Powerful Life Lessons

Sometimes the best life lessons can't be painstakingly planned out, carefully crafted or providently pursued. They cannot be taught by a teacher, learned in a classroom or forced upon us. Most often, we stumble spontaneously upon the most important life lessons in the least expected places.

Last week we spent 5 wonderful days enjoying a family holiday in Chilliwack BC, visiting family and friends. We took one full day to drive into Vancouver and make family memories at the Vancouver Aquarium, where we had plans to meet up with some wonderful friends. As we headed out of the hotel parking lot on a sunny and balmy BC February morning, we entered our destination into the GPS and set off on our adventure. Well, the GPS takes you the most direct route, and innocently sent us down East Hastings Street, right through the middle of the notorious Vancouver Downtown Eastside, home to nearly 18,000 of Canada's poorest residents. As you can imagine, a small 10 year old boy who has grown up in a middle class home in a small town Alberta landscape, had a lot of questions about what he was seeing! His eyes became as big as saucers as he peered out of the back window of our lovely rental car. He watched in amazement, all of the people, most of whom are homeless, sitting on cold sidewalks, huddled together for warmth on what is left of torn blankets, in their tattered and dirty clothes. We even saw an old and filthy stroller with a small child, not much older than Stetson sitting in it. Imagine what kind of life that poor little baby has lived in such a short time. What kind of future lies ahead for a baby born on the streets, into that kind of poverty? Too many people to count, lined up in front of empty shop windows, abandoned by hopeless owners whose business was driven out two decades ago, by the up rise of drug trafficking and prostitution. We saw several police cars, parked in the alleyways, on the street, Beat Cops walking the "strip" and trying to manage the problem, knowing that despite their best efforts, they will not be able to put an end to it. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not this week. Not this year. We saw an ambulance parked on the sidewalk, with it's back doors swung wide open, as paramedics and police tended to what I am sure is a permanent resident of that street. Everywhere you looked, there was more to see, worse than the last block.

How do you explain all of this to your child, when you can't even make sense of it yourself? All we could do was be honest.  We started out by educating him as best we could, at a level we were comfortable with, being sensitive to his age and what would be appropriate for a 10 year old. Clearly, that was not going to satisfy this curious tween. I could sense that he wanted more from us, that he still needed answers to his questions. We allowed him time to ask what he wanted to know. We explained that these people had been faced with very difficult times, financially, emotionally, mentally, physically, and possibly all of the above. We told him that most of these people were now addicted to drugs and reminded him of the importance of saying NO to drugs, and not falling prey to peer pressure and of course, staying in school. We stated the value of self-worth, self-confidence and self-control. Once that chain breaks down, it is easy to forget your own value and try to fill that void with drugs. Once you become addicted, people turn to a life of crime and will steal and prostitute themselves to pay for that next high. This lead to a discussion about the downward spiral, the vicious cycle and the inevitable question....."what is a prostitute?" Gulp. I vowed that I would always be honest with my children and give them the correct information when confronted with life's most difficult questions. I briefly wondered why I had promised to hold myself to such high parenting standards. One look in the rear view mirror at my two beautiful, clean, healthy and well fed boys, and it came back to me. Two perfectly good little reasons. And thus began our open and honest family discussion on drug trafficking and the world's oldest profession, unfortunately, not just a Vancouver Downtown Eastside problem. Though we don't see any of this on the streets of our small town of a mere 8000 people, in central redneck Alberta, it still exists in cities all over the world, and on a much smaller scale I'm sure, even in our own little sleepy town.

Sometimes, you have to leave the confines of the classroom and be fully present when the opportunity arises, to learn life's greatest lessons.