Women's Centre of York Region celebrates day of ‘reflection, advocacy, action’

Yorkregion.com
March 10, 2016
By Lisa Queen

Three women.

Three inspirational stories.

About 200 women attending a conference marking International Women’s Day listened as three speakers shared personal stories of struggle and resilience.

“Today is about celebration, reflection, advocacy and action,” said Catherine Curtis-Madden, executive director of the Women’s Centre of York Region, which hosted the event Monday at the Richmond Hill Performing Centre of the Arts, one day in advance of Women’s Day March 8.

Despite growing up hearing her chauvinistic grandparents tell her she shouldn’t take part in traditional boy activities, Amber Bowman was determined to fulfill her dreams of playing hockey and driving a big, red fire truck.

She played on the Ohio State University hockey team, where she was named captain for two years, and is now a firefighter with the Central York Fire Department.

The fierce competitor won 15 world championships in the Firefighter Combat Challenge, considered the firefighting Olympics.

But last May, on her journey to winning her 16th championship and finally beating her goal of breaking the two-minute mark to complete the challenge, Bowman suffered a severe concussion while training.

For the next several weeks, she lived on a mattress on her parents’ living room floor wondering if she would ever recover.

“How did this happen? Why me? Why now? Not now, I can’t, I need to get this, I need to get better faster - all of these thoughts going through my head,” she said.

“Could I live the rest of my life on this mattress?”

Just going to the bathroom or eating meals was a huge deal. Bowman suffered intense pain in her eyes and head.

“Mentally, I was broken,” she said.

Finally, Bowman not only began to recover and returned to work, she started training to compete in last year’s firefighters’ competition.

Last year, she claimed her 16th world championship in five years, making her the most victorious competitor in the challenge’s history.

She also became the first female firefighter to break the two-minute mark, with a time of 1:58.

“After years and many days of training, I finally achieved this goal of mine, to break this two minutes. This goal, that back in May, I never thought would be attainable,” she said.

“But it shows that through my physical and mental setbacks, I learned to push past and overcome adversity. I could have given up or skipped the season or just made excuses for the rest of my life as to why I never broke that sub two-minutes.

“Being the closest female ever to get there, I could have easily given up. Sometimes in life, you don’t know why things happen. But we learn more from our failures than we do from our successes. You know what? We learn the true us.”

Shortly after coming to Canada from Brazil more than 20 years ago, so she could improve her English skills to fulfill her dream of opening an English-language school in her homeland, Helen fell in love with a young refugee.

Despite cautions from others that she was moving too quickly, she married.

She said her life became a nightmare of bullying and threats.

At times, she said she even feared for her life.

“With time, I had gone from a confident, beautiful woman full of life and full of joy to a dull, drab, non-descript middle-aged woman,” she said.

After 20 years, Helen decided to leave her marriage.

“My escape was one of the most dangerous things I have done in my life,” the mother of two said, adding harassment continued even after her divorce.

Helen got counselling and turned to the Women’s Centre, where she participated in the enterprising careers program.

She is now pursuing a career as a translator and writer.

“My goal here today is to inspire you to believe and follow your dreams,” she said.

“With persistence, you will accomplish every one of them. You can’t change the past but the future is full of possibilities.”

Marina Nemat was a typical Iranian 13-year-old girl consumed with watching the Donny and Marie Osmond and Little House on the Prairie TV shows, listening to the Bee Gees and hanging out with her friends when the Islamic Revolution took place in 1979.

She came back from spending her summer at the family cottage on the Caspian Sea to see a tank parked in front of her home and watching demonstrations in the streets of Tehran.

Nemat and her friends returned to school to find their beloved principal had been executed and teachers had been replaced with fanatics.

Those who think democracy and freedom must always be there, because they always have been, are mistaken, she said.

Nemat and her friends began the dangerous pursuit of protesting the changes in their country.

A friend’s brother was shot to death. A 15-year-old friend vanished and was killed.

On the night of Jan. 15, 1982, as Nemat was getting ready to have a bath, the authorities came for her.

The 16-year-old was sent to Evin political prison, where she was tortured, the soles of her feet beaten.

“I was drowning in pain,” she said.

“Torture is designed to kill the human soul.”

At the age of 17, she was forced to marry an interrogator or risk having her family and boyfriend arrested.

Nemat was raped over and over.

Only the support of her fellow prisoners allowed her to survive her ordeal.

Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, Nemat has detailed her experiences in two books, Prisoner of Tehran and After Tehran: A Life Reclaimed.

“What happened to me in prison, I became a witness. A witness is nothing, is irrelevant, is meaningless unless he or she testifies,” said Nemat, who now volunteers helping refugees through her Aurora church.

“And I stand in front of the world to testify. I make the world uncomfortable. Sometimes, the world doesn’t want to listen, I can tell you that. But it’s amazing how the truth eventually prevails.”