Christine Dranzoa - a remarkable person.

I’d like to share a story from Africa that is very much linked to a small slice of Saskatoon life.

Chrsitine Dranzoa outside the Faculty of Vet Med, 2002

I have a long history in Africa and for the last eight years of my career as a wildlife veterinarian I took Canadian students from the Western College of Veterinary Medicine to Uganda. We would not have been able to carry out this program if it had not been for the head of the Department of Wildlife and Animal Resource Management at the Makerere University veterinary school. Her name is Christine Dranzoa and through several exchanges of letters and email she laid on a tour for me in 2002 to see what was what before I actually took students there.

 

After that introductory tour it was relatively simple for me to convince the powers-that-be in Canada that there was a really worthwhile opportunity for Canadian students to learn a huge amount about veterinary medicine, and much more, in a new setting.

I also found out that Christine has a remarkable history, which I will compress (and which does not appear on any website). She was born in West Nile, the region of the country where Idi Amin came from. When he was ousted the equally gruesome despot, Milton Obote, targeted everyone in West Nile. Christine, aged 12, fled to Sudan as a refugee. She managed to get out of that nightmare and finished high school, got her BSc and went on to her PhD work. At age 27 she spoke to the dean at the vet school about the lack of a wildlife department and soon found herself not only founding one, but also becoming its head! We worked with her near the end of that tenure as this rather grainy old footage, shot with an early version of a digital camera, shows.

 

For the first three years Dr. Dranzoa traveled with us in the field and worked with the students on her specialty, which is birds. Her thesis work had been on the nesting ecology of birds in partially logged forest fringes. We visited Kibale National Park where Christine did her studies and used mist nets to capture birds, ring them, and collect blood samples for disease studies. We even found a couple of cases of avian malaria.

We were also able to secure funding at the WCVM to bring Christine to Saskatoon to deliver a moving talk about issues related to wildlife in her country. When my wife and I took her to one of our favourite places, Prince Albert National Park, we were lucky enough to see a huge swirl of snow geese above a slough near the appropriately named town of Duck Lake.  

Snow goose cloud. Photo by Trudy Janssens, Photogrpahy One2One

When her eight years as department head were up Christine was promoted to the post of Deputy Director of the School of Postgraduate Studies for the entire university (30,000 students, 3,000 graduate students) at age 35!

Artist's impression of the new campus

Dr. Dranzoa has gone on to meet new challenges. Two years ago (in her forties) Christine was tasked as one of the team founding a new university in her home region, in the district of Arua in the West Nile sub-region. This was after elders in the community petitioned Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni.  It  was founded in 2012 and has now been registered as Muni University. Christine is the current Vice Chancellor.

It comes as no surprise to learn that Christine has been active in other fields, especially in ones related to women’s issues in Uganda and beyond. Although we came to know her well and enjoyed our many visits with her, she never told us that she co-founded and is Chairperson of Nile Women Initiative an NGO which aims to address gender disparities in her home region. She is also Honorary Secretary of the pan-African Forum for African Women Educationalists.

Christine (r) with Fifi in 2003 and Angela, Chrstine's sister

Over and above these remarkable achievements she has now raised 18 children, none of them her own (she has never married). Most are kids of her siblings who were either killed in Obote’s pogroms or died of AIDS. The youngest, Fifi, is about to finish high school. A few are not even relatives, but just orphan children who are friends of her extended family. When we visited Christine’s home we discovered that the bedrooms were set up as dormitories – boys and girls. How could it have been otherwise?

The nursing clinc is under construction

Christine has written to me seeking help with equipment for a nursing station, a small but much needed part of the campus, especially during the construction phase when not only builders but also the  general public, will have it handy. She had heard that there were organizations in Canada who could ship containers of stuff to needy areas. After a bit of sleuthing I met (so far only by phone and on line) a Regina-based nursing PhD who has shipped 79 containers to 19 countries in the last 10 years. Her name is Pammla Petrucka. Dr. Petrucka has a well-oiled system and access to a large warehouse in Regina. She can also get hold of a full array of medical equipment ranging from bangages to bedpans, tilt beds to tubing and walkers to wheelchairs. On top of that she has a team of volunteers who can fill a container in a single day. All the equipment is donated, in good condition, and free. The problem is the shipping. It costs about $25,000 to ship a container. This covers the cost of the container, the physical act of transport, and the paperwork. The container is not returned and is likely to end up being a useful addition at the destination. I have even heard of containers being fitted with air conditioning before shipment.

My wife and I, and several of those former students have managed to raise part of the funds needed to get one container to Uganda, but cannot reach the full $25,000 needed to complete the shipment. We are channeling our funds through the Hospitals of Regina Foundation, which has NFP charitable status so that our donors will receive tax receipts.

Apart from being an author and retired professor I am a storyteller and have told stories about my career as a wildlife vet on 4 continents. The Africa stories often have threads about Christine in them. I hope that this comes as no surprise.

Saskatoon Storytelling

Friday night is storytelling night in Saskatoon. Or at least the 3^rd Friday of every month. That is when storytellers gather for an informal session that usually runs about two and a half hours. The core, the driving force, behind the group (we call ourselves the Saskatoon Storytellers Guild) are a small group of half-a-dozen or so professional tellers who have been involved for a long time.  Many of us are members of the Storytellers of Canada, Conteurs duCanada. Chris Lindgren keeps the books and runs the group email list. Other regulars who tell in libraries and schools are Kathy Bennett, Judith Benninger, Russ Frith, Bonnie Logan, and Garry Tisdale. Balladeer Paddy Tutty brings her dulcimer and contributes. Sometimes other professionals also manage to be in the city on the right day. Last week it was Kevin Mackenzie from Regina who joined us. Occasionally teller, musician and actor Joseph Naytowhow is in the city and drops by, much to the delight of all. The there are a few who might be classed as semi-professional. Wayne and Shirley Handley probably fit this bill as do I. There is woodwork to do, grand children to visit, fish to catch and writing to finish, or maybe start. 

Then there are the more-or-less regulars who come out to enjoy an evening of stories and share experiences. We are usually a group of about twenty who gather at 7.30 of an evening. Our venue of late has been the Unitarian Centre on 2^nd street, which is a friendly spot with comfortable chairs.

Each time we meet one of us acts as “host.” This is not an arduous task as it just means that the host has to choose a theme for the evening and make sure that the tea and coffee supplies arrive at the same time as the people. 

Here Kevin and Christine share a moment during the break. The coffee and tea supplies are at the back.  Those who can do so bring some sort of goodies, for the break. Home-made muffins, oatmeal cookies, some sort of chocolate delight. It’s all good.

Last week Rhonda was our host. She chose an open-ended theme of birds or flight and as usual the theme stories were the first to be told in the story circle as brief anecdotes. In storytelling tradition some sort of object is passed around the circle and is held by the teller. It shows who has the floor. It is often a stick, but can be a hat or a stone. That’s up to the host. Rhonda chose to use a sculpture of a small duck—probably a teal.

Highly appropriate, and here she is at the right of the circle starting the proceedings off.

All nineteen of us gave a short account of some sort of bird, or near-bird encounter. It was fun to listen to the variety of stories that emerged. We had naturally had stories from Canada, but also from Kenya, Ecuador and France. The Canadian ones included accounts of humming birds in Tofino, LBJs (unidentified Little Brown Jobs) south of Moose Jaw, a successful killdeer nest on a driveway and the disadvantages of winning a duckling in a raffle. For those who have never had such luck, it is definitely a two-edged sword. 

  

As teller Bonnie put it, a duckling’s output is somehow greater than its intake, which can be a disadvantage if the pet is sitting on your head. The wooden teal in Bonnie’s hands is definitely not the pet one.

Rob told us how he and his family went birding at North America’s oldest bird sanctuary at Last Mountain Lake but instead watched as 1900 head of cattle crossed the road, mustered by just three cowboys. It took a long time and not much bird watching occurred. We heard about an escaped budgie that eventually came back, and a blue and gold macaw that cleaned its handler’s ears near the Arc de Triomphe. Kevin must have thought he was at a liar’s contest. His anecdote started out as being more-or-less believable, but soon morphed into a fantasmagoric account of a swan’s broken wing, surgery, a famous film star, a sauna bath and an unusual tissue transplant for the patient with the wing of a rare Central American duck. Of course he has to wring the duck’s neck to steal the wing. He had us all in stitches.

The session after the break is always for prepared stories that can be on any theme. They always range across the full gamut and at least one is likely to involve the third son of an impoverished family succeeding when his brothers have failed. In this case it was not only the third son but he had to complete three seemingly impossible tasks. Of course he got the girl–what else would you expect?  There were folk tales, a Maasai animal story, stories from a time before time and stories with a moral.

A typical storytelling evening, and a good time was had by all. We don’t know if everyone will live happily ever after.

The Word On The Street in Saskatoon

LinkJust back from a wonderful three-day break canoeing and fishing in Meadow Lake Provincial park, in Saskatchewan’s northwest. With all the kids back in school, and the official summer season over, we almost had the entire park to ourselves.

The weather was fantastic, with daytime highs in the mid 20s and nights above freezing, and we had our campground entirely to ourselves. We encountered black bears twice, in both cases when we were driving.
This group of a mother and cubs was feeding on low-bush cranberries right by the road. They all looked fat and sassy.

The canoeing was great. The waters were calm, and the fall colours were just getting going.

Now I have a bigger task. Today is the city’s first ever participation in The Word On The Street Festival and I have been drafted at the last minute to act as an MC for one of the afternoon sessions. We have a stellar line-up, with 32 readings and activities in three performance venues. Our headliners are Yann Martell and Sandra Birdsell, but we have lots of other authors, and a major attraction will be Netty the talking car.

The Word On The Street is a free Community Festival that celebrates reading and advocates literacy. It takes place across Canada on the last Sunday in September each year and this year Saskatoon joins established venues Toronto, Halifax, Kitchener and Vancouver as well a newbie Lethbridge as we bring together talented writers from our city, our province and beyond.

You can find out lots more about the day at our website You can also see a short clip that was made by the students at the Evan Hardy High School media school during last year’s preview event They will be with us again this year and we look forward to seeing what they can come up with.