on the delegation,
says he has given the program “my total
commitment.”

Denike met with his counterpart — who,
because Odessa operates on a kind of
county system, is a deputy mayor — and
found a school system he terms, “bureau-
cratic, but with much more autonomy
granted to the local school.

“There is a great deal of emphasis on
children, in terms of manpower. In one
school we found 58 teachers for 620 stu-
dents, which is twice the staffing we have.”

Denike describes a system in which the
local board, teachers, parents and students
elect school principals and select the
number of hours for instruction. He says he
found an impressive pre-school program
and high priority granted to education, not-
ing that teachers spend much of the summer
period on program preparation and
upgrading skills.

“] was greatly impressed with the morale
and dedication” of the education commun-
ity, Denike states.

The school board chair also took note of
state-funded meals at Odessa’s schools, and
he acknowledges the marked distinction
from Vancouver where special funds have
been set aside to feed students from low-
income families.

“I’m not sure whether the system we have
is better. Ours is very family oriented (in the
sense of responsibility for children),”
Denike says.

* He considers the trip “very worthwhile,”
because it gave him a first-hand look at the
dramatic changes in the Soviet education
system.”

For Frank Kennedy and Don Jantzen,
increased trade and business were impor-
tant goals to pursue while meeting with fel-
low trade unionists and leaders of Soviet
enterprises.

Kennedy, secretary of the Vancouver and
District Labour Council, says the trade
unionists agreed to petition their respective
governments to establish a Soviet consulaté
in Vancouver. And they urged that visiting
Soviet ships be repaired in the city’s dry-
docks.

The labour leaders will also be asking the |
B.C. Federation of Labour to host threé
visitors from the Odessa Regional Council —
of Trade Unions.

Jantzen, first vice-president of the Intet-
national Woodworkers-Canada, Local 17
217, says that while Soviet citizens lack
consumer items taken for granted in the
west, they have low rents and an impressive
list of social services.

And, he observes, peace sentiment in the
sister city “comes from the pores of every-
body.”

Kennedy, who is also president of End
the Arms Race, agrees and reports that |
EAR will be asking the sister city committe
to help pay for a visit of Odessa peace acti
vists to attend next year’s Walk for Peace
The trade unionists raised the issue while
meeting with the head of the Odessa Com
mittee for the Defence of Peace, Ivan Gat
daenko, a former seaman who visit
Vancouver back in 1934.

—

Denying funding for a comprehensive
food program in Vancouver schools will
only lead to increased social costs in the
future as under-educated children become
unemployable adults, was the message a
group of anti-poverty activists delivered to
government representatives last Saturday.

Speaking at a rally in Robson Square,
members of the Child Poverty Action
Committee and End Legislated Poverty
joined concerned parents in citing the
effects of hunger on the ability of children
to learn and function effectively in the
school environment. They called on all
levels of government to provide the money
necessary to feed the needy children.

The $200,000 funding provided by the
Vancouver school board to start a food
program. in four schools was welcomed
-but was criticized as only “scratching the
surface of the problem.”

“We have identified fourteen schools in
Vancouver that have a dire need for a food

Cost of undernourishment cited

program. Providing a program for four of
those schools is just the beginning of what
is needed,” said Joanne Banks of the East
Area Parents Association.

“We know there is money available. It
is astonishing how fast money can be
found to purchase a nuclear submarine.
But the cost of one of those subs could feed
all our hungry kids straight through kin-
dergarten to Grade 12,” she said.

Phil Rankin, the only Committee of
Progressive Electors’ trustee presently on

the Vancouver school board, was cheered .

by the crowd for his role in moving the
motion for the food program.

But Rankin stated that his motion
almost died, without a seconder. “The
hungry children issue has been the horn of
plenty of good publicity for a group of
people that don’t deserve it. The Van-
couver school board never intended to
have a hungry children program that
would be funded by the board,” he said.

be moved by common sense,” said Ran-

“Federally, provincially and munici-
pally there is the money available to funda
good nutrition program. Maybe if the
government and the public are not going
to be moved by charity, perhaps they will

kin.

“Research has shown unequivocally
that if you put nutrition into the schools
you get the result that everybody
wants — a better educated population,”
he said.

“It’s not a big issue. It’s about time that
governments stopped talking about all the
things they would like to do and started
doing them.”

Participants in the rally had earlier
marched to the offices of Pat Carney, pres
ident of the federal Treasury Board, and
Claude Richmond, B.C. minister of social
services and housing, to deliver letters
expressing their concerns and demanding
funding for a nutrition program.

et

2 « Pacific Tribune, September 14, 1988