One afternoon twelve adults huddled around a table trying to read together. Several rubbed their hands, blew on them to warm their fingers. The furnace had gone out as it regularly did. The janitor had showed me how to adjust the thermostat: how was I to know the unlady-like and house-bound procedure of relighting the pilot? And then we heard a mad beating of wings. Opening the office door, we discovered a terrified pigeon flying into the walls and ceiling. Our only recourse was to rip the plastic that stapled the cracks in the window shut. We left the window open to the prevailing wind. The pigeon found its own way out. We got colder.

This building, this place for people, this place where people gather, has been searching and searching for money to start. The adult literacy program is one part of this place. Basic education students learn in conditions like this. At the same time they have to acquire their education while working in one, sometimes two, sometimes more, jobs. And for women with children, having 'baby-sitting money' hardly means it is easy to find a sitter. ("She had them, she should look after them!") And 3/4 of the illiterate adults in the world are women.

In Canada, the majority of continuing education courses available are taken by university-educated adults. And 'training' is all the rage. Yet, in the past thirty years, Canadians have been sending aid to 'developing' countries - strings attached, of course. With this money we say, listen, education is important for your development. And what has been developed at home? A country where books belong to the few. Where reading is still a privilege. And where non-print, non-formal traditions of learning are deliberately ignored. Who can read a wampum belt when it is locked in a scientific, hermetically-sealed glass box?

Much of adult literacy in Canada is taught by women. In several provinces, programs with paid staff are being replaced by volunteer programs. The majority of volunteers are women, too. Women in paid positions have long hours, little job security, low levels of pay, few benefits... but I don't need to rail on about this to you! It has been your experience as much as mine. When I was in the Caribbean this May at the literacy and second language teaching workshop I noticed that most of the participants were women. They face very similar working conditions. A friend who trained as a teacher in Winnipeg has not-fond memories of paying for the privilege of being a student teacher. Her brother, the medical student, was paid for his apprenticeship.

My lover's brother is working at the SkyDome now. He says They don't know yet if the roof will work. Everything he does is ripped out and done three times - They keep changing Their minds about what They want done. Regularly there are tourists there, white men in business suits and white hard hats, seeing how their money is doing.

On the plane out here, I had settled into my seat when a man sat beside me and said not a word, not hello, nothing. He wore short grey hair and a red and white striped shirt and he looked straight a head. As we sat there a woman a few rows behind, who spoke only halting English, discovered someone in her seat and helped them find their own. Along came a man in a business suit with a lime green airport security card pinned to his pocket. He looked at my neighbour and said, "You have 29F, too. I'll have to get to get the girl straighten this out." Without further interaction he headed up the aisle to find the 'girl.' My neighbour turned to me and pulled out his boarding card. "I don't have my glasses with me," he said, "Which seat does it say I have?" I pointed out 26F, three rows up. But before he had a chance to begin to move the executive was back, allowing the flight attendant. She, for the business man, asked to see my neighbour's boarding card and repeated what I had just said to him. Well, it is her job...

In June I was camping in a provincial park in eastern Ontario. One day we hiked along the trail which leads to a pond and Beaver dam. The pond was huge, covering what once may have been meadows. We topped to listen to the frogs croak, to hear the splash of their return to water. We watched dragonflies dart among the bulrushes on invisible wings and wings that buzzed when they touched each other. We delighted to see the blanket of lily pads, the blooms of the Fragrant Water-Lily and the American Lotus. We saw a snake sunning in he branches of a bush. Then the path led beyond the dam and we were on the other side of this haphazard pile of sticks that rose several feet over our heads and kept back all the water. It struck me as an irony that the beaver (Castor Canadiensis) is Canada's national animal. These animals created this environment in which so many different beings thrive. This was my first glimpse of their power. Why are we so unfamiliar with it? Instead, we are familiar with having 'beaver' thrown at us as a word we should shrink from.

What pattern is this? Has it been seen before? Maybe we just need to keep putting the pieces together in their haphazard way, binding the layers together, creating our own patterns with careful threads. We can sit around the frame wearing our protective thimbles, stitching and talking. Whoever said crazy quilts weren't beautiful.

See you in September,

Tannis