A Sermon in Two Voices by the Reverend Jessica Purple Rodela, First Unitarian Congregation of Waterloo
Introduction from Rev. Diane Rollert: In honour of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Dr. Lotta Hitschmanova, founder of the Unitarian Service Committee of Canada, my colleague, the Rev. Jessica Purple Rodela, gathered materials from a collection of quotes posted on the web by the USC. Out of Lotta’s own words, Jessica created a sermon in two voices, which she has given to us for fair and free use. On Sunday, November 29, we took a departure from the usual to share this extraordinary document. I post this with special thanks to UCM member, Diana Marvel who dressed in olive green suit and military cap and brilliantly embodied Lotta for our service.
First preached by Rev. Jessica Purple Rodela on 11 October 2009
Presented to the Unitarian Church of Montreal on 29 November 2009
Call to Worship
NARRATOR: She wore a uniform to work every day, dawn to midnight. The uniform was originally required by the United Nations who declared in the aftermath of World War II that agencies may assist abroad only if identified by a uniform. The Unitarian Service Committee was assigned a variant of the olive green army nurse’s uniform and military-style hat; Lotta affixed ribbons and awards, and wore the distinctive garment every single day. The uniform commanded respect, and allowed access to places where civilians and women were often banned. Lotta Hitschmanova was indeed a “an undeclared feminist.”
Dubbed “the atomic mosquito” for her diminuitive size and persistent voice in public service announcements and tireless schedule of speaking engagements across Canada and the world, Lotta created a buzz of sound-bites throughout the 60s and 70s in support of sowing the seeds to feed all the children of the world, to empower the poorest among us, and to give rise, as a founder, to Canada’s international development movement. Dr. Lotta, fighting the enduring war against poverty and hunger, created an army of her own, and enlisted all Canadians to serve. Dr. Lotta – a soldier of peace. . .
LOTTA: Food, education, and community development strike at the very roots of poverty, disease and hunger. Fight need on every front with a contribution to the USC, 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa 4
NARRATOR: Development often starts with a woman. Support leadership programs for women through the USC, 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa 4.
LOTTA: Scientists tell us there is no longer any excuse for human starvation, yet two-thirds of mankind remain hungry, while the world spends 150 billion dollars a year on armaments. Won’t you invest a constructive dollar in the fight against need and poverty. Contribute today to the USC, 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa 4 .
NARRATOR: Men cannot live without hope. Tomorrow has to be better. The Unitarian Service Committee brings hope to cold and hungry adults and children overseas, who have no help from anyone. Your dollar can make the difference between life and death. Please send your contribution today to the Unitarian Service Committee, 56 Sparks Street, Ottawa 4.
The Atomic Mosquito of 56 Sparks Street: A Sermon in Two Voices
LOTTA:
“Do you realize that two-thirds of humankind goes to bed hungry every night?”
NARRATOR:
It was the challenge of the age, the challenge of our age, echoing the strains and strain of humanity and our call toward humaneness and humility:
LOTTA:
“Do you realize that two-thirds of humankind goes to bed hungry every night?”
NARRATOR:
This was the challenge of Lotta Hitschmanova, founder of the Unitarian Service Committee. . . It was a challenge issued from the depths of her own, lived experience, the unexpected fate of a child born into privilege, growing up in the sheltering arms of a wealthy well-educated Jewish family in Prague, Czechoslovakia, born 100 years ago, in 1909.
LOTTA: Czechoslovakia, as you know was one of Europe’s excellent democracies. I was very much under the influence of the first president of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Mazurak. And of his successor, wonderful President Benes. And we were a democracy, we believed in helping other people, that we had responsibilities as citizens. And this is embedded in me and I fervently believe it. . . . I had wonderful parents, wonderful parents. A father who adored me. Who was an industrialist and money didn’t matter. And so he gave me every chance to get the education that I wanted. My mother was a brilliant linguist and so I inherited from her the love for languages – the possibility of communicating with other people – and I was very fortunate.
NARRATOR:: WWII thrust the world she knew into chaos and confusion. Because her journalism work had been decidedly and unapologetically anti-Nazi, her life was in danger, and she had to flee her home.
LOTTA:
I became a refugee, I went to Belgium first, and when Belgium was invaded I went into France. And that was at the beginning of the war. And I was in France in Marseilles and outside of Marseilles for two years. And I experienced personally how much it hurts to be hungry. To be a refugee, to be without a home, to be without country, to be without friends. And this is something dreadful, dreadful; you have no more roots, you have no one to turn to.
NARRATOR: Her circumstances reduced – far from friends and family, she became the lonely acquaintance of hunger, heretofore the unknown companion of that two-thirds of the world. . . and helpless as she wondered of news from home. In 1941 in France, she applied for a visa to go to the United States. She didn’t get the visa, but Lotta, fluent in French, English, German, Spanish, and Czech, did get a job as an interpreter helping other hopeful refugees. She sustained herself meagerly on a diet of beetroot and carrots, and collapsed on the street.
LOTTA: I fainted from hunger in Marseilles twice, fell in front of a street car and I was very ill. . . Hunger is a terrible thing. It is so upsetting that even an intelligent and educated person comes to a stage when nothing else matters but where the next meal will come from. You think of nothing else. This is why my heart goes out to the children in the developing world who have nothing to eat. Only when you are not hungry can you start a more normal life.
NARRATOR: Lotta got help from a clinic run by the Boston-based Unitarian Service Committee. At long last, a visa arrived – not from the US, but from Canada, and Lotta settled in Ottawa, where she joined the Unitarian church where she continued her efforts on behalf of World War II refugees, particularly the children.
LOTTA: World War Two was a terrible human tragedy and the children, of course, always the most defenceless, are the greatest victims. And I believe that the children are the generation of tomorrow and the great hope, for a better tomorrow and that it is the responsibility of every human being to help build. . . . “[we must] aim at one single goal: to help make this torn, crying, bleeding world of ours a peaceful shrine for everyone—whatever his or her language, background, or colour.”
NARRATOR: Such wrenching heartbreak, such challenging conditions and circumstances would be enough to break most of us in two, yet Lotta persevered. Lotta was not one to respond to such tragedy by remaining helpless. . . she turned her considerable intelligence, wit, and powers of pen and persuasion toward helping other refugees, such as herself.
LOTTA: I think I am a very strong person, I must be physically. Because I have gone through terrible hardship and around me there has been such terrible illness and I have always come out victorious. And I am very strong minded because I so believe in this assignment for life. I have chosen it . . .
NARRATOR: Inspired by the Unitarian Service Committee of the United States, an organization sponsored through the American Unitarian Association in Boston, which had rendered her aid in those dismal days of near-starvation in France, Lotta helped organize six Unitarian congregations (in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Hamilton, Winnipeg and Vancouver) to sponsor the idea of a Canadian Unitarian Service Committee. In that first year, USC Canada sent $64,985.38 and 180,000 pounds of clothing and toys, helping 1100 children across Europe. From the beginning, Lotta was determined to create an agency with a personal touch. Hers was an agency that provided not just a “hand out” but a “hand up,” affirming the “worth and dignity” of all persons.
LOTTA: The USC believes that a voluntary agency must be thoroughly human and work from the heart, with compassion and understanding, but also with a maximum of professional knowledge. The USC believes a voluntary agency must never humiliate, but must create cooperation between human beings, so they can build a better tomorrow together. . . . . The strength of USC lies in its imagination, its flexibility and its direct contact with the people. The USC gives a human touch to international development. It’s the link between you and them. . . . Self-help must be the ultimate objective of each project.
NARRATOR: Lotta believed that her USC Canada project would and could feed the world in “a few years;” but war beget war, and the endless stream of human suffering demanded continued effort. Lotta quit her job, and devoted her life to the cause of others, working from 5 in the morning till midnight, and reigning over the agency with an iron-fist determination she commanded of all her devotees. No ivory-tower theorist, Dr. Lotta traveled personally to every site, reasearched every project, took endless “jottings” for her files on every visit, served as witness and spokesperson for every venture, she interviewed families across the globe, listened to their stories and came home to Canada to report on what she’d heard, and to ask for support.
LOTTA: In listening there must be no preconceived ideas, no prejudices as to religion or colour or origin, -- for it must be your conviction that mankind is one, made up of many faces. You must love people, and have the sensitivity to be interested in their problems; be able to settle down and listen, for hours if necessary, in order to learn all you can about their problems before you start offering advice and help. And it is very important not to hurt the sensibilities of your recipients – just think how you would feel and react if you were in their stead!
NARRATOR: And it was that power of empathy that fueled her quest. . .
LOTTA: And very often I’m haunted by what I see during the day. And so at night I am alone and I think back and it is difficult to sleep and to forget. Because how can you forget outstretched hands and you have nothing to give. And they all know that you come from Canada from one of the richest countries in the world and you have to say no. And what right do you have to say no. And then I always feel that I have not worked hard enough and that it is my fault. And that if only people at home knew how great the difficulty is, the problems, the hunger that these terrible illnesses, the hunger of children wanting to go to school. And that they have no money and that they must work when they are tiny. All this is so far away from our Canadians that it is very difficult to interpret.
NARRATOR:: Demand, of course, always exceeds supply – and despite the best intentions and oversight, Lotta understood that the best was sometimes just not enough. . .
LOTTA: . . . We decide on the neediest and we draw up a distribution list. We can give enough to the people on the distribution list but when there are twice or five times as many that come, then it is the tragedy of the people to whom we have to say no, which is the most cruel word in my dictionary.
NARRATOR: Sometimes those experiences proved life-threatening …
LOTTA: I was several times almost lynched….it happened not so very long ago in southern India. When we ran out of supplies…when the women went against me because we had run out of supplies. It was a narrow road and I was outside of the ambulance, it was my back against the ambulance and our two drivers saw this. These exasperated women going all against me. They managed to get me into the car but it was really like a miracle.
But another time, this was a little earlier in our history of aid to India. A very nice postman who had heard of the distribution on the following day, had not informed one village but had informed several villages that the lady with the white hands, this is how they called me, would come and distribute saris and blankets. And naturally everyone who was there expected that we would have a sari or a blanket for every single person. Naturally that was their right to expect, but we didn’t, we didn’t have enough. And they went against us with sticks and stones and this was a very dangerous situation. [When faced with these situations] I get very cold. Very calm, I do not frighten at all. I’m just shattered by the tragedy. Because people would never do it if they weren’t so exasperated and disappointed and furious. They cannot understand that a voluntary agency does not have enough funds. How do you explain it to them?
NARRATOR: Sometimes it proved potentially soul-crushing . . .
LOTTA: I was so shattered by Bangladesh that I thought that I would have my first breakdown in my life. That I couldn’t take it. You see, I have seen many things in these last more than a quarter century. I have seen Greece in utter ruins. And little children walking for a whole day begging for a piece of bread and crying coming back to their destroyed villages at night with empty hands. I have seen Korea at the height of the war, so destroyed with millions of people in the refugee camps. I have seen the haunting drought in Bihar, which I will never forget. And people dying in front of me and we didn’t have a piece of bread to give them. And we did not have a handful of rice to give them. But Bangladesh is different. The cruelty that was done to practically every single family in a country of 75 million people is something you have to experience, you have to go, you have to speak to the people. You have the students of Dhaka University around you and then you are so shattered. The sorrow and the wounds that have been committed on every family by slaughtering one to five to six to thirteen family members that we of course from the outside could never erase. I shall never forget Bangladesh, never. And it is a commitment of myself to help this country as much as possible.
NARRATOR: Faced with such overwhelming need and senseless tragedy, how might we sustain ourselves? Lotta’s sister Lily had escaped the war, but her parents were killed in the concentration camps. Lotta had no family at home, no children of her own. She worked from dawn to midnight. How, for 30 years, did the indomitable Dr. Lotta wake up day after day, don that distinctive uniform, and continue to march for justice?
LOTTA: You asked me how I can get away from my heavy commitments. I never do, but I have outlets when there is the time. I’m very, very fond of flowers. And when I am very discouraged and I am very, very tired, then I do not go and buy something to eat, but I go and buy some flowers. . . . … I adore children, I [adore playing with them]. . . . they need love and they all need great affection and great understanding. And so I have them all in my heart. And, very often, I am being called the mother of 1,000 children, but I have many more. . . . I have seen magnificent victories [over the years in this agency I created]. And when I go back and I find young people who flock around me [who] were once tiny, dirty frightened urchins. And we have taken them into our homes and we have given them a good education and we have built up their bodies and their minds. And today they are nurses and social workers and teachers and they are doing so many wonderful things. That is my reward.
NARRATOR: Lotta was always jotting things down on slips of paper – among her effects toward the end of Lotta’s career, a USC worker found a note reading: “Was it all worthwhile?”
LOTTA: You see, [about] this uniform that I wear and that so many people question. . . . I only have it because it is so practical and the only real way of travelling to the areas where we have programs. This still confuses many so I tell you what happened in an airport in Moncton a few weeks ago. A very old lady came to me and she was laden down with parcels and she said, “Are you a stewardess?” and I said no, but could I possibly help you? And she said, “No, thank you very much, but you look like you are doing something very useful so here is 25 cents.”
NARRATOR: Lotta’s legacy lives on -- through the vibrancy of the USC Canada” with its Seeds of Survival program and its mission to promote “vibrant family farms, strong rural communities, and healthy ecosystems around the world.” The philosophy she created for international aid and development is the model used today for agencies across the globe; we still take our “marching orders” from the soldier of peace.
LOTTA: In the field of the art of giving aid I have identified three basic principles: 1) To come as an open-minded friend and good listener, when offering help. 2) To say good bye to a project when it can continue on its own. 3) To serve with a personal touch, because a relationship of confidence must lift your aid beyond the realm of a simple business proposition and prove that you truly care. And now let me turn to the Science of Aid: 1) Be businesslike and practical. 2) Identify needs felt by the people of the locality we want to serve. 3) Develop local leadership. 4) A voluntary agency must not spread its activities too thinly over too great a territory. 5) Strictest economy when spending precious Friendship Dollars. . . Just as vital as to extend the right kind of help when it is needed, is to phase-out when your partner is ready to manage his responsibilities on his own. To overstay one’s usefulness is a serious mistake, because it dwarfs the sense of responsibility and independence of the recipient. The phasing-out process from a project is just as important as the phase-in…. Because the USC does not overstay its welcome, we do not crush precious human initiative.
NARRATOR: Lotta’s legacy lives on, in the vibrancy of our Unitarian congregations and the realization of a Canadian-unique parent organization, the CUC. Although it is no longer affiliated legally with the Canadian Unitarian Council or our congregations, we are still primary supporters of its mission.
LOTTA: The USC [is] a non-denominational agency. We keep the name “Unitarian” in our title for historic reasons, and because the word expresses the oneness of mankind in which our organization passionately believes. . . . Why do so many people trust the USC? Because it’s completely Canadian, because it’s non-denominational, because it gives aid regardless of religion, or race or political affiliation. It’s well run, closely supervised, and small investments bring big results.
NARRATOR:
Lotta’s legacy lives on, in the response of hope to fear, in the answering of help to despair.
LOTTA: I think that it’s one of the many, many roles of a voluntary agency to draw the attention of public opinion in a generous and rich, wonderful country like Canada. To the basic problems that humanity today is facing. And, so, an agency such as USC … that is one of our main assignments because Canadians want to know, they feel the responsibility which we have in a very important position of leadership. And it is not only our government, but it is the responsibility of us, the people of Canada, to help as much as possible and we can do that, by wasting less, by encouraging our government to do more.
NARRATOR: Happy Birthday, Lotta. May we all be worthy of such a legacy of putting our Unitarian faith into action, bringing the gift of hope to an ailing world, healing the heartbreak, with the sustaining nurture of food sovereignty, empowerment, and hope. Let us dare to realize Dr. Lotta’s dream –
LOTTA: To think that one day the world will be a good place to live, not only for us in the North American continent but for everyone, everywhere in the world, because it can be done. There can be sufficient food grown and there can be sufficient schools for eager children to go to school and life can be something very beautiful if only we abandoned all these horrible destructive things, war and jealousy and only our materialistic thinking and if we thought positively about progress. Progress not so much in the materialistic way but in developing people, the incredible faculties that are in every human being and that are just waiting to be awakened.
Benediction:
LOTTA: “Charity begins at home. Indeed it does. And then it goes on to embrace next door neighbours and all those who need help. So start by caring for those near you and then give a thought, and if you can a dollar, to the children far away, who have no hope without your help.”
NARRATOR: “I am absolutely convinced that it can be done.”
