Queen of Cardboard

Once upon a time there was a Queen of Cardboard. She woke up one shiny morning and saw that the whole world was just full of ugly garbage. The Queen knew the secrets of turning ugly garbage into beautiful treasure. Hardly anyone else in the whole wide world seemed to be able to do this garbage transforming magic. So, one day when she was oh so tired of seeing a world full of garbage, she packed up her bag of tools and set out on a journey of many miles through many lands. She wanted to share the magic of transforming paper and cardboard garbage into surprising and wonderful treasures with all the people in the world. Some people were so impressed and infatuated with the very idea of making treasure out of garbage that they joined the Queendom of Cardboard right away. They gave her gold and jewels and all kinds of money to support her magic journey around the world. Along the way, the Queen met many interesting people and made new friends who helped her even more. Others invited her to come and show them the secrets of building strong furniture and aids to help people with disabilities, by using old boxes and bags and envelopes and newspapers. She used all her spare time to help the people who asked her, and she became a very good teacher. She learned many new languages and the customs and cultures of many new lands. The Queen worked so hard night and day and devoted herself so much to helping all those who asked her for assistance that slowly but surely the world began to change. As more and more people learned the magic of transforming throw-aways into useful objects, there was less and less garbage in the world and it became truly beautiful again. The Queen of Cardboard woke up one shiny morning and saw that the world was beautiful again, and she and all her people lived happily ever after.

This is a story about making the world a better place. In some ways it is a love story, in some ways it is more of a comedy and in others it is simply the unfolding of the human "every-day-life" drama. My love affair with cardboard began early in life. Those small boxes of raisins that my mother packed into a "goody bag" for me every morning when she sent me off to play in the backyard were filled with magic for me. Of course I had to first rise to the challenge of getting those little treasure boxes open without ripping them apart, but fortunately tenacity runs in my family and I could never give up easily, even at the tender age of two.

My mother was a brave woman. There she was in small town Ontario in the late 50's, blind since the age of 18, and the new mother of a rambunctious and precocious daughter. There is no doubt that losing her vision completely as a young woman transformed her. When I consider how much trust she had to have just to set me free every day into the world of our fenced-in backyard, albeit with Kerry the intrepid German Shepherd dog keeping watch over me, I am amazed that she could do it. Those first experiences of being all by myself in the backyard, a solitary woman alone in the world, sowed the seeds of my later adventures and travels. Unmistakably.

It was cardboard and not blindness; however, that changed me. My own life was transformed in the summer of 2004 when I invited Jean Westmacott to come to Canada and teach a weeklong workshop on "APT". Appropriate Paper Technology was invented some years ago in Zimbabwe by an art teacher from the UK, Bevill Packer. He had to scrounge for the materials to teach with when he arrived in Africa empty handed. Bevill developed APT over the course of many years along with his African students, and went on to publish a very comprehensive technical manual (http://www.floodmeadows.com/apbt/manual.htm) so that others could learn the same techniques for themselves. Others, including David Warner of "Where there is no Doctor' fame have carried on with this work (http://www.dinf.ne.jp/doc/english/global/david/dwe001/dwe00114.htm) .

Jean learned APT directly from Bevill. When he died in Zimbabwe some years after publishing the manual, he was granted special permission to be buried in a cardboard coffin of his own making. True to his calling, this remarkable man was burried along with his beloved paper hat. For many families in the developing world the cost of a coffin means that they lose their entire livelihood. Thus, the death of one leads to the death of many, something that adopting the use of APT for coffins could help to change.

One of the best and most amazing things that Jean has built with APT is this sofa bed that she and her family at Plum Cottage in England have been using and enjoying for many years. I have yet to take on anything that large and ambitious, though I am intrigued with the design challenges that large projects provide. In APT, "small is best" and a good design keeps this concept at the forefront at all times.





This group in Kigali, Rwanda, not only built a sofa bed when they ran a six month APT training, they used knives they had made themselves by putting secure handles onto blades. In the APT manual there is a picture of a group of mothers who met weekly at the Harare Hospital for seven weeks to make wheelchairs out of cardboard for their young children who had Cerebral Palsy. The fathers were given the important job of locating the cardboard and paper raw materials which included them in a new way with the care of their disabled children.




Dads are ultimately very important people in their children's lives. It is only recently, with the clarified vision of being fifty now myself, that I can truly appreciate just how special my own father was and how much he has influenced my life. He died just after his 70th birthday close to fifteen years ago. I still feel his guiding presence watching over me, and I know those moments when he is most proud of his eldest daughter.

He was an engineer by profession, but in reality I can see now that he was my mother's Occupational Therapist through the many years of their life together. This was well before the everyday Canadian world really understood rehabilitation, or how critical it is to have strong advocates for the independence of people who happen to have a disability. In the same way he defended my mother's right to independence, he defended mine.

When I was three. he was painting the house. My mother didn't want me to climb the ladder. out of fear that I would fall. His response was to teach me the safe and correct way to climb a ladder. Once taught, I could be relied upon to test all the limits in a true spirit of self reliance and self discovery. Not long ago I rappelled down a twenty odd storey building as a fund raiser for Easter Seals, I have completed two fire walks over a twenty foot long pit of hot coals, and a high ropes course, in addition to white water rafting in an inflatable rubber dingy in Nepal. Some people have told me that just going to Haiti or planning on spending a month in Nigeria are courageous acts. Confronting and transcending fears is very empowering, as I well know from direct experience. I doubt that I would have done so many confrontations without my father's early conditioning of my mind and spirit.

There is so much more that he taught me, by example and by design. All about the stars as he carried me on his shoulder to tuck me into my sleeping bag at the campsite that would be left better than we found it complete with a stack of wood for the next camper's fire. All about my own country, as he took us on summer camping vacations from coast to coast over thousands of miles and taught us to love and appreciate the entirety of where we came from, and what it means to be a Canadian. All about the weather, the clouds, how to tell if a storm is coming. All about the rocks and minerals of the earth, their names and how they were formed. All about the trees and plants in the forest and in the fields, meadows, and gardens, how to care for them and how to use them. All about wild animals and pets and the special bond that people have with non-talking creatures. All about the different religions, peoples, countries and cultures of the world and how to celebrate the incredible diversity we belong to. He is the one that educated me, and encouraged my insatiable curiosity by teaching me how to learn and by instilling in me a great love of books and literature and music. Most of all he imparted his values of respecting the dignity of every human being, of always doing one's best, of being one's brother's keeper and a steward of all creation, and of being true to oneself. I of course, being naive and somewhat sheltered from realities outside middle class North American life, believed that everyone shared a similar enriched experience. Fifty years later I realize that they did not.


I think that my friend Louise took over where my father left off. She was the one that asked me "why don't you come to Haiti?" when I inquired what I could do to develop an international career. Without Louise, the APT workshop here would not have happened. It was her connections with the parish of Notre Dame d'Acadie that resulted in us having a place to hold the workshop for a week. It was her idea to make the child size table and chairs to raffle off as a fundraiser for the Haiti project. She is a powerful yet gentle spirit with a truly remarkable committment to the agricultural cooperative (CATR) she co-founded in Haiti. In the Fellowship of the Mango, she is the Butterfly Lady of the Pool. On my first trip to Haiti we had the chance to work together teaching a Caregiver School for the Healing Hands project. (www.healinghandsforhaiti.org) This was one of the peak experiences of my career. It was pure pleasure to work with her, we were as close as it gets to the perfect complementary team of Physiotherapist and Occupational Therapist. Haiti may be a project for me, it is a calling for Louise. Working with her is a gift, she is an inspiration. Whenever she talks about Haiti she gets a holy glow around her, and you just know it is rooted in pure love.

If I love cardboard, my husband Alan hates it. I do admit that when every spare inch of the house is either stuffed with raw materials for building cardboard creations, or covered with cardboard projects in various stages of completion, that when you open the fridge and half used containers of paste are there to confront you, and even the dust bunnies are made of cardboard fluff, that it could test the tolerance of any normal person. And after thirty years together I have come to the conclusion that Alan may not be entirely "normal". If he fails at normal it is because he is on the tail of the bell curve where honesty, predictability and dependability reside. He is also the ultimate "Black Hat" thinker a la Debono's thinking hats. He can pop a balloon, poop on a parade, stop the merry-go-round, or generally deflate an excited and vulnerable creator faster than a speeding bullet and more powerfully than a locomotive. He is able to leap tall creative ideas in a single bound and nit pick what is wrong with them. Basically, he is who you want to have proof reading your proposals because he will find every possible thing wrong with them and preserve you from finding out only after you have submitted them. Alan is the love of my life. He is my fiercest fan and my staunchest supporter. Irreverant, argumentative and even at times as insufferable as he is, I couldn't have achieved what I have without him. He knows that telling me not to do something is a sure guarantee that I will, so instead he calmly lets me do what I do, go where I go, and be who I am.