Yes, because I had previously drawn a picture.... I was at a Colombian seminar for the Canadian Council for Refugees, where a Colombian person was speaking about the trauma Colombians went through in leaving Colombia. Here I've been in North America—well, my mother's family, since the 1600s in Boston—so I have no background at all in being an immigrant, but at Pier 21 they said, why don't you come up and draw something on the board about your situation. Why ask me, because the Colombians have all sorts of horrible situations? I have nothing.
But I did go up, because I remembered a young boy—and at that time in the fifties they wore the short pants, the knee socks, and carried hard suitcases—who was standing there all alone. He was 11 or 12, standing there, and I kept looking at him and thinking, oh, he's all alone. His parents were obviously busy doing something else, and I said, oh, I'd love to help him. So I drew that on the board. This was a sponsorship agreement holder, because I'm also a sponsorship agreement holder for the Atlantic area for the Baptists. She asked me, why did you draw that picture on the board? I said, it was because I'd never, never forget him, because he looked so lonely, but I could not help him. Then she turned to me, and it was one of those moments, and said, what are you doing now?
Let me tell you this, because I've been doing work with immigrants here in St. John's for about 15 or 18 years, and I don't do it for money. I hold this post, and when I say something is true, it's true. When I say something is wrong, it's wrong.
In some of the cases, we have real, real concerns. For example, I made a report on a case because I found out that we had allowed a criminal to stay here in St. John's. I knew he was a criminal; I knew what he had done. Instead, he was allowed to stay, and when they started to get wise about him, he slipped over the border and is now staying there.
I made a report—and I'm not a writer, but a talker—with the help of a friend of mine who worked for the New York Tribune, who's now retired from that American paper, a big New York paper, and she confirmed everything about what was happening. They were sending back people....
Again, I've been to Russia, because of my husband's work back then, just after it turned from Communism, and I was in St. Petersburg, protected, by the way, by the Mafia. That was the only safe way to keep me protected when I wasn't in Krylov, where my husband had to help them get rid of 2,000 people. The point is, I knew what the Mafia was like in St. Petersburg.
We had a person here who was a saint, and he was sent back. He wasn't a skilled worker, but he was a hard worker. He was here for eight years. He was an absolutely unusual man, and he was deported. I knew, because the Mafia in St. Petersburg, back when I was there, were so bad that.... When he was deported, they kept the man who caused him to be deported, they kept him, and he slipped over the border.
When I got all of the information on him, I made the reports to the head of the RCMP for Atlantic Canada, the head of border control for Atlantic Canada, the head of immigration for Atlantic Canada, the five top people. And I had my friend do the write-up on it, who knew a lot more about writing than I did. I made the report, and I said, “This is it. This is the truth, and nothing but the truth.” And at the end of it, knowing the whole lot of them were younger than I, when they said they weren't going to do a thing, then--