By James V. Horrigan
Staff Writer
The diagnosis of a serious or potentially fatal disease such as cancer can be life altering in many ways. Aside from dealing with the obvious physical aspect of illness, for some people it leads to a reorganization of priorities. The little things that really matter can become crystal clear when confronted with one’s mortality.
For Scarborough resident Dr. Elaine Pitkin however, it was the 1992 revelation that she didn’t have cancer that led her down a path that only a few years earlier would have been unimaginable.
“I had a lump in my arm and went to the doctor,” said Pitkin, 74. “He said ‘I think you’ve got sarcoma,’ which is very lethal, so they took it out right away.”
The lump turned out to be a benign cyst; Pitkin’s brush with her own mortality turned out to be fleeting.
“So, I said ‘Great!’ and decided that whatever time I had left I was going to try doing what I damn well pleased.”
For some people that might have meant finally taking a dream vacation; Pitkin is one of them. But she didn’t embark on a worldwide cruise in a luxury ocean liner. Nor did she undertake a grand tour through Europe.
“I began looking for volunteer projects that didn’t have an upper age limit on them,” said Pitkin, who has lived in Scarborough for six years. Although retired from a career in rehabilitation psychology, she works at the Scarborough Hannaford’s in customer service, a position she enjoys because of the interaction it gives her with people in the community.
When she learned of a Minnesota-based group called Global Citizens Network (GCN), Pitkin knew she had found what she was looking for.
She said the 15-year-old group’s mission is to increase global understanding at the cultural level.
“That is the only way you are really going to make a difference,” Pitkin said. “They scour the world looking for opportunities to enter into community partnership with needy groups.”
The result is that during the past two years Pitkin has embarked on three “vacations” that led her from an Indian reservation and Lutheran church in Arizona to northern Thailand and Nepal.
“We helped them to organize a humungous thrift shop,” she said of her 2006 trip to an Indian reservation in Rock Point, Arizona.
When that task was complete she and six other volunteers turned their attention to a nearby Lutheran church, where heavy rain and wind had recently blown the roof off the church library.
“What it did was soak their roof and ruin their whole library, so we re-plastered the inside, repainted it and put their library back together,” she said.
Writing about her Arizona experience in the GCN annual report, Pitkin said the most memorable part of her time in Rock Point was an evening spent in a medicine man’s hogan, a traditional Navajo hut, listening to him recite the story of the First Man and First Woman, or the Navajo legend of creation.
“I became transfixed,” she wrote. “I was astounded by a vision in my mind’s eye of the centuries of ceremonies re-enacted in this place.”
The realization that 500 years of oral tradition had been passed from one generation to the next in that very hogan was quite moving.
“It was an overwhelming sense of the commonality of mankind’s existence and imbued me with wonderment of my own oneness with timeless eternity and unfathomable infinity,” she wrote.
Those satisfying experiences led her last month to Heygo, a tiny village near Chang Rai in northern Thailand, where she and six other GCN volunteers built a toilet on the grounds of a school for children ages 4 to 7.
“It was so they could have a teacher who would come in five days a week,” Pitkin said.
Because the teacher lived in another village, eight to 10 miles away, and had to ride a motorcycle over bumpy roads in order to get to the school, it wasn’t practical for her to make the journey every day.
“But with the toilet, she can live in the school and they can have class five days a week,” Pitkin said.
She stressed however that the American volunteers weren’t working alone; there was a steady stream of villagers ready to help out in any way asked. That’s where GCN’s theory about community partnerships is put into practice.
“If the people don’t have an investment in what they’re doing then it’s a gift and it sort of diminishes the recipient because it’s treating them like a welfare person,” she said.
One of GCN’s missions, Pitkin said, is to work to decrease human trafficking by giving young women in rural areas more opportunities.
“We want women, especially, to have more options about what to do in life, rather than working in rice fields or teak farms or ending up as a prostitute in Bangkok,” she said.
Satisfied that her two weeks spent digging the toilet would have long-lasting benefits to not just the teacher who could now live at the school during the week, but to children in the area who would be provided with steady, predictable levels of education, Pitkin and her band of volunteers were ready to move north to Nepal, where earlier this month they rebuilt a kitchen at a refugee camp housing elderly Tibetans.
“They were the Tibetan Mustang fighters who came out of Tibet in 1959 and were trained by the CIA to fight the Chinese,” she said. “Then, somewhere around 1979, the Dalai Lama says, ‘Lay down your arms and we will take care of you.’ These guys are in their 80s and they’re not going to be around for much longer,” she said.”
The work she does for GCN is satisfying, Pitkin said.
“Why else would somebody spend the amount of money that I spent to go there for six weeks and work my butt off?” she said.
Pitkin stressed that GCN is a secular institution, which seems to work well for someone who describes herself as a secular humanist.
“What I am is about, let’s say, 15 percent Buddhist, 15 percent Christian – because that was my heritage – 20 percent mystic and 50 percent agnostic. I’m pretty odd,” she said with a laugh.
She said she hasn’t yet decided where her next mission with the Global Citizens Network might take her, but said she feels certain that there are people and cultures the world round who have something to teach her.