MONTRÉAL--Parting from Canada for our own countries will be such a sweet sorrow, as Shakespeare put it. It has finality—that except maybe for Skype for virtual reunions, we won’t ever see each other again.

I made personal connections with many of the participants. There is always that advantage with face-to-face meetings that virtual meetings cannot accomplish. You see people in flesh and blood, not hear them in digital audio or worse, as blocks of text in emails or blogs.

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We came together as strangers. Once we broke the ice, however, the participants tell stories that I can readily connect with news people often see or read from cable news stations or from the internet. I’m privilege to be with people of recent history.

There’s Selma Gasi from Saravejo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Selma is a living testimonial to what the world now knows as “ethnic cleansing,” the subterfuge for genocide. In the 1990s, Serbians and Croatians raped and massacred the majority Muslims in her country not because of their faith but to annex territory for Serbia and Croatia. Selma seethes when she talks about those days. Yet she struck a friendship with the Serbian participant.

Then there’s Panithida Phongpaew from Thailand. Pam is an atypical human rights activist. Speaking good English straight from “Mean Girls” and “Gossip Girls,” she could easily make it to the Foreign Service. Instead, she opted to work as a campaigner for the Thai Action Committee for Democracy in Burma. Pam works with Burmese migrant communities.

My buddy Indonesian Faizal works for children’s rights to health. Early on, his fellow Muslims freaked out when he criticized madrasahs that taught only religious hygiene, not secular modern hygiene.

Faizal is friendly with Timorese Marina Bernardina of Timor Leste. Annexed by Indonesia and later fought a bloody war of independence, Marina feels more at home talking to Faizal in Bahasa.

Dr. Maha Raham acts as the voluntary chair of the Women Human Rights Center in Iraq. Maha projects a strong image of an Iraqi woman, vocal and independent.

On the other hand, lawyer Shepherd Tanyaradzwa Matsika is the legal officer of the Children Trust in Zimbabwe. He litigates on behalf of the children, supervises a legal aid program and research on children’s experiences to advocate for policy reform. He admits though that human rights advocacy faces immense obstacles under President Robert Mugabe.

Here in John Abbott College, I catch up with the news from the Internet.

When CNN posted the breaking news that the Honduran military deposed President José Manuel Zelaya, I immediately emailed Arely Alvarado.

Arely works as a psychologist at the Centro de Prevención, Tratamiento y Rehabilitación de las Victimas de la Tortura y sus familiars. She provides therapy to victims of torture or of organized violence, especially the women and kids.

When she got my email, Arely was dumbstruck. She never expected a military take-over. That was supposed to have ended in the 1980s when democracy was restored. But then she reasoned that present Hondurans never developed a collective memory of human rights abuses under martial rule. Arely herself is a post-martial law baby.

Arely goes home to Honduras tomorrow, the same day that deposed President Zelaya vowed that he will return to the country. Will that spell trouble for her?

While here, I’m awe-struck with the wealth of human interest stories from fellow human rights advocates. But there is so little time to hear all of them.

I loathe to part with many of them. After this training, our remaining links will be through the power of the Internet. But such is life, and it’s time to bid each other goodbye, adieu, adios.
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