Drive-by Saviours Read Free

to work or attend school until his refugee hearing, to be held sometime in the next twenty months. Every time I met with Abdul he sighed deeply, shook his head, and told me the same thing: “I’m a hard worker, a very hard worker, and I can’t even find volunteer work.”
    That week, like every other week, I had tried and failed to find volunteer work for a geneticist. Every lab I asked told me about union troubles. Volunteer workers take away paid work. Besides, they wondered, how could they tell if a guy with three Sri Lankan degrees knows how to work in a Canadian lab?
    I dreaded breaking the same bad news to him every week. Every week he sighed and shook his head and asked me what he should do. Every week I had no answer.
    I wished I could spend the whole day with Abdul, show him the framed art in our galleries and the graffiti art in our streets, take him to hockey games, show him the urban expanse below the CN Tower, give him the therapy of doing something, anything, which he couldn’t do alone on his ‘material-needs-only’ welfare allowance.
    But with reports due to the government funders that hold our existence in their godly palms, it was my lot and my time allotment to appease them with sacrificial reports and proposals, occasionally taking the communion of workshops on budget development, and doing the ceremonial dance of regulatory lingo. I had but thirty minutes available for Abdul, during which I referred him to several volunteer agencies, none of which were likely to have anything for a geneticist.
    If I were a Christian, a true Christian, I’d have taken Abdul out and about in my free time, or given him some money at least. But my personal budget was carefully and strictly allocated to loan payments, rent, RRSPs, and scrupulously pre-selected registered charities benefiting from my benevolence. There was little left for handouts.
    My time was equally regimented: forty hours for work, softball on Mondays, volunteer board meetings on Tuesdays, art class on Wednesdays, Thursdays were for writing a weekly piece I do for the social workers’ newsletter, and Fridays were for Sarah. It was her insistence on quality time—during which we played cards or watched movies, though when we started we used to sing each other love songs until it got so hot we were naked on the floor, exhausted, with all the heat rising above us as sleep ensued.
    My weekends were dedicated to the never-ending task of fixing up our fixer-upper house, the only one we could afford in Toronto despite renting the upstairs to students. It was an ongoing process of drywall, primer, paint, rewiring, re-shingling, spackle, tar, glue, hammer, sixteen different kinds of wrenches, 112 kinds of screws and drivers, a drill for tough jobs, re-spackle the mistakes, sanding through dust and fumes.
    What time did I have for clients? Besides, you take one to a ballgame you gotta take ‘em all, which is well beyond my allotted charity budget.
    Abdul left my cubicle with his head hanging as always, and as always I wondered if there was more I could have done. I put it out of my mind and returned to my budget analysis. Someone was spending too much on long distance phone calls.
    At 4 : 30 , as I was drafting a memo outlining a new policy on long distance calls, the power went out. There was a collective groan from the cellblock at the interruption. Technical difficulties again? As if the computers weren’t slow enough.
    A strange silence set in, as if time had frozen. The steady hum of the computers and florescent lights had ceased. Now what?
    One by one we staggered into the hallways, overwhelmed by the frightening possibilities of our newfound freedom. It was the freedom of nothing to do, or the relative freedom of plenty to do but no tools with which to do it.
    â€œPower’s out?”
    â€œLook’s like it.”
    â€œWell, let’s see.”
    My manager, Sherry, and I strolled around the maze asking