My brief “life-stopover” in Victoria seems a life time ago. Two years ago I was doing my best to recover from an apartment fire that would see the end of a long relationship, the end of possessions, and the end of having a home. It was the harsh word of Fate saying: “Move on”.
And move on I did. Straight into my parent’s basement.
Well, it was a little more than that. After that fire I was incredibly offered work at the CBC Station in Victoria. With nothing to lose but my sanity, I headed across the straight back to my first home.
Much as I adore my parents, recuperating from loss and forging a new reality was not easy in the basement bedroom of my angst years. Tossing economics aside, I found a nice heritage home half a block from my elementary school in James Bay to sublet for 6 months.
I tell you all this by way of getting to the subject of this note: my flatmate Kyle.
A bright young fellow who was collecting tomes on medicine and the philosophy of healing from the time of his tender teens. I called him “Golden Boy”. You don’t often get the opportunity to meet individuals like Kyle. A young man, to be sure, struggling to realize himself – but beyond that an honest-to-goodness hero, as well.
Studying for his nurses degree while also taking distance education courses for his medical degree weren’t enough to stop him from also organizing a conference on the AIDS epidemic in Malawi by way of raising funds for a summer trip there.
Before departing for this foreign soil, he managed to acquire thousands of dollars of basic equipment from local hospitals to take with him to Malawi … even getting AIR Canada to ship the excess good for free (they were going to charge him some astronomical amount).
Kyle has been back from Malawi for a while…but his commitment to the people there has started him on his next leg: building an AIDS centre. Right now he’s looking for people to “vote” for his AIDS centre proposal. The next step is to raise 35-thousand dollars for the Center.
For details, just click on the link here: pending657
c
