‘Odd couple’ aid needy Sudan
By LARRY CORNIES, The London Free Press
September 10, 2005 — Like playwright Neil Simon’s famous characters, Londoners Glen Pearson and David Tennant are a bit of an odd couple.
Pearson is the city firefighter who has been involved for years, with his spouse, Jane Roy, in a host of charitable causes: the London Food Bank, slave redemption in Sudan and, most recently, Canadian Aid for Southern Sudan (CASS).
He is a self-admitted “process” guy, committed to community building in Africa at the grassroots level. Having gained national attention a few years ago for his critique of Canadian business interests in Sudan, he is consulted by Ottawa regularly on foreign policy and aid for that region. Not long ago, Prime Minister Paul Martin asked him to be the Liberal candidate in the riding of London-Fanshawe next election — a substitute for disaffected MP Pat O’Brien.
Pearson declined, believing his strengths lay in community building in London — and the local-village level in southern Sudan.
Tennant is the wealthy developer and president of Hampton Group Inc., whose Conservative pedigree is lifelong. The chief of staff to international trade minister Tom Hockin during the Brian Mulroney era, Tennant has been involved in numerous Tory campaigns as a tour director, fundraiser, campaign manager and strategist. He prefers results to process. He has built a successful career on the premise that vision, action and achievement are things that follow each other in fairly rapid sequence.
And, unlike Pearson, who has spent a career in public service of one kind or another, Tennant is a private-sector, market-driven capitalist who now, as he nears retirement, is looking for a way to give back — to parlay his success and know-how in business into benefits for some of the world’s most disadvantaged.
At the urging of friends at Byron United Church, Tennant contacted Pearson and Roy, asking whether he could somehow help out with their humanitarian and post-civil-war aid efforts in Sudan. Together, they developed Smart Aid, a series of projects designed to kick-start Sudanese development by using Canadians donations to begin or assist small businesses, from which profits are reinvested in existing or new Sudanese projects.
Through the purchase of 50 manual sewing machines, CASS in already in the process of helping the women of Sudan’s Aweil region re-acquire their skills in sewing and textile work — arts that were lost to a generation of Sudanese due to the civil war and the slave trade. The YWCA, a partner in the project, is providing training and mentoring on site.
The Smart Aid projects, which will also operate under CASS, are more complex — and hint at Tennant’s entrepreneurial talent and ambition. Smart Aid aims to:
* Buy two generator-powered brick-making machines, each capable of making 3,500 bricks a day, using 10-per-cent cement — far superior to the mud bricks commonly in use. The bricks will be in high demand because they will interlock, permitting construction of buildings three storeys high. While Smart Aid will run the machines initially, they and the contracts that come in will eventually be turned over to locals.
* Supply a tractor to a small group of farmers, who will use it to till their own fields, plus 300 or so additional acres. Smart Aid will supply rice seed, wages for labourers and reapers and the cost of moving the crop to market. Proceeds will be shared by the growers and Smart Aid, which will invest its earnings in the community (schools are high on the list of local leaders).
* Find a way to get the extremely valuable gum Arabic, produced by sub-Saharan acacia trees — a coveted commodity used in everything from soft drinks to pharmaceuticals — from Sudan to world markets. Transportation is the main obstacle; the raw gum must be moved from Sudan through Uganda and Kenya to the port of Mombasa. That’s no small feat in countries where the best “roads” are more like our backwoods trails.
Like Pearson, Tennant is determined that Smart Aid will succeed. He’s donated $50,000 to the cause and corralled commitments from 10 business associates and groups for amounts totalling $130,000 over the next three years: Training Station, Whitney Engineering, Dunbar Homes, Hampton Group, Doug Weldon, Pacific and Western Bank, McKenzie Lake Lawyers, CH Excavating, Southside Construction and Byron United Church.
Their odd pairing is still something of a puzzle, even to Pearson and Tennant.
“Our world views are totally different,” Pearson says, to which Tennant responds that the two of them have had “wonderful philosophical discussions and debate.”
“I’ll look at an issue through the eyes of a businessperson. I’m more critical in that area than Glen. He’ll look at it from a more philosophical point of view . . . . In the end, we’ll usually reach a consensus created by compromise.”
The Smart Aid projects will work, Tennant says, for two reasons: First, the Sudanese, despite “the 25 years of horror they’ve had,” have not “taken on a victim mentality. They want a future.” Second, Smart Aid aims to create wealth “from the bottom up,” rather than through handouts and transfers between governments.
Both Pearson and Tennant share the dream of using Smart Aid proceeds to build Canada School — a facility that, besides teaching basic skills, will help reform Canada’s image in the eyes of the Sudanese.
Four members of Pearson’s fire crew have already volunteered to pay their own way to Sudan to begin construction in January.
They’ll work alongside former child soldiers from the civil war.
Odd couplings all around.