The calamity in the Indian Ocean has cast a sombre shadow on the arrival of the new year. Long will we recall the horror of the Boxing Day tsunami that hit a dozen nations in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India and Africa, taking with it over 125,000 lives. At least 150 Canadians are still missing.

While we mourn the loss of so many dead, at the same time as Canadians we are responding generously, along with the rest of the world. So far, Canada has pledged over $80 million; already international donations are close to the one billion dollar mark. Here in Toronto, and within our community, the response was immediate. We quickly put aside our Christmas celebrations and began sending donations to the Red Cross and other agencies. By last Saturday, the Red Cross had received from Canadians more than $26 million; World Vision Canada’s total donations had reached $4 million.

Other aid agencies continued to see Canadians reaching into their pockets – Oxfam Canada raised $2.3 million and UNICEF Canada more than $3 million. Christian Children’s Fund of Canada raised over $125,000 for relief and reconstruction in Sri Lanka and India.

That the figures are growing with such generosity tells the story of our goodness within. We are feeling the loss of entire families at a personal level; we are identifying painfully with the orphans whose families were swept out to sea, with the mothers who lost children, with the husbands who lost wives.

As Camillus Mendis, Sri Lanka Country Director for CCF Canada said, "The flood of devastation has turned into a flood of compassion. And the generosity of Canadians is giving people reason to hope."

These distressed nations would continue to need our help in the days, weeks and months ahead; if not years. Our aid effort has started out in the right direction with an outpouring of not only love and compassion, but with money as well. What we have to look to now is for the rebuilding of these societies – its cities, bridges, hospitals, railways, ports, roads and other infrastructure need reconstruction; disease would be a threat for millions in the coming months. Since we are giving so generously, we expect that Canada play a key role in this recovery.

Over the weekend Prime Minister Paul Martin captured in words the feeling in our hearts when he said, "Canada stands ready to do more." And in a direct message to the millions bereaved and left homeless, he added: "Canada, and the world, stands with you... not simply for a week or a month, but for as long as you need us."

The destruction by fire of the Sacred Heart Church on Main Street in Georgetown is a tremendous loss for Guyana, and moreso for many Guyanese abroad. For our columnist, Bernard Heydorn, it was a touching, personal loss, which he writes about in this edition.

"This was the church at which I was baptized, as were most of my siblings," he writes. He continues: "This was the church where the hand bells chimed sweetly, sounding the passage of time, the angelus calling Catholics to prayer, pealing joyfully for weddings and tolling slowly and sadly for funerals. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, when I heard the angelus bells of Sacred Heart ring at morning, noon and sunset, I stopped, blessed myself, and said a prayer."

These bells are now silenced.

What more could we do to help preserve heritage landmarks as these in our homeland? From reports, among the problems that led to the conflagration was the church was ill-equipped to deal with the fire that started in a crib, the result of an electrical fault. As Guyanese abroad with such personal stakes and memories of back-home, perhaps we can help with know-how, equipment, and even more sophisticated systems. Surely we do enough to help now, but Sacred Heart can never be replaced – so perhaps we can find a way to prevent such an irreplacable loss from taking place.

At this season of goodwill, I am impressed with two things: the demonstrations - not mere expressions - of genuine goodwill among people, and conversely, continuing acts of ill-will, often internecine, among people.

The international news in the past weeks has highlighted the continual killings in the Middle East of men, women and children. In Gaza and West Bank of Palestine, the Jews earnestly kill Palestinians, mostly civilians. The Palestinians in turn fight Israeli tanks and missiles with stones and human bombs. The carnage continues. The bystander dies on both sides. At the season of Hanukkah, with all its meaning in terms of human determination, and memories of their struggle against oppression, surely the Jews, as the dominant military power there, could show - especially now that their hated Arafat is gone - some generosity and humanity towards Palestinians, who share much with Jews, including ethnicity, resilience and grit. Most are ordinary, decent people, some of whom have been pushed to fighting by what they see as an unwarranted seizure of their homeland and a denial of basic human rights - with no correction in sight - by the same people who demand retribution for a similar extermination of their rights by Nazis, sixty and more years ago. Why are memories so short, and so selective?

Harsh words and harsher acts of protest and vengeance are easy to understand and as easy to carry out. Scattered over the world, Palestinians long to be re-united in a homeland, just as the Jews had craved for centuries. Now that the USA guarantees the integrity of Israel, surely Jews can cease their marauding over Palestinian lands and extend the patient hand of generosity, as one civil being to another? Is that asking too much, when their own people also crave peace? Or is there something about peace that is undesirable, another agenda perhaps, profitable to some, perpetuating the divisions?

CTV News on Christmas eve, quoted Palestinian church patriarchs and archbishops in Bethlehem, who noted, while thanking the Jewish state for welcoming Christian "tourists" to their shrines: "In these days, just before Christmas, this little town of peace is being transformed into a big prison with the continuation of the wall around it." Israel affirms that the 200 km long barrier will keep out suicide bombers, but it cuts into the town and is destroying its tourist economy. Palestinians see it as just part of another land grab. Perhaps Bush, at his inauguration a few days hence, could offer something to finally settle this issue.

In nearby Iraq, hundreds have died recently: Iraqis killing Americans and vice versa, and more discouragingly, Iraqis slaying their own, Sunnis versus Shia, in a war as old as Islam itself. These factions have become more, not less separate, and each feels so strongly for its position, that they seem almost irreligious and merely political, however solidly rooted in scripture their beliefs. Surely it is time for them to come together, even as Christians are trying to do in various attempts at ecumenism? What better time of year than this to declare for unity and peace? Especially this year when we saw the close occurrence of Deepavali, Ramadan and Hanukkah, Guru Nanak’s birthday, Tohji-taisi (Shinto), Yule (Wikka), Joseph Smith’s birthday (Mormon), Christmas, Zarathustra’s demise, and aboriginal peoples’ holy days.

The UN in 1948 declared December the Universal Human Rights month. Why don’t we emphasise this more, that the peoples of the Earth can shed the scales from their eyes and see light, as Jesus Christ so wistfully imagined?

On Dec 19th a small event in Hamilton encapsulated our hope. A group of people – Christians, Hindus, Muslims, Bahai, Mormon, and others assembled to remember Jesus Christ, and shared in his adoration, reciting his work and singing songs of praise. There was no hate, no division, only expressions of love, peace and goodwill. If this were replicated all around the world, what joy would there result?

Dispirited by new threats from Bin Laden, and killings in Saudi Arabia, I heard of the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, which instantly dwarfed all these in lives lost, property destroyed and the magnitude of human suffering. Perhaps its Nature’s reminder that there is a Higher Presence that not even Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Sharon or Bin Laden can match.

In the midst of tragedy, rebels in Sumatra and Sri Lanka called a truce, and millions worldwide responded to aid the afflicted. We can be cruel and hard-hearted, and yet can rise to acts of nobility and grandeur. Must it take global tragedy to bring out the best in mankind?

It is the time of year now when I look out into the backyard to see the pine trees drooping with fresh snow. I’m fortunate to have a view of majestic trees – there are the ones that lost their leaves early last September and are now stark and wiry against a steel-grey sky. Then there are my neighbours’ crabapple trees, the magenta fruits of late summer now wind-dried and dark like faded rubies. And there are stately pine trees with branches bowed with snow as if to modestly hide undergrowth.

After every snowfall I look for tracks from the neighbourhood jack rabbit. Sometimes, I’m fortunate to discern after careful, short-sighted scrutiny, the solicitous trembling of its white coat before it scampers off in a lope, its ears levered downwards and back for speed, the black hole of one eye dilating and swiveling with the dread of pursuit.

And then, over the fences, beyond the tall pines and the steaming vents on roofs, is the sun. I could never stop being surprised at how cold and distant it is in winter. This far north, at such a low angle, the sun becomes a small, luminous speck dully but bravely shining in a sky filled with gradations of white and a harder grey.

"The sun like a ten-cents piece in the sky," a Trinidadian friend once remarked.

"You mean like a dime," I said, my feet too firmly planted here in the Canadian north.

"No, man. It smaller than a dime. It is like a ten-cent piece from Trinidad! That is how cold this place is!" Such was the quick reply. The tone was couched in censure, which was immediately confirmed. "Where you come from? Like you forget how small the ten-cent is or what?"

I pondered my colleague’s point of reference. Was it like the inches and millimeters thing – the latter affording more precision for measurements? And so, my friend, in describing the sun and the temperature, had ignored the standard here and had instead reached for an even smaller measure. The Trinidadian coin, with a smaller diameter than the Canadian dime, became the currency of choice to describe the size of the sun in one of the harshest months of winter. The resulting hyperbole was superb; his intuitive rendering of the metaphor was poetic, the iambic pentameter effortless. Many Trinidadians are gifted this way.

I thought I’d run this by another friend whose sum total of experiences could only see the sun as a huge dime.

"What if there was a similar unit of currency but smaller in physical dimension?" I wondered. "Wouldn’t an intuitive but comparative approach using both units offer a more dramatic, poetic and perhaps original route for a description of the weather?"

Indeed, it would, we both agreed. We also understood that what we had witnessed was the meeting of two worlds in a confluence of experiences that was effortless as it was dynamic. This wasn’t a case of two solitudes - instead, it was two worlds that could blend seamlessly into each other, working at times in unpredictable ways to both enhance and enrich.

I treasure moments like these because it helps me to better understand the experiences I encounter, and undoubtedly, the world around me. When my friend reproached me for forgetting the size of a Trinidad ten-cents piece, and even worse, for not applying it to the real world, it led to a moment of illumination which I would probably have missed had I insisted that we use the local currency. I’m constantly on the lookout for these moments that reveal parallels and overlaps between the two worlds I know – the Trinidadian and the Canadian. It also helps me understand who I am and what I’m becoming.

Take a recent experience, for example, at the grocery store. In the fruit section, by the mangoes that thrilled the eyes with shades of rose, burnt orange and healthy tropical yellow, a woman’s hands were wandering through the rows, feeling for firmness. At the same time her eyes were appreciating the hues, and her sense of smell was keenly focused.

My mind immediately found the memory I was retaining, waiting for use one day, of a time on Frederick Street, in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad. There, with the sun blazing downwards on exposed heads, another woman was standing by the back of a van that held boxes of apples wrapped in soft tissue and sitting in trays similar to egg cartons.

"But what is this," she remarked ecstatically. "All these apples have different colours of red. And they smelling nice too, too bad! I feel to eat one right now." She picked up an apple, deeply inhaled its fragrance, and enthusiastically polished it on her loose, open-necked cotton shirt.

"I buying this one, mister," she said with finality to the vendor.

By the time this memory had played itself through, the woman had picked up a mango with the same finality.

I treasure these little discoveries in the parallels and overlaps between two worlds. As it goes, though, it is a currency I’m still learning to use.