I was born September 10, 1946, in Coronado, California, at the US Navy Hospital, within hearing of the waves of the Pacific Ocean, I like to think, and I've lived most of my life on this ocean ever since. We moved every couple of years or so, and I went to about 8 different schools, in the U.S. and in Thailand, and then YoHi in the 12 th grade, Nile C. Kinnick, Jr., High School, in Yokohama, Japan. It's a questionable way to raise a child, all that moving around, and has had lifelong impact, but you get what you get, and it gives you the chance to learn to turn barriers into opportunities. I was miserable as a teenager until the summer of 1963, when we crossed the Pacific by ship to go to Japan. On that voyage I decided that things would be different; I would get friends, I would learn to set my hair and wear wake-up, I would have a boyfriend. At YoHi, all those things happened. It was a great turning point in my life.

My family stayed in Japan while I went to the University of California – southern California in the 1960s, a legendary place and time. I studied philosophy and formal logic and modern dance, wore long skirts and got my ears pierced, went to demonstrations and had bitter fights with my father over Vietnam. I married a professor who was a Canadian citizen and came to Canada with him in 1971. The marriage didn't last but I was in law school here by then, and then became a lawyer, and have never left Canada except to travel and for work assignments outside the country. I'm now what is called a dual – a Canadian and an American citizen, passports from both countries (and yes, reporting to both tax authorities.) In 1980 I married a second time, and though Juri and I have now been separated and divorced for some years he's one of my best friends – and the father of my two children, Kate and Nicholas, still the lights of my life. They're in their early 30s – Kate is a young criminal defense lawyer in Toronto, and Nick has full-time work in the film industry here in Vancouver, doing things I barely understand with graphics and computers.

In law I have been a legal aid lawyer for most of my career, working for people who face disadvantage and discrimination. A lot of human rights, civil liberties, and a particular focus on refugees and immigrants, as well as telecom and utilities regulation for a while. For about eight years all together I was one of Canada's immigration and refugee law judges – a Member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada – from 19990 – 1992 and then from 2006 – 2013.

In 1999 through to the fall of 2002 I was seconded by the government of Canada to the OSCE Mission in Kosovo. I was one of nine Directors for three years – first the Director of Mitrovica Region, in the north of Kosovo, then the Director of Democratisation, in Pristina, Kosovo, a Kosovo-wide position. From 2003 through 2005 I worked as a consultant in international affairs, primarily in Afghanistan. This included being the head of UNIFEM (the UN Development Fund for Women, now called UN Women), in Afghanistan, and carrying out projects for various international NGOs in that country.

In January, 2014, I returned to the practice of law in British Columbia, on a part-time basis, and took up a part-time appointment with the provincial Mental Health Review Board, chairing mental health or psychiatric detention hearings.

My medical history for the last decade is a whole separate story – suffice it to say for these purposes that I have faced life-threatening conditions three times, and survived each. My hat trick, I say. Most recently I had a bone marrow or stem cell transplant in January, 2013, which successfully removed cancer from my body. I'm still in the latter stages of recovery from that process, and can't really travel yet, or stay up in the evenings. The image above was taken last fall, 2013, to show my new post-transplant hairdo, after it all fell out and then grew in, and I began at last to look like something other than an alien!

The important thing about those experiences, however – though this is trite – is what they have taught me about the value of human life, the beauty and wonder of the world around us, and the deep love which family and friends can come to have for each other. We all know these things, but we know them more deeply when we've been through very serious illness. I am immeasurably stronger than I was before. This sounds like backwards reasoning, but is one of the great lessons of life – that we can get better than we were before because we got worse first.

And now I'm learning to run, and to do the front crawl! My dreams include kayaking around the Galapagos Islands, and running a marathon – I'm not promising, mind you. But those are my dreams, and with patient and steady work I see no reason why I can't achieve them.

I also see no reason why I won't be strong enough to go to the next YoHi reunion, and I can't wait to see everyone there.

Stay strong, dear friends. My year at YoHi really was a transformative year for me, and you were that year – you, and others like me who can't be at the reunion this year. That year helped to make me who I am today. I can't explain it, the chemistry or the magic, but it was real, and it always will be.

 

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