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Hello friends, I’ve spent the majority of my life as a city kid, Toronto and Montreal respectively, and I unabashedly love it. Through the years, I’ve never ceased to be amazed by the vibrancy that ripples through urban spaces, be it at Taste of the Danforth, Beaches Jazz Festival or medieval fights and djembe drumming on Mount Royal. Within the city, you meet people from all walks of life and all corners of the world. There is a downside to city life, though. In any city, it’s easy to live anonymously. A person can slip out of their home unobserved, hop onto the subway, do countless errands and unobtrusively return without interacting on a meaningful level with a single other individual over the course of a day, week or month. Worse, for those marginalized at the edge of society, like the homeless person outside your Starbucks, the squeegee kid at Spadina and Dundas or the drug addict outside your car, this sense of anonymity can gradually break down your sense of pride, personhood and respect for yourself. During high school, I was involved in Out of the Cold, a fantastic organization that provides a hot meal and a place to sleep for some of Toronto’s 5,052* homeless people. There, I learned how important it is to give back to our communities and break down our personal barriers. Moments of realization like these are valuable because they demonstrate how thin the line is between our lives and the lives of others. It is in these moments—the ones when we’re forced to stop, refocus and look another human being in the eye—that show us how basic our common humanity is and that our lives can always change with the bend in the road. As an international development and anthropology student at McGill University, I found myself so wrapped up in international issues—like genetically-modified corn in Oaxaca, deforestation in Haiti, genocide in Darfur, desertification in Northern Africa, rising HIV/AIDS rates across South East Asia and multi drug-resistant tuberculosis in Eastern Europe—that I forgot about those who live anonymously in the city and whose needs are so often ignored because they are invisible to society. As we go about our busy lives, it’s important to remember that poverty, violence, alienation, apathy, hunger and other issues exist in our communities and that we can take small steps to combat such issues at home through local organizations like Out of the Cold, the Red Door, the Scott Mission and Sheena’s Place so we can take the first steps to creating a more peaceful and just world. Stefanie * statistic from the City of Toronto website: www.toronto.ca/housing/streetneeds.htm
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