Take, for example, the hospitality shown by the town of Grand Forks, British Columbia, during the devastating ice storms in January, 1998 that hit Quebec and Eastern Ontario, leaving millions of people without electricity for an extended period of time, in some cases, for several weeks.
Grand Forks is a farming and forestry town located in a valley near the United States border about 500 kilometers east of Vancouver. Its 5,000 residents are not particularly affluent. Unemployment was then at 11% and layoffs were looming in its three wood-processing mills. But generosity is a local tradition.
So, when the citizens of Grand Forks learned about the deprivations their fellow Canadians were experiencing as a result of the century’s most damaging ice storm, they were determined to do something to help their suffering neighbors in the East. School superintendent Denny Kemprud proposed that the town provide hospitality for some students. The idea was met with a wave of enthusiasm and soon Internet wires were buzzing with plans of adopting 74 students, ages 13 to 17, plus four teacher-chaperones to come to Grand Forks.
Air Canada agreed to free up 78 seats. Two hundred families volunteered to provide food and lodging. Grand Forks Secondary School organized committees for transportation, housing, and entertainment. The good citizens of this small community with a big heart chose to rescue their so-called “Eastern refugees” from evacuation centers in hardest-hit Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, Quebec.
When the “refugees” landed at the airport in nearby Kelowna, a local McDonald’s restaurant treated them to a free meal before they boarded buses for the ride through the mountains to Grand Forks and their first hot showers in two weeks. The town opened its arms to its guests. The town council presented them with T-shirts. Generous merchants enabled them to go bowling, attend hockey games, and watch Titanic at the local movie theater.
Operation “Freeze Lift” was an immense success. It is a reminder to the world that with the advent of the Electric Age, we inherit the potential for practicing a new corporal work of mercy: “I was in the dark and you provided me with light.” One of the teachers back in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu began to use the image of hospitality displayed in Grand Forks as a lesson plan for a school course in values, morals, and ethics.
An American author by the name of C.M. Kirkland once said, “Like many other virtues, hospitality is practiced, in its perfection, by the poor. If the rich did their share, how the woes of this world would be lightened.”
Grand Forks, as mentioned, has a tradition of generosity. One-third of its population has descended from Russian Doukhobors or other European immigrants. It hosts summer visits by young radiation patients from Chernobyl and operates a relief program in Russia. When it was time, after two weeks, for the “Eastern refugees” to leave, the Doukhobor church provided them with a mouth-watering feast of Russian fare, including borscht and vereniki dumplings.
Apparently little was mentioned about the political tension between Quebec and the rest of Canada. But if the students harbored any negative feelings about English-speaking Canada, they seemed to have melted under the warmth of Grand Forks hospitality. As one of the teacher-chaperones stated, “The majority of the students will leave here with a different view of the West.” One of the students put it this way: “When part of the country is in trouble, that another part would help is something . . . what would you say, strengthening?”
Though somewhat cloistered in the rugged Kootenay Mountains, Grand Forks might appear, to geographical reductionists, as an isolated community. But its strong moral sense of the needs of others gives it a legitimate place on the stage of world affairs. According to philosopher Francis Bacon, “If a man be gracious to strangers, it shows that he is a citizen of the world, and his heart is no island, cut off from other islands, but a continent that joins them.”
The residents of Grand Forks, British Columbia are surely citizens of the world. They are also a moving, albeit modest, example of how morality can be a more powerful factor in unifying people, as well as a nation, than politics.
Dr. DeMarco is a professor of philosophy at St. Jerome’s College in Waterloo, Ontario. He is the author of The Many Faces of Virtue and The Heart of Virtue
This article originally appeared in Lay Witness, a publication of Catholics United for the Faith, Inc., and is used by permission. Join Catholics United for the Faith and enjoy the many benefits of membership.
