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Embedded Bishop: A Year After Moving to Saskatoon’s Poor Side
Leisha Grebinski (Interview), Excerpted from CBC News.ca
Volume 30 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: April 5, 2016
It has been a little over a year since Bishop Don Bolen decided to pack up his four bedroom house on Spadina Avenue in Saskatoon to take up residence in Pleasant Hill, a neighbourhood that suffers from low incomes and high crime rates.
CBC Radio’s Saskatoon Morning invited Bolen to talk about what he’s learned over the last year. Here’s some of what he said in a conversation with Saskatoon Morning host Leisha Grebinski.
1. What were your first impressions of Pleasant Hill?
My first impressions were positive. I come from small-town Saskatchewan and Pleasant Hill neighbourhood has a feel of small town — and I very much enjoy living there.
2. Why that neighbourhood, in particular?
It has been a little over a year since Bishop Don Bolen decided to pack up his four bedroom house on Spadina Avenue in Saskatoon to take up residence in Pleasant Hill, a neighbourhood that suffers from low incomes and high crime rates.
CBC Radio’s Saskatoon Morning invited Bolen to talk about what he’s learned over the last year. Here’s some of what he said in a conversation with Saskatoon Morning host Leisha Grebinski.
1. What were your first impressions of Pleasant Hill?
My first impressions were positive. I come from small-town Saskatchewan and Pleasant Hill neighbourhood has a feel of small town — and I very much enjoy living there.
2. Why that neighbourhood, in particular?
I suppose these are the days of Pope Francis, where we are retrieving a lot of the original gospel message of outreach to those in greatest need. And there are a lot of people who have a lot of needs in the Pleasant Hill neighbourhood. And the church has a lot of activities going on there, many churches do. And it’s a neighbourhood where I’m right across the street from St. Mary’s parish very near to our First Nations parish Guadeloupe, so it’s a neighbourhood that I wanted to be close to if I could.
3. Did you have perceptions going in that were maybe challenged?
There’s no doubt that it’s an area where a lot of people live in poverty and all of the associated issues that come with that are found in the neighbourhood. But it is also in a city and a society where racism is still embedded in a certain way, in our structures of privilege. On the other hand, much of the social outreach that takes place in the city is initiated in that neighbourhood. Many of the agencies for social change, the local groups, on environmental issues, on poverty issues, a whole raft of housing issues, racism issues, they are centred in that neighbourhood. So there are an awful lot of good people looking for social change.
4. How has living there changed you?
I think that it is a work in progress and that I am a work in progress.
Leisha Grebinski (Interview), Excerpted from CBC News.ca