En route to meeting Helen Miller, I imagined a kind of missionary-shaped woman. Which I can’t define, but every reader will get the picture.
Instead I was introduced to a youthful woman of willowy figure, long, dark hair and fine features who could readily be fashion model material – rather than accept God’s call to build an orphanage from crumbled buildings in South Sudan, wrenched by civil war and one of the world’s most dangerous places.
You got it: This is a good-news story.
That’s how it was pitched by John Weston, former Conservative MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country. As a late-blooming writer himself, Weston knows these are the hardest stories to write. Gore and grief yarns are so formulaic they write themselves and have an eager ready-made audience. God stories not so much.
And even some friends and fellow congregants at West Vancouver Baptist Church – who gathered for a money-raising barbecue recently at the home of small dynamo Esther Chu – have gently advised Australian-born Helen, a West Vancouverite since 2004 with a masters of divinity degree from UBC’s Regent College, not to go back to South Sudan. Again.
She’s been there four times as a missionary and relief worker. She’s known as “Mama Helen” and by her South Sudanese name, Atwong. She leaves in July.
Once she used a few spare minutes to hasten to see the Nile. She was snapping pictures when a policeman materialized and told her that Muslim men were having a customary swim nearby. A charge loomed – i.e., a bribe. But a senior officer was sympathetic on learning Helen’s mission. Case dismissed.
She’s inspirational. It’s catching. Among her admirers is 13-year-old Ashley Wong, who has tied in Helen’s mission with her school human rights project. “Some kids don’t have the same opportunities, rights, and privileges that we are so lucky to have in Canada,” Ashley says. “I have experienced this first hand because I was adopted but given the chance to have a happy life, to be looked after and cared for. That is what Ms. Miller is doing, giving these kids a chance.”
Was Helen ever frightened in this dangerous land?
“Once the U.S. Department of Homeland Security emailed Americans” – she’d flown from Seattle, evidently putting her on the list – “to leave our area immediately,” she said. She stayed put. She trusted angelic protection. Whatever the danger was, it passed.
Her next challenge is cut out for her: There’s no water on the site, an abandoned children’s home in Malakal. Church members and others are donating to drill a well, cost $10,000–$15,000.
Like most aid people, Helen has no illusions about how much the West can help. The planned orphanage will house 60 children. But they will grow up to be 60 healthier, better-off, more skilled adults, and hopefully pass that on to their children. Better to light 60 candles than to curse the darkness.
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A must-read for every North Shore taxpayer – and shifty offshore tax evaders too – is West Vancouver-Capilano MLA Ralph Sultan’s spring newsletter.
It’s a masterful compilation of New Democrat Premier John Horgan’s sticking it to the exploited victims of the leftist state’s insatiable greed, written by a world-class economist who should have been Liberal finance minister.
Samples: “The NDP government’s new school tax has such a targeted consequence for the North Shore, I believe it is appropriately labelled a ‘targeted attack.’”
In West Vancouver, Sultan writes, 7,059 homes are captured by the new school tax — “close to one-half of all residences.” In North Vancouver District, 934 homes. Together the two will be hit with a 141 per cent increase in school taxes.
On the speculation tax: “The NDP says you can avoid this … by renting your home to others. Maybe your children? (But don’t sell it to them; having a home owned by your children is viewed with suspicion.) Mike Harcourt, former NDP premier, commented on this asset tax when first proposed by the NDP in 1993: ‘Are people expected to move their children into tents in the backyard, so rooms in the house can be rented?’ Mike thought this was one idea which the NDP should simply walk away from in the 1990s, and they did.”
On the cumulative impact of seven NDP taxes on North Shore municipalities: “A policy of ‘taxing the rich’ is unwise when it penalizes success and opportunity. We encourage people to get an education and save their money and when they succeed, we punish them? And we punish them again when their properties climb in value due to external capital flows from far-off lands, drawn to B.C. by our own success in building an attractive economy with desirable communities offering outstanding health care and education?”
Those who dismiss this as mere politicking should scroll down to Sultan’s tables of hard figures. And rage.
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Scarce Horseshoe Bay parking has taken a hit – losing three of seven existing spaces in front of Bay Market, Tina’s Pet Grooming, and Community Spirits to a BC Hydro electric vehicle charging station and stalls on each side.
This, in a town where there is no Marine Drive gas station west of 22nd Street.
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Bottom line: Justin Trudeau and Bill Morneau won (durable?) pipeline “peace in our time” by risking taxpayers’ billions as the default position. Canada’s tolerance toward mass lawbreakers is intact.
