June 30 2007 (Saturday)

Today we prayed outside the Women's Health Centre at the Winnipeg hospital where they do abortions. We had a number of people come out (from CLC and even CWL I think). Maybe a good dozen showed up, other than ourselves, making it the biggest turnout yet since Vancouver. They had all their signs and were picketing the hospital, while we were just praying. We only did it for an hour, however, since we had to get to our Masses (mine was a vigil Mass at 4pm).

June 29 2007 (Friday)

Today we entered into the Canadian Shield! Its strange how quickly the scenery changes from flat prairie land to rocky and hilly woodland. I like it though, it reminds me a bit of BC. It ought to be like this for much of Ontario. Speaking of which, Greg and I got to the Ontarian border this morning. Feels sort of strange, we already reached Ontario 6 weeks into the trip. Officially now, we are half way done the trip - another 6 weeks will get us through Ontario, into Montreal, and back to Ottawa. Four provinces down, two to go.
Tonight I arrived at my host family in Winnipeg - the Desilets family. They are a very active pro-life family (Anna Desilet was manager for Alliance for Life and has been working hard in this field since the 60s). They are also french-speaking.

June 28 2007 (Thursday)

Night-shift went well again last night. 48km as usual. In other news, last night we got to camp out at a campsite past Winnipeg. It is getting a bit too far to drive back to the RV to sleep. But I like camping out, or at least I liked it when we did it in BC before getting the RV. Speaking of the RV, today we took it to the mechanic in Portage La Prairie to see if he could fix the leaking oil tubes. Turns out that there are 5 leaks, among other problems, and that it will cost a little fortune to repair it. We are going to tow it to Winnipeg, and then leave it there as its owners have decided to do away with it - too much trouble to fix. Oh well, Ol' Betsy served us well while she lasted.
Today also I went back to Portage La Prairie with Cyril in order to register for my UBC courses online. Not too much to say about that except that I successfully registered in my allotted 1 hour time limit.

June 27 2007 (Wednsday)

Today it is Ben's birthday! He is now 23 years old. We had a little celebration for him - we had some of his favorite food (seafood) and chocolate cake. Oh, and we had birthday hats. It was quite the little celebration in the RV.
By the way, we are now nearly in Winnipeg. We are staying there this weekend, and will again have another 6 parishes to talk to. We also have 3 host families, so the walkers will be split this weekend.

June 26 2007 (Tuesday)

Today we had an interesting experience. As Cyril had to use the van to go out to Winnipeg, and the others had to start walking before 11am, we weren't able to attend the 11am Mass at Good Shepard church in Portage La Prairie. The only alternative was the Ukrainian rite Mass at 9am, at the Assumption parish. So we all went to the Ukrainian rite Mass! By the way, Cyril's dad is a Ukrainian priest (they are allowed to marry in the Eastern rite), so Cyril knew what to expect and had even memorized some of the responses. But for some of us, at least for me, it was pretty new. One of the starkest difference came in receiving the Eucharist - they receive the Body and Blood together on a spoon. But I liked the Mass, and the church was very beautiful (beautiful iconography of Mary).
Not to much other news. We are still in the parking lot at Portage, and Greg and I have our day planned out already: sleep.

June 25 2007 (Monday)

We've been having a bit of crazy weather lately. I don't know if any of you heard, but Ellie was hit by a tornado which did a lot of damage. We weren't walking when this happened (thankfully), but we are still feeling its effects. Greg and I are on night-shift now, and last night we were forced to stop walking because a thunder storm had hit us. So we waited out the storm (safety first!) and then proceeded to finish off the night walking.
We returned to the RV at Portage La Prairie in the morning, were we are again parked out in a parking lot. The RV, unfortunately, is now on its last legs. It has started leaking oil like a sive, so we don't know how much longer we can keep it going. We will be in the parking lot at least a few more days however.

June 24 2007 (Sunday)

Today I only gave one talk at Blessed Sacrament at 10am in the morning. Afterwards, Jeremy and I typed up all the prayer intentions that we had received (as is our custom) and then proceeded to leave early to drive back to where we last finished walking. It was a good 4 hour drive, plus the time zone difference (one hour), so we got back walking pretty late (11pm). On the way there, our RV broke down. We were going to have it towed, but the guy we called to tow it said he knew what the problem was (burst oil tube, or something like that), and he fixed it. So we are thankful that we can keep the RV to sleep in.

June 23 2007 (Saturday)

Today we prayed outside of the Regina general hospital, where they perform abortions. We got there at about 2pm, and stayed till 4pm. We encountered a bit of opposition today. Initially, we were on the front sidewalk facing the street, but soon after we began two officers told us we couldn't stand there, so we had to stand in the street along the curb. Furthermore, we were across the street from some apartments, and at one point during the first hour some guy threw a couple of eggs at us. Thankfully, he didn't manage to get any of us. I think it was the same guy who later cranked up his music very loud so we couldn't hear ourselves. In any case, we also got some positive response, as some people from off the street decided just to join us. We also got to discuss the issues with some people afterwards who were wondering what we were doing outside of a hospital.
Afterwards, I was dropped off at Blessed Sacrament, a really nice church with very beautiful music. I look forward to going there again tomorrow. Bye for now,

Etienne

June 22 2007 (Friday)

Today was pretty much the first real day off we've had this trip, because as I said we didn't walk today, and we didn't have any parishes to speak to. But I sort of wished we were walking, because we spent a good part of the day just driving back to Regina, and waiting in the van since we couldn't get to the house till 4pm (which is when we were allowed in). Oh well, tomorrow should be more interesting - we are praying outside the Regina General Hospital. Also, we have 6 parishes to talk to this weekend (that's the most we've had yet), which means that each one of us will have our own parish to talk to. My parish shall be Blessed Sacrament. So I will give my own little talk tomorrow and Sunday, as I have already done many times already. The speech that Cyril gave us is pretty straightforward - we just tell the parishoners what we are doing, and why we are doing it. Then we ask for 3 things: for people's prayer intentions, for donations, and for people to become more active in the pro-life movement. This weekend I think I'm going to emphasize what Mother Theresa said, that "if people spent an hour a week in Eucharistic adoration, abortion would be ended". Bye for now,

Etienne

June 20 2007 (Wednsday)

Today I awoke to find myself in Moosomin, Saskatchewan, parked in a field. We are still on our way to Winnipeg - today I saw a sign that said we were 396 km from there. That's only about four days away. However, this weekend we are driving back to Regina to talk to parishes since it is the closest big city in the area. Bye for now,

Etienne

June 19 2007 (Tuesday)

Hi all,
Today was a pretty ordinary day. We got up, went to Mass in Regina, then left to go walking. We did a good 50 km today.
Today we received some good news from our walk leader, Cyril. Firstly, it appears as though Cyril made a mistake in his calculations for the trip. He had assumed the walk was going to last 11 weeks, and had planned the walk schedule accordingly. However, this walk goes from May 19 to August 11, which is twelve weeks. This means that, instantly, we are now one week ahead of schedule. Thanks to this, we will be taking it easy this week - nightshift on Thursday and dayshift on Friday are canceled. I hope we will be able to use this time wisely doing more pro-life things. Second piece of good newsis that the central walk RV got fixed, which means that we will get our rightful RV sent up very shortly. That means replacing old Betty with a beautiful new RV. Third piece of good news is that this weekend somebody is lending us their house, while they are out of town. That's always nicer than the alternative - sleeping in the RV and van. Hopefully things keep going well. Bye for now,

Etienne

June 18 2007 (Monday)

Today we were back on the road walking, and made our way all the way to Regina. We started making some bad time last week, so have been stepping it up a bit lately. Both night-shift on Sunday and us daywalkers today managed to get in 60 km each. Jeremy and I were walking together, and we decided to job the distances to make good time.
We encountered some supportive people today. A couple in a van stopped to see how Jeremy and I were doing as we ran in our big yellow ponchos. We explained to them what we were doing and they gave us a donation. At another occation, as we walked through the town of Regina, we met a couple of aboriginals our age and we walked with them a good 10 minutes, discussing what we were doing, among other things. Their fist question to us was, "What's pro-life?". We gladly explained it to them.
Right now we are parked outside Holy Rosary Cathedral. We are set to go to Mass tomorrow morning and will be off to make another 48km tomorrow. Until later,

Etienne

June 17 2007 (Sunday)

Happy Father's day everyone. I hope all of you got to spend some time with family and especially your dads today. Today, we certainly got to celebrate as we joined our host family's (Greg's family) in a big family get together BBQ. It was great getting to know the Roth family - they are such a strong pro-life family.
Tonight we made our way down to Moose Jaw in order to continue our way East to Winnipeg. On our way out there, Saskatoon just got hit by such a downpour of rain! We just missed it, but so many streets got flooded, we saw it in the newspapers the next day. Thankfully the RV held up. Bye for now,

Etienne

Saturday June 16

Hi all,
A little bit of an update: today, Saturday, we kept ourselves busy. In the morning, we left to pray outside the Saskatoon hospital where they perform abortions. We stood on the sidewalk just outside the hospital. Things went well, although we didn't receive as much attention as we did last week outside the abortion clinic in Calgary (not too many people drove by). Afterwards, we went to meet with Bishop Albert at 2:30. We basically told him what we were doing - he was very supportive. Supposedly he had seen us already walking as he was driving late at night, so we already had our introduction... Anyway, later on we just went to gave a talk at St. Ann's parish, where we were well received.
Well, I want to give you some stories from the road to keep you all entertained... so in this spirit I will recount one particular night a couple nights ago. On Wednsday night this week I had an interesting experience. I had just dropped off the other walker, Ben, and had driven 8 km ahead, and then settled down in my little bed (now that we have the van as a support vehicle, we have the option of putting down some of the seats and laying the sleeping bag out on the floor). Before you knew it I was out. Then some 1 hour later, I woke up in a panic, confused about where exactly I was and I was thinking that I had not driven up 8km for Ben. I then proceeded to get dressed and turned on the van and started driving down the road as quickly as I could. A few kilometers went by and I slowly realized that I had already driven up, and furthermore, that I had only been asleep for an hour! I drove back and went back to sleep. Later on that night I also had some interesting dreams... dreams like that the other walkers all walked on ahead without me while I was resting, and dreams of crowds of pro-choice people getting angry and kicking me out of school. Boy, some weird stuff happens at night! These stories are actually not uncommon - Ben told me that another girl had done the same exact thing I had done on another walk. I think it has something to do with forgetting what one does directly before going to sleep - leading one to believe that they havn't driven up 8 km. Thus, waking up in the night shift can be very interesting. Sometimes, you need the help of the other walker to point you in the direction which you are supposed to walk, having forgotten which way you parked the van. All this just adds to the fun of nightshift!
Thanks for reading my blog and I will update as soon as possible.
For life,
Etienne

Week IV

Hi all,
As you may have noticed, it has been two weeks now since I last updated the blog. It has been a real challenge to get time to update and to get access to the internet. But I plan to start a pen-diary, writing a short thing every day, and to simply type it into the computer at the end of the week.
In any case, I shall give you eager readers an account of the last two weeks and all the adventures we've had...
Last weekend we arrived in Calgary. Highlights of the weekend include praying outside the Kensington abortion clinic. We stayed there from 12pm-2pm on Saturday. Of course, being an abortion clinic, there were very stringent rules as to where we could stand and for how long. We had to actually stay at the playground park across the street from the abortion clinic. The clinic was hard to see from where we were standing. Only 4 of us at any time was allowed along the fence near the road, while the rest of us had to stand in the middle of the field. A sizeable group of about 20 came out along with us, so our presence there was definitely noticeable. Those in the field prayed the first two hours of a prayer book, while those at the fence prayed the rosary. We rotated the 4 people every time they finished a rosary. We got some negative reactions, as well as some positive reactions. Nothing too big happened though. Among those who came out were Cyril's (our walk leader's) brother and his brother's wife, along with Jeremy's mum. Praying outside of clinics will be a regular occurance for us, as tomorrow again we are doing a similar thing outside of a hospital that does abortions here in Saskatoon.
Oh, did I forget to mention? We're in Saskatoon! It's amazing that one week from Calgary and already we have walked past the city of Saskatoon in Saskatchewan. We are in our third province, and by next week we shall be in Manitoba. We seem to be moving on quite quickly. For the past two weeks I have been on night shift - from 9pm to about 9am every night from Sunday to Thursday, I have been walking in the dark with nothing but a flashlight and rosary in hand. It has been very exciting! Night walking, while at times tiring, has huge perks. One who night walks gets to walk alone, first of all, which is nice if you're like me and you like your moments of peace. As a night walker you get to walk in the silence of the night, under the stars, just you and your thoughts. It is much easier to pray as many rosaries as you can in 5 or 6 hours of walking when there is nobody else there to walk and talk with. Praying is, however, definitely a challenge in the late hours of the night. First of all, the cold of the night makes you just want to focus on walking and nothing else - so it takes a bit of an extra push to start praying. Another obstacle is the lack of sleep - it is extremely difficult to meditate upon the mysteries of the rosary when your mind is weary and sleep-deprived. Sometimes one has to make due by praying without meditating. In these cases all you can do is keep the intention in mind and pay attention to words of the Hail Mary's. Another benefit is that, while walking at night can be taxing, you utilize your time much more efficiently than day walkers - either your walking and praying or you are sleeping in the car waiting for the other walker 8 km ahead. This means that during the day you have more time to do other things like read or whatever (but evidently not to write up blogs!) It has been a challenge also to go to daily Mass, and its the truth that night walkers get to go more often than day walkers simply because we aren't walking during the day-time. Thus, as many of you can imagine, the chance to go to one extra Mass is worth night-walking the entire three months.
In other news... we now have an RV that was donated to us by Jeremy's dad. He had bought it for $4000, and it is a 1976 model. So you can imagine that we are a bit weary about its capabilities. We were actually supposed to have a new RV sent up to us from the States by the beginning of the walk, but something (I know not what) happening such that the Central Walk in the States has actually been using it. We are still expecting to get it sent to us eventually, but in the meantime, Ol' Betty (as we so endearingly call her) is proving to be quite useful. Whereas before we received the RV last week the night walkers had to pack and uppack camp every two days, now we have a mobile sleeping place. This means that we can just sleep on the road (or in parking lots, as the case have been). It also means that we can walk for longer hours, since we don't have to spend so much time traveling to and from where we begin and end our walks. We have even decorated Ol' Betty with some prolife messages such as "Crossroads Pro-Life" and "Pro-Life Walk Across Canada" and "Protect Love Respect Life from Conception until Natural Death". Hopefully I can post pictures of her on this blog sooner than later.
Today was a very restful day - Ben and I (Ben is the other guy who night-walked with me this week) basically rode into Saskatoon with the RV and had time to go to the cathedral for a few hours, praying and going to Mass. After Mass, a women tapped me on the shoulder and was impressed by what we were doing (we were wearing our pro-life shifts at Mass, as is our custom). She gave me a picture of her at Medjugorje, where in the background was what looked like a most beautiful and realistic statue of Mary. The thing is, however, that she says the statue wasn't there when she was there, but that it appeared in the photograph after it developed. For those of you who don't know, Medjugorje is a now famous pilgrimage site where since (I believe) the early 80s some children (now adults) have been receiving messages from Mary. The woman at Mass also gave us a rosary from Medjugorje, and donated money. She also made an annoucement after Mass and so many others also donated money to us on the spot. We wished to stay at the cathedral longer, but we had to rush out because our time had expired on the parking meter. However, when we got to the RV we found that somebody had put in an hour worth of coinage into the parking meter for us, so that we returned to the cathedral. We have a lot of little stories like this, this is just a sample.
Tonight, we are staying at Greg's parents place. It is nice - we will get to sleep in beds and get home-cooked meals. I am really looking forward to this weekend.
Anyway, dinner shall be ready soon, so I must go. Thanks for taking an interest in my blog. Until next time,

Etienne

Week II

Greetings from Creston!
Since last week the Crossroads group has traveled further into the Interior. From Summerland (which we went to just to sleep for the weekend), we walked through Midway, Greenwood, Grand Forks and Castlegar. We are still in the mountains, having gone through Blueberry Pass and Kootenay Pass this week. We have a final stretch to do, and should get to Alberta by Tuesday. Passing through BC was wonderful, it is so beautiful here in the Interior. The mountain ranges and wildlife (bearts, goats, deer, coyotes, etc.) are superbe. Although I've lived in BC all my life, I have only really stayed in the Lower Mainland. The Interior feels quite different - the weather, at least in the past two weeks, has been very warm (30-35). No rain. This, I think, has been beneficial, since we have had to deal with many troubles already trying to start the walk and getting used to the strain, so that rain might have proven a bit much. We have had two guys (out of the 6 of us) out of commission this week (One for the entire week, the other for part of it) due to blistering feet. Cyril's leg leg is so swollen he cannot walk on it. However, we can still manage by walking alone during the day-shifts rather than in pairs. It would take three of us to fall in order to really cause problems! In any case, we have the weekend here in Creston to heal up, and are giving talks at Creston and Cranbrook Parishes this weekend.
Over the last week we have met many people on the road. There are some days that go by when I get to talk to somebody on the side of the road on just about every shift. People don't normally stop their cars to say hi, but just when there are people working on the side of the road or construction people, we often get their attention. A lot of waves and honks of support have also been coming from drivers. The support has far outweighed the negative reactions this week. It is really great to see that there are a lot of pro-life people driving by, supporting us. My hope, however, is that our message reaches to the majority of people (in my opinion) who have never given the issue of abortion tremendous thought. Those people who, on seeing us, do not have such a solidified opinion as to instantly honk in support or to curse in anger. Those people, rather, who wonder why we are out there and what it is we are fighting for without knowing whether to honk for or against us. It is the large majority of people who drive by without making their presence known...
I best be off now, for we our group is meeting up at 2:00 in order to plan the talks we are giving tonight at the evening Masses. I hope to have a chance to write to you again next week, hopefully with some more pictures of our trip. For life,
Etienne