Thursday 31 July, 2014
Thank you for having Black Ottawa Scene from your very busy schedule. How are you today?
I am very well thanks and it is truly my pleasure to work with you again and to support and engage with Black Ottawa Scene.
Can you tell us about your childhood. Where were you born and what was it like growing up? Were there any persons or incidents that helped form who you are today?
I am a student of English poetry and I love the poem “Hercules” which ends with a clause: I am a part of all that I have met”. I am a white African. I am very much an African. I was born in South Africa in the early sixties , in 1962, the year before Nelson Mandela was arrested. I grew up in Johannesburg in the sixties and the seventies, a very interesting time to live in Africa and in that part of Africa. I grew up in obviously in a segregated society. For those of your readers who know southern Africa, and that part of southern Africa’s history, it was a very interesting time, it was a segregated society but I think it created a heightened awareness of the issues that affected us as humans, because we lived in a cloistered environment, but we were very sensitive to the challenges that others were were having in living in their environments and our society had a lot of touch points between black and white communities, obviously and of course in South Africa we had what were called “honorary whites” who were Chinese, we had what are referred to in south Africa as “coloured” people who were people of mixed race descent, and we had people of East Indian descent , so we had these racial groups classified that way by the legal system of apartheid, that each had their own culture and of course within the black community there were many sub communities, tribal communities with long histories and proud cultures and I think that not withstanding some of constructs of the society, human beings are human beings, and it was in some respects a wonderful place for people to learn about cross cultural beauty and the experience that all of us to be able to live in such a rich environment where so many people of different backgrounds come together, formed a very significant part of my early childhood. Of course the white community in south Africa in those days, we had domestic servants although my parents were not moneyed people, they still were privileged enough to have servants, and so I have very fond early memories of friends who were children of women who looked after me and I think those early childhood friendships formed lasting friendships and I am still in touch with some people from time to time. But I think you can’t get away from the reality that the brutal political environment and long before I came of age in terms of understanding the context in which I was growing up and becoming politically and socially conscious, I think the experiences I have seen gross injustice happening around you in ways that were taken for granted. One incident I remember when I was I was about ten or twelve years old, our car was stolen in Johannesburg and the police came around and asked me if I could for a drive-by with them to see if we can find the car. I remember even at that stage, finding it interesting that they were doing stop and search of people walking in the street for no reason. They would stop a man and ask him to open his brief case. I was in the vehicle as a twelve year old looking for a motor vehicle, why were they stopping people and looking in their briefcases with no reason, and so, long before I knew about things and controversies, needing warrants before you can stop people and search them from a law enforcement perspective, I was exposed to some of these things, they really did make an impression. I grew up in a Jewish environment, with Jewish traditions and some of the inputs of the Jewish tradition of eastern European immigrants . One grandmother was born in South Africa, as both my parents, so I am third generation South African, but their line of descendancy was East European and they had suffered persecution as Jewish people in czarist Russia, and I think that community brought with it its own burdens of having not had political freedom and its cultural traditions that flowed through the religious teachings and through some of the rituals and so all contributed to an adolescence of awakening with a social conscience and that had lessons that came about the time of the Soweto riots and the death of Steve Biko. So it was a very rich childhood in ways I think that sometimes my own children whom have grown up in a peaceful and stable environment had not experienced and I think by the time we were finished high school in South Africa in the 70’s, we had military service that we had to contemplate to avoid because of some of the bush wars and the township uprisings. My community was very very adherent to social issues and political issues and the need to serve our fellow humans, with humanity.
Did you have to serve in the military, was there conscription at the time?
I was conscripted. I never did serve in the South African army. That was the time of the South African bush war. I was conscripted in 1978 as a 16 year old but I got exemptions to do my medical school training. By the time I left South Africa in 1988, I had had repeated exemptions.
Was that when you came to Canada?
I got married in 1986, my wife is a Zimbabwean and we lived in South Africa after I finished medical school. I practiced medicine there for about a year and half. and then I went to live in England. We came to Canada in 1989.
Did you do any of your post graduate studies in England or Canada or both?
Mostly in Canada. I did some post graduate work in England. I spent a year working in the National Health Service which was also a great experience. I did my post graduate specialty here in Ottawa in Public Health and I studied at Ottawa U and also did my Master’s in Epidemiology.
I am an alumnus of Ottawa U myself, I did my graduate degree in Health Administration there
(Laughs) Interesting. We may have been students there at the same time.
You’ve been medical officer of health for some years, five years I think?
It’s been six years
What do you see as your biggest achievement and what has been your biggest challenges?
My biggest achievement frankly is landing, having the good fortune to land in this job and land in the role in public health. I was always attracted to public health, I spent all that time, probably too much time talking of the formative years of my life. I think what that really did for me, my parental upbringing, all of those streams created in me a sense of a desire to serve the public. It’s a trite kind of saying that we all want to serve, but those of us attracted to the health disciplines do have in us a desire to leave every interaction with individuals, having provided the other individuals we’ve interacted with, with a sense of fulfillment. And the beauty of medicine or any of the health professions is that it gives us an edge to be able to do that, we have that uniquely privileged kind of relationship with people than with other professions. If you take that a step further, to have the opportunity to do this for a whole community, which is what public health is, is really a very rewarding space that one is lucky to find. So in the sense that the achievement is just being here, that’s really something I feel quite strongly about. More towards what you’re driving at, one of the things I’m proud of in this organisation. I think we are an organisation that is well respected and we have credibility, we’re perceived to be, I believe, an entity that makes a difference in the lives of most of Ottawa’s citizens. And I think that the team work, the enthusiasm and the dedication that constitute the make up of the work force here, is very much the reason for that. I do believe that the visibility that we have and the awareness that the community has about our organisation has increased . I don’t think it’s my work alone but my ability to work with people who are here and who bring all of those skills and dedication to really improve people’s awareness of what we do and to improve and enhance people’s confidence in us, is something I am very proud of.
What about your challenges, are there things you feel you could have done better or done differently? Are there things you’re struggling with or to come to terms with? In six years there must have been a few challenges.
You know every day is a challenge in some ways. Possibly the highlights, maybe one of the most difficult things of my career, was managing our community’s response to the H1N1 epidemic. As an issue, that was a big challenge. I think the biggest on-going challenge that we have, is aligning people’s perceptions that public health is sometimes about social engineering, sometimes we’re perceived as trying to tell people how to live their lives. We’re sanctimonious and self-righteous, you know: don’t smoke , don’t drink and don’t go for a swim if you’ve got any alcohol in your system, don’t drive, use condoms. There is always something about our message that often is perceived as a bit of raining on people’s parades. And then when we try and bring interventions into the community that we know, work beyond providing a messaging, interventions around a healthy public policy, sometimes people see that as a nanny state’s move, that Levy thinks he can parent better than I can, and Levy likes to tell me what to do. And really, that’s not what it’s about, what public health professionals, and you were one, what we are about we are are trying to do is to engage with people to ensure that they have the ability to make the healthiest choices, that they have an environment that is healthy for them, for their children and for their loved ones, socially, physically and emotionally. I find that sometimes frustrating that my best intentions and the best intentions of our staff, are perceived by people with a libertarian bent, to be a waste of public money and to be an imposition in their lives . I see that as a challenge. and I see that as disappointing because honestly, our true intention is inevitably to enrich and enable people to to live a fulfilled life, so that disconnect is sometimes quite frustrating.
Talking about H1N1, I recall when the epidemic hit Ottawa, and Canada, there was a strong movement from public health to make sure that the public was immunized. But then there was this, don’t know what to call it, people then reacted in surprising ways. I remember I was at my barber’s, getting a haircut and the barber asked me , you’re from public health how is it that you’re forcing people to get immunized for H1N1 when in fact we know that from the research that the vaccine causes autism and AHHD? And then there was this famous conflict you had with the then Chief of Ottawa Police over safe injection sites. How do you deal with these types of distractions ?
That is really a great question because you used two wonderful examples there of how public perception and individual perceptions can sometimes be confusing and create confusion. The way I deal with it is always to , even at times when I am at my most frustrating, which is fairly unusual, when people are being very aggressive and advancing a point of view they believe to be fact and they feel strongly is right, and I feel strongly is not. I would try to just respect the position they are coming forward with and again this comes back to my childhood in South Africa, we had some pretty strongly held opinions about fundamental truths in society, some people thought that other people were better than others based on perceptions, not based on any reality or science, which is patently ludicrous. So with situations like that, I engage in dialogue and I want to understand where people are coming from and I want to be respectful and I want to provide the best argument both at the intellectual and emotional level, for why I believe my point of view is is right, so being tolerant of others’ positions, being respectful in the articulation of my own, I think, is always a good way to at least establish a dynamic in which you can engage with. And from there good things happen. You don’t have the ability for good things when there is no common ground in which to have a dialogue. Even if the dialogue ends with a reluctance agreeing to disagree, the process of going through this conversation in a respectful and tolerant awareness of each other’s perspective, I think and this leads to the nub of the police chief dynamic in your question. It enables you to build common ground on the things you do agree on and what I found with any number of people in this role where poeple have come with strongly held opinions I don’t agree with, is that we can in almost in every situation, we can park those opinions for another day and celebrate those things we see a lot of common ground. So on safe injection sites, it is a difficult conversation, because health professionals tend to see a certain angle, while law enforcement professionals see it from a different angle and public appropriators, people who spend public dollars see it from a different angle. But we have a lot of common ground when we talk about the needs of people with addictions, and the needs of people who are homeless and every police chief I have ever engaged with on, in the discussion on how we can help them, specifically the individuals in our community who have those kind of problems , and how can our community help those people, before we had common ground, we don’t want them getting sick, we don’t want these people having to commit crimes in order to get their fix. We want to be providing them with services, we want them to make a healthier choice than they are making, we very quickly were able to focus on those kinds of common ground. So when I first started here, I am proud of this piece, there was a lot of talk in the press about how I was on such a different page, or my predecessor had been on a different page, with the police chief and the police chief and I, I think on my second day, we went out and we had shepherds’ pie at a local pub in Kanata and we agreed simply not to talk about things we disagreed with in the press.
That’s a very interesting way of dealing with conflict.
And then we said well, now we need our teams to have shepherds’ pie. We instructed both teams to get together and we organised a facilitated session where we asked the front-line police officers who work in the market and our front-line public health staff who work in the market, to get in a room together and engage with each other about how their work works. And all of a sudden people started to understand the world through other people’s eyes.
A lot of the myths about public health around communicable diseases for instance are shared through social media which has now become an industry of its own, that seems to be going out of control. What are you doing to counter all this? Are you using social media to correct the wrong impression people may have about public health?
We do and I think social media is a double edged sword. We’re allowing, it is the democratization of information and certainly some real trash gets out there as health communications. It’s unvetted and really have no substance in science, no substance in anything. Unfortunately the uninformed consumer of this information has no way of weighting that against more credible and more appropriate information that I would be recommending. We see it for example with the vaccines. The way I view that, this is just another phase in our never ending struggle to have people make wise decisions for themselves to enable them to make wise decisions. We have examples: carpe diem is one thing, buyer beware, so long before social media, there were snake oil sales men, people who sell false hope with the wrong messages, sometimes malevolently and sometimes because they believe it. When it is malevolent, it’s best handled head-on and deal with it and when it is that they are ignorant, we have to help educate them and show them where we can, how they do things. So social media helps disseminate that , it helps create a challenge in terms of the breadth and reach of some of these frankly incorrect messages but it also allows us to counter it . I have a great faith in the wisdom of humanity to ultimately sift through all the information that is available and come to the right conclusions. Our role becomes putting out positions forward and telling the truth as we see it, through the media , the social media channels that are available to us. So we now have Ottawa Public health actually has, we’ve been very lucky to have two or three really innovative smart folks who understand social media and we’ve empowered them, something I am proud of, not a bureaucratic attitude to our social media, we haven’t worried about risk. We’ve just said to them, folks, go engage in the social media conversations , on Facebook, on Twitter, on YouTube, put out your position . We’ve got 20,000 followers on our Twitter account, the highest of any public health unit in north America.
That’s quite an achievement!
Yeah, people follow because the stuff out there is credible and valuable and that helps us engage in conversation in this new world. The nimbleness that we are able to achieve with social media is really exciting. We had an issue about five months ago, in a measles case in a school in the west end of Ottawa and some of our folks who keep an eye on the social media discussions, picked up that a few of the mothers at that school were starting to escalate their concerns and frustrations with government and with public health and very quickly we had a person, didn’t seek any approvals to get into the Facebook conversation. One of our staff said please hold, we’ll be back in ten minutes with a nurse to answer your questions and we were able to be instantaneously responsive to dozens of worried and potentially angry parents and quickly resolve the issue and get correct information out, so social media is really a powerful tool as I see it.
Talking about social media as a tool for getting your message out to the community, there has been this recent legislation, the so called anti-spam legislation. How has that affected Ottawa Public Health and your ability to engage the community?
It hasn’t. I wish I could remember the legal clause, but we ‘re exempt. So the legislation has benefited us and enabled us to delete a few spam messages from our own list, but public organisations that don’t have a commercial interest in disseminating information are exempt from this law. That was re-assuring.
I am thinking of our readers; Black Ottawa Scene focuses on people of African, Caribbean and Black heritage. I’d like to find out from you, are there any particular disease conditions of public health concern where we, as a community are most at risk? How are you dealing with that, how are you communicating that , how are you engaging this community in addressing any of those concerns?
One of the biggest challenges in north American society, is we don’t like to talk about race and ethnicity in the accurate collection of statistics . Growing up in Africa, we don’t mind so much talking about people who are black and white , we are comfortable with it and we don’t see it always as a threat or as a problem. But we do not take statistics by ethnicity or by race in Canada in a meaningful way that allows us to really understand some of the basic questions you’re alluding to . We do know though that here in Ottawa that people of African descent , who could have been here for many generations, some are first time Canadians, so from an epidemiological point of view , we sometimes slice that slightly differently from the background of the race and ethnicity, or we might slice it as new Canadians, or immigrants, as refugees. Certainly we know that immigrants, and many immigrants now are coming in from Africa, immigrants tend to be healthier than most Ottawa-born folks . Refugees tend to have very specific problems and that depends on where they come from. But in my book the biggest challenge that refugees have, relates to mostly to challenges literacy.
To go back to my initial question, because Canada does not have a tradition of collecting information by race, you are not able to identify any specific risks relating to a particular racial group?
We do do certain things. There are two things I think really come out for us, one is we know that descendants of certain folks particularly sub-Saharan Africa, not so much the Caribbean community, do tend in Ottawa to have higher rates of diabetes, we know that black people from the literature, that black people tend to have higher rates of cardio-vascular disease risk factors, higher prevalence of high blood pressure, particularly some issues with obesity, just like the rest of the community, yet we know that in Ottawa black communities tend to have lower heart disease, so that’s strange , low rates of heart disease. So there a few things that we know and we know them from special surveys rather than from our traditional or routine collection of data. We also know that with diseases like HIV and hepatitis C, TB, again depending on how long people have been in the country, new immigrants or first or second generation immigrants, we see higher proportions of TB in the black community than we would expect, based on the proportion of people in the black community. So those kinds of things are easily explainable by the fact that we sometimes see in immigrants from countries where other problems are endemic, hepatitis , and HIV for example. And that’s the Caribbean story, as an example, so about a third to fifty per cent of the HIV we see in Ottawa is actually people who’ve come from endemic countries.
That is sub Saharan Africa and the Caribbean?
Yes and so what we do then is we work in a community engagement context, with organisations like Somerset Community Health Centre, OCISO, OLIP, groups that work with new comers and community groups, particularly on health promotion kinds of initiatives. You might be familiar with Operation Hairspray, and that’s one example that we are quite proud of in terms of the work with the community to address a risk factor that we perceive is there, might not be as bad as we think because the data is there. We want to be culturally appropriate and we want to have reach into the community and the only way we can do that is by working with people and leaders in the community.
I sense from your words that you sound a little bit disappointed, that Canada doesn’t have a tradition of collecting data based on racial or other ethnic demographic characteristics. I look at the US, it is routine that every data they collect regardless of what it is, in the military they want to know your race, gender, sexual orientation and so on. Do you as as medical officer of health and a research and fact-based scientist, do you see a need for collecting data based on race or ethnicity?
Race is a determinant of health and it is an attribute of the human condition, that helps us classify people , not for the wrong reasons, I think we have a tremendous sensitivity in Canada. Canada is a marvelous country, with wonderful values of tolerance, of egalitarian aspiration and equality, and we’re nervous about the way that other societies have collected and used this kind of information, and nervous with good reason. We’re not naive as a society but from a medical and public health perspective, we’ve seen other parts even in Canada, not that long ago, Toronto public health took a look at this question and came up with the conclusion that for sure, if we understood race as a variable and how it contributes to health risk and health behaviors, and how we could work with that kind of data, from a scientific perspective, I believe we’d be in a strong position on some of our programmatic decisions.
In that case are you, as a community of public health specialists, people with lots of experience, are you pushing for information or data to be collected along racial or ethnic lines? What is the barrier, is it government, or is the level of political correctness that we see in Canada, because as you said, Canadians are rather nervous about how data based on race have been used in other countries for the wrong reasons?
I think the biggest barrier is a lack of an immediately obvious need to go about it, there isn’t a burning platform that has those in my community crying out for it. We perceive, those of us who understand the the power of this information, for the good that this information can be put to. We regret that we don’t have those opportunities but the good news is that we don’t see an obviously glaring gap that will galvanize us to make a case to have a broader community of Canadians with those social behaviors. As to why they should rethink , why we should rethink the way we approach these things, I should see it in a sense as a good news story. I think the barrier is the absence of the burning platform, so to speak. I think the political correctness has a negative connotation to it. There is a reason that we’ve come to our stage of political correctness. Many of us have seen , sadly many of us have experienced how this kind of information can be misused in ways that the intention that inadvertently will cause pain and suffering to individuals and societies, so one has to go there with caution, with awareness and sophistication.
Recently there has been an outbreak of Ebola virus in West Africa, Liberia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, and just yesterday there was a report that a Canadian doctor who just came back from West Africa voluntarily quarantined himself. Obviously this is a public health issue. Are you concerned about this and what is Canada and Ottawa Public Health doing about it?
We’re concerned in a generic way about anything that happens anywhere. We know that the concept of the butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world, in an inter connected world we all experience the consequences of the wind flow that that sets up and that’s a meta-physical and almost trivial analogy when one talks about the tragedy that is the Ebola outbreak. Yes , any disease of that sort creates an awareness in the public health community of the potential for spread, the potential for real tragedy and our obligation to protect the community. In a broader sense, the risks of things like of Ebola for people who live in Ottawa, even people of African descent , actually this is the irony, they actually pale into insignificance, compared to the risk of substance abuse, the risks of obesity. We are fortunate to live in a society that largely speaking, has taken care of most of the killers and the diseases that maimed fifty and a hundred years ago, infectious diseases. Sometimes I get into trouble when I say this but people remind me that infectious diseases can have a resurgence, we see SARS, we see Walkaton, people die, these are more terrible in that they are avoidable but the ill effects of chronic alcohol use are avoidable, people are dying in large numbers without us being aware of it, has us thinking of the diseases that are more common and the risk factors that are more common in our community. That’s not to detract though from the point, it’s really to provide context as to how we look at these things as public health professionals but the fear that we feel for an infectious disease that we can’t see and can kill suddenly, is legitimate and there I would say that I am not overly concerned about us here in Ottawa. I don’t think we’re likely to see a significant impact on the health risk of the people of Ottawa from what’s going on in West Africa . There’s a few reasons for that. Even though we’re talking particularly about a community that travels back and forth to Africa, the flight patterns are such that most people who might be sick, coming from West Africa tend not to have Ottawa as a first stop. Because of the characteristics of the disease, people would manifest their sickness if they were going to be sick, earlier than they’d likely get to Ottawa . Also although the disease is obviously very serious, it actually doesn’t spread as easily as we think, people really need to be in direct contact with someone who is ill before it would spread, so our conditions here in Ottawa even if someone would land here, are such that we could probably for the community quickly manage the situation, for the individual it might be serious, whereas that’s quite quite far from the situation in a small rural hospital a country where there is a lot of the disease. So from my point of view as the local public health officer, I am not overly concerned about it. But there are things that are troubling, on the one hand Ebola shows up , its first manifestation are very common flu-like symptoms and so it’s very difficult for people to determine at the early stages that this is something as serious as Ebola, and so that’s the scenario when something is rare, and it shows with some common symptoms . That’s the situation we in a community like ours might have physician who might not immediately think of it while in West Africa it would be at the top of my list. So that kind of thing is something we have to be vigilant about. And then the other piece is as a humanitarian, the fact that this is been going on, and it is so difficult to manage, in the communities that it is happening and over a thousand people affected now, close to seven hundred have died, that’s obviously a devastating statistic. So you’ve learned by now I never give a straight answer.
That’s OK that’s what reporters expect. So let’s turn to your personal life. You’re a very busy person, you know how long it took me to get this appointment for an interview, what do you do to relax, how do you fit all this work into your family life, your social life and your other obligations? Do you have a life other than public health?
I’m very lucky, I love what I do. I love my work, I work very long hours but I don’t regard that as a burden, I find that my work is relaxing, and while it has many stressful moments, I derive a lot of energy from the work . I don’t exercise a lot, I try and do a minimum of an hour three times a week, but I find that I am not very disciplined in my exercise life. But mostly what I do, to relax other than work out is, I read a lot, I have a wide eclectic taste in literature, mostly non-fiction, mostly history, a lot of African history, I like jig saw puzzles and I enjoy spending time with my family. I am very lucky, I have a very balanced and a very content life and part of that comes from visiting my family in Africa, and that’s part of the reason why I put you off for nearly a month because I was in South Africa, so that kind of travel , there is nothing I find more relaxing than spending a week in a game park.
I know you are a soccer fan, and we just concluded the Wold Cup of soccer, so what was your verdict, what was your reaction to the competition?
Last time I ran into you said you were going to ask me about my prediction. I am so happy we waited till afterwards as I was hopelessly wrong. Not that hopelessly wrong, I would have thought that Brazil would meet Germany in the final , so I was close . I love the World cup and i am a sports nut and when we were growing up we didn’t have TV, South Africa was isolated, FIFA had banned South Africa, we used to travel , in the seventies , to the Swaziland border and there was a hotel right on the border with Swaziland that used to be able to pick up the signal from Swaziland . So every four years we would make the trek down to the Swazi border to watch the World cup. That’s how driven we were. So I really enjoyed it, I thought is was a fantastic tournament,I was blown away by some of the lesser popular nations.
What was your biggest surprise and what was your biggest shock?
I think my biggest surprise was probably Iran . The German vs Iran game was just amazing. And the biggest shock was seeing Brazil collapse to Germany, that was so depressing, I was a Brazil supporter, I thought Brazil would have a good run and since the days of Pele, I’ve always had a soft spot for Brazil . The Germans were trying not to score, that was just terrible.
What was your verdict about the African teams, there were five African teams there , what did you expect and did you expect much from them or were you thinking they were just there to make up the numbers?
No no I was very excited to see that many African teams, I thought that Ghana and Nigeria had strong teams and would do well and they had a tremendous performance. I was surprised Ghana lost to the US actually, I think it was probably a good result but I thought Ghana had a good team and Nigerian put in a great performance. Cameroon was just a disappointment, I am not sure what the story is there , but I haven’t really got into the politics of what happened afterwards but to see two players head butting each other on the same side, I thought what are we doing, that was disappointing.
Let’s go back to your country. Bafana Bafana didn’t make it this time, not even to the African Cup of Nations. What do you think is going on here?
I think one of the tragedies as the legacy of apartheid is there are other things to focus on and there was no international competition for the hundred years of the World Cup, so I think we kind of underestimate understanding the level of the sport and the interest in the sport that we have, we can’t underestimate the fact that there hasn’t been that much infra structure, that much effort put in creating excellence in the sports.I am also a rugby fan and of course the Springboks can hold their own, I am proud of that.
But it doesn’t seem that the world sanctions have affected rugby as much as soccer?
I think they did. I think it is a smaller competitive pool in rugby and I think that South Africa would easily be the pre-dominant world power in rugby, now they are one of the big three, but often not right at the top. The All Blacks and the Wallabies, even some of the British teams can sometimes add flavour. I think if we add those thirty or forty years out of international competition we’d be on the moon
But Bafana Bafana won the African Cup of Nations under Mandela. Are suggesting that , do you think that was due to the Mandela influence?
I think the Mandela Midas touch cannot be underestimated.
You think Mandela wearing their jersey did it for them?
It can’t be overestimated, I am not a man that believes in myth, every human at the end of the day, paupers and kings all start and end the same way but he had an amazing ability to motivate people , so I don’t know if that had anything to do with it, but I think Bafana Bafana has along way to go to real excellence.
So what future do you predict for Bafana Bafana, I think they just fired their coach and hired a new one Do you think that’s going to do the trick, turn things around for them?
I think at the end of the day success in any walk of life comes from a combination of passion and hard work. They’ve got the passion, no question, sometimes they go a little off on the hard work but they’ll get their discipline right and in time with patience and hard work they’ll win the World Cup one day.
Finally do you have message for readers of Black Ottawa Scene?
I’ve very much enjoyed being at some of the Black History Months. I think the pride that I feel in the room comes right out of the community, it’s so inspiring. My message really is thank you and our little piece of Africa in the hearts of all of us from there and of course the Caribbean and of course, so many came from Africa through the Caribbean, my message is never forget, don’t lose it, Africa gave the world humanity. My anatomy professor used to say: Never forget what Africa is.
Thank you so much Dr. Levy and it’s been a pleasure interviewing you and we look forward to talking to you again soon.