VANCOUVER, B.C. — Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, Amy Romer, works as a mentor for Megaphone's peer newsroom called The Shift in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The Shift is made up of a diverse group of individuals with lived experience of poverty, who are reporting from the DTES instead of being reported on
By Gilles Cyrene
Sometimes, I feel like I was born and grew up in the 19th century, not the 20th.
In Saskatchewan, where I grew up, 1956 was the year for rural electrification. But not for us. An electrical pole was installed with power lines that went right through the middle of our yard between the house and the barn, but we did not get electricity. We were tenant farmers. The owner of the property, our landlord, who received a third of the crop share every year, didn’t want us to put holes in the house.
My father offered to pay for the cost of wiring the house, but the landlord still refused.
Every day, when we walked under the power line between the house and barn to do chores, we were reminded of our peasant status.
Indoor plumbing consisted of a pump on the pantry sink that drew water up from a cistern in the basement. The sink drained into a pail that needed to be emptied daily. It was my job to carry a bucket of drinking water from the well, which was 60 metres away, to the house. In my parent's bedroom, a metal container with a toilet seat vented to the chimney, held a five-gallon bucket, which my father emptied in the outhouse.
At some point, we got a propane fridge and replaced the gas lantern with propane lights in the kitchen. During the short days of winter, our lighting in the barn was a kerosene lantern.
We had a phone, a fairly large box mounted on the wall with a crank on the side used to call an operator or to ring the neighbours on the party line. That was a true 20th-century connection.
When I was seven years old, I got the mumps. It was serious enough that I had to be taken to the hospital. Mumps can be fatal. It can cause encephalitis, an infection of the brain; myocarditis, inflammation of the heart muscle; and other deadly conditions.
The problem was that we were in the middle of a prairie winter blizzard, with snow whipping through the air driven by fierce winds and drifting snow piles making the roads impassable. The nearest plowed road was more than five kilometres away.
I remember being bundled up in a parka and blankets in front of the kitchen coal-stove oven before suddenly being carried out into the elements to a box sled drawn by a team of Clydesdale horses. They belonged to the neighbours. It was the same team that hauled their kids in a Bennett wagon to our one-room country school. I lay down on a mattress on the floor of the sled, surrounded by warm rocks, under several quilts.
I didn’t feel sick. The whole thing felt like some kind of wild adventure. I felt the team of horses jerk us forward and enjoyed the up-and-down floating motion over snowbanks, the wind gusting against the sled and the swish of the sled runners cutting their way forward. I was warm, cozy and quite happy. I slept.
I don’t remember getting to the hospital. My parents later told me that the horses hauled us to a neighbour about five kilometres away who lived on a road that had been cleared, and I was taken to town by car. At the hospital, I was placed in a fetal position on the operating table, where the doctor injected something directly into my spine. That I remember. It wasn’t much fun.
Mumps is now a vaccine-preventable disease. The MMR vaccine, which protects against measles, rubella, chickenpox and mumps, is part of routine immunization programs in most countries. In Canada, following the approval of the mumps vaccine in 1969 and the introduction of the routine two-dose MMR vaccination in 1996, reported cases of mumps have dropped by over 99 per cent nationwide.
I got the mumps before the vaccination was available. But we had community. We had neighbours willing to brave the cold, risk their lives and venture out in a blizzard with a team of animals. Community and antibiotics saved my life.
In 1959, we were evicted from the farm where we had lived for 10 years when the owner’s son-in-law took over. His family never moved into the house and it sat vacant, slowly deteriorating, despite having no holes in the walls. We built a new home on land previously owned by my grandmother and we installed electrical service, running water, a gas furnace and indoor plumbing.
Finally, at 15 years old, I experienced life in the 20th century.
Gilles Cyrenne is a retired journeyman carpenter, now writing full-time. He is the vice-president of the Carnegie Community Centre Association and has been involved at the centre for more than a decade with various writing groups and projects, including the annual Downtown Eastside Writers’ Festival. Gilles is a member of The Shift peer newsroom.
