Today was a successfully busy day. I say successfully in that I did all that I intended to do, and all that I intended to do was all very important to me. I attended the Amnesty International UVic chapter meeting for the first time, and I'm hoping to get involved with them in organizing campaigns, especially the Human Rights Film Festival which UVic is hosting in November. I don't know how it'll pan out for me since Romeo and Juliet will overlap, but I'll do my damn'dest! After the meeting I attended a panel discussion at St. Aidan's United hosted by Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan. The panelists were women who were either from Afghanistan, worked in Afghanistan, or were Canadians of Afghan descent. Their focus was on the importance of educating women in Afghanistan, and educating men on women's rights in Afghan society, and that the best way to get rid of the Taliban over there is education. The stories from these women were very inspiring, and are another testament to not taking our education for granted in any way. After the talk there was an actual burqa on display in the lobby which guests were allowed to try on. I wanted to try it for myself, but someone got to it first, unfortunately. I asked the old lady wearing it what the vision was like underneath, and she said it was terrible. Besides the obvious social controversy of this garb which I won't go into right now, the thing seems entirely impractical as an article of clothing. All in all it was a great evening.

On another note, I'm reading an anthology on the state of Canadian drama throughout the 20th century for m theatre history class. In it, playwright Sharon Pollock posits that there is no such thing as "Canadian Identity", that Canada is rather a "bureaucrat's name for a geographical area", and what we actually have are British Columbia, Quebec and Alberta, etc. etc., and that we'll only find ourselves when we seek out our roots to where we immediately are, and that those who have found their voices as artists did so because they were grounded in their regional disposition. This is an interesting statement, and quite closely linked to Andrew Cohen's opinion about Ottawa being a capital that seems to have little symbolic relevance to the country it supposedly governs. Perhaps Canada really is too big for its own good. I afterwards read an interview of playwright Rick Salutin who was recounting his experiences in Mozambique. He remarked how refreshing it was to be over there. The interview was done in 1981, so Mozambique was only a few years old at this point. But he was saying how the people came together--people of several distinct languages and customs--because they decided "it would be a good idea to have a country, so they went ahead and did it". They were making up a culture and were quite proud of it, Salutin says. He said he wished that Canadians could be more like this and not obsess so much about the question of our national character, but rather, answer it. That is to say, invent the answer. There's plenty of material to work with.