In a world where publicity is a negotiable currency, there are some people who help their fellow human beings in concrete ways, day in and day out without any fuss and without calling attention to themselves. One of them is Lloyd Seivright, co-founder of a charitable organisation which is celebrating its 33rd anniversary with a gala in Toronto this evening.

Seivright is now retired from his day job in the shipping department of a giant beverage bottler, but not from his activities with Pride of Toronto Chapter 12, which will award its 100th scholarship at the function to Deirdre-Ann Ennis, a third-year medical student at the University of the West Indies at Mona. Pride of Toronto is a non-profit charity operating under the umbrella of the lodge to which Seivright belongs, the Independent United Order of Solomon.

His lodge activities go way back – more than 50 years ago he was active in the Pearl of St Jago Lodge #17 in Spanish Town. With undisguised pride he admits that he was “the youngest Master that ever ran a lodge in Jamaica”. Seivright was an assistant distiller at Innswood Estate and on migrating to Canada in 1969 he joined a brewery-supply firm known as Canada Malting. After that he went to Cott Beverages, which bottles a wide range of soft drinks, juices and nectars under its own label and for major supermarket and food chains.

Pride was started in 1978 by four women – Seivright’s wife Madaine, and Daphne Mullings, both from Jamaica; Myrna Blackman from Grenada and Rosalie Johnson from the eastern Canadian province of Nova Scotia. Madaine serves as secretary while the modest and self-effacing Lloyd describes himself as organiser of Pride and its charity co-ordinator. This core group, together with a larger group of members, performs all the functions such an endeavour requires.

They collect used wheelchairs and specialised hospital beds, medical dressings and

over-the-counter drugs, basic medical equipment like blood-pressure monitors and blood-sugar testers as well as sophisticated equipment like dialysis machines. The donated equipment comes from hospitals in the Toronto area, which replace beds and machines after a certain period of service.

Every year Seivright and his associates donate more than C$1-million worth of hardware and supplies to hospitals and other non-governmental organisations in Canada and across the Caribbean, even to organisations in Russia, Hungary and China – 40 countries in all. Pride also supports foster children in India, Ecuador and Nicaragua and organises an annual Christmas party in Toronto at which food baskets and gifts for children are distributed.

The organisation awarded its first medical scholarship in 1989. It went to Marcia Graham, who paid tribute to the group when it celebrated its 25th anniversary: “I was from a family of four daughters and my parents had struggled hard to afford sending two of these girls to medical school. I had big dreams, lofty goals and great ambition, but the books and supplies had to be bought. This Canadian scholarship helped fill that gap and make the completion of my medical training in 1992 possible.” Graham did her internship in the Bahamas and post-graduate work in family medicine in Miami where she also did residency training. After six years abroad the newly minted Dr Graham returned to Jamaica and set up practice in Montego Bay.

For this year’s celebration, Ennis and five other third-year medical students at the UWI will be in Toronto to receive their awards. On this occasion all are from Jamaica, but over the past 22 years students have also come from Antigua, the Bahamas, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, St Vincent, and Trinidad and Tobago. In addition to awarding scholarships at the UWI, Pride also assists students at two universities in Toronto – the University of Toronto and York University. Some are for medical students and some are for computer science studies. The computer award began in 1998, sponsored by the Toronto Sun newspaper and named in memory of the late Kay Baxter, who represented Jamaica as consul-general in Toronto from 1987 to 1992. Seivright comments: “It took 22 years to reach the milestone of 100 scholarships. We now will be appealing to our supporters, corporate donors and friends to help us to find another hundred scholarships in the next five years.” Seivright’s efforts have not gone unnoticed – he was awarded the Order of Ontario and the Jamaican-Canadian Association recognised him with a Community Service Award.

The Pride organisation sets a very high example for similar bodies – it operates with an extremely low overhead, with the members and volunteers doing the work and covering most of the expenses out of their own pockets. Seivright says he has established such a rapport and reputation with donor institutions that they call and notify him when they have beds and wheelchairs.

But he admits to a few frustrations, some of them with his own homeland. Donated goods often sit on the wharf in Kingston for weeks at a time before finally getting customs clearance. And right now, he says, he has 70 wheelchairs, six dialysis machines and ancillary supplies together with other donations waiting in warehouses in Toronto to be shipped. But these goods can’t go until all the formalities are straightened out.

But the Pride of Toronto people continue their efforts, soliciting donations, picking up and sorting the goods, packaging and preparing them for shipping to lucky recipients in 40 countries. The organisation says its inspiration is charity itself. In its 30th anniversary programme, Madaine Seivright set out its attitude which others may well emulate: “We grow and develop through service, and only through service to our fellowmen do we express divine harmony, which is part of the creative plan. Without service, mankind could not exist, and through it, we reap the blessings of creation.”

Ten years after a game-changing event

In case you have just emerged from a decade-long coma, tomorrow is the 10th anniversary of the day airliners crashed into prominent buildings in New York and Washington. It shocked the United States and many of its allies and has changed forever the way we do many kinds of business. A not completely unknown Saudi fanatic named Osama Bin Laden conceived and organised the hijacking of airliners by fanatics who aimed them at the Word Trade Centre, the Pentagon and perhaps the White House.

The air waves, newspapers and social media have been filled with wall-to-wall coverage of the anniversary for weeks now, and the intensity increased to a fever pitch this week. Articles, documentaries, commentaries and reportage have gone at the events of that terrible day and their aftermath from every conceivable point of view. Bin Laden wanted to teach the United States and the other powerful western countries a lesson. While he failed utterly to bring the US to its knees, he has succeeded far more than he could have dreamed.

The US played into his radical hands and invaded not only Afghanistan but also Iraq, which had nothing to do with Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda – in fact Saddam Hussein hated them. It has thrown literally trillions of dollars into the two wars as well as into the giant machine created under the rubric of Homeland Security. Instead of stoutly abiding by its widely proclaimed belief in the rule of law and individual liberty, the US has trampled on the rights of its citizens and others, has created an alternative prison system, a gulag of extra-territorial sites where people are tortured and held without charge or trial, and fostered a whole new climate of fear and loathing even more strident and corrosive than we saw during the Cold War.

keeble.mack@sympatico.ca