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The Current Transcript for October 22, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

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VOICE: The word I heard most often in my own therapy sessions with Haitians was destroyed. I heard it in their words and I saw it in their eyes.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: She had a year with the patients she's talking about and then like medical workers before her, she was ordered to abandon them. Literally forced off on an island in the South Pacific where hundreds of would be asylum seekers intercepted by the Australian Government are kept in uncertain and indefinite detention for years. The stories coming out of the island nation of Nauru raise disturbing questions about the treatment of refugees at a time when the movement of desperate people has never been so great. We'll hear the concerns in just a moment. Also today.

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VOICE: I chose this place because they have an all you can eat buffet. I dish up my fourth plate of food and hope that the waitress doesn't notice how many trips I've made to the buffet table or to the washroom.

AMT: As a psychiatric nurse she was trained to help others, but she could not find a way to help herself, driving way out of town to buy groceries, sneaking extra meals in the car, secretly devouring food in a binge purge cycle that she knew was destructive. An estimated one million Canadians struggle with eating disorders that take over their lives and the lives of those who love them. Andrea Parmar found a way out. She shares her story in an hour. And you're going to hear from Michael Palin today. The man who roared to fame as a member of the Monty Python gang, has also had a long career documenting adventurous travel. So when Sir John Franklin's long last ship was found in the Arctic, how could he resist.

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VOICE: I've learned a lot about the first air expedition that was made to the Antarctic. Then to hear it went to the Arctic and disappeared. I mean there's a great story there.

Michael Palin tracks the Erebus and its crew from success in the Antarctic to its icy grave in the Canadian Arctic, in half an hour. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Doctors censure Australian government over treatment of migrants held in island detention centre

Guests: Nick Martin, Nick McKim

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VOICE: They have been trapped on this island for five years and slowly over time their hope has been destroyed, has been diminished, until they report feeling like they don't even know themselves or why they would want to go on living. So we saw extremely high rates of suicidal ideation, of self harm and suicide attempts because of this utter loss of hope. We are concerned that without adequate mental health facilities that our patients could resort even more towards suicides, towards self harm causing irreparable damage to themselves and possibly even death.

AMT: That is psychologist Christine Ruffler describing the devastation she witnessed on the tiny island of Nauru, 4500 kilometres northeast of Australia. She was there with Medecins Sans Frontieres, Doctors Without Borders attending to some of the 800 asylum seekers who have been transferred there by Australia. They had tried to make their way to Australia by boat from as far away as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iran. Now they are waiting in limbo at a so-called offshore processing facility. Some have been there since it opened in 2013. According to MSF, the conditions there are collapsing. Suicide attempts are said to be rampant, including some by children as young as nine. Earlier this month, the group issued a rare rebuke of the Australian government describing the facility as an open air prison. MSF was forced off Nauru by local government officials earlier this month. Just last week, Australia's own senior medical officer on Nauru, Dr. Nicole Montana who was working with asylum seekers left the island and her position. Australian media reported she was arrested and deported, an accusation Nauru's government denies. Dr. Nick Martin met a similar kind of fate when he was the Senior Australian medical officer in Nauru from 2016 to 2017. He's on the line with us now from Normanton, Far North Queensland, Australia. Hello.

NICK MARTIN: Hello.

AMT: Can you tell me what led to the ending of your term on Nauru in 2017?

NM: Well I didn't get arrested or deported, but I was told when I got back to Australia, that they could no longer guarantee my safety on the island. So I wasn't able to go back to Nauru.

AMT: And who were you in danger from?

NM: That wasn't made particularly clear to me, but I understand it would be from the Nauru government because they were not happy with what I was saying about their facilities and the way that things were going there.

AMT: So as we mentioned, Dr. Nicole Montana was deported after being arrested. The government says she breached her rules of conduct by taking a photo of a refugee. It now denies that this was the issue, but what do you think is going on there?

NM: I'm not quite sure. I think the big government in Nauru are pretty much a Laurence of themselves and they certainly cannot be feeling the love from the international community right now after MSF got off the island and we're fairly scathing in their assessment and to be, Medecins sans Frontiers or a political organization, and for the Nauru government to get rid of them is quite unbelievable, really.

AMT: And you of course saw refugee children and their families up close. What can you tell us about their conditions and and what you saw?

NM: Well I can tell you that you know I left Nauru just over a year ago and it was the same patients you know day in day out. The level of mental health conditions and physical illness as well was unbelievable. Like, I'd never seen anything like that in my life before. And the fact that a lot of these patients are still there after a year and now finally being evacuated after all this, well, national uproar and now sounds like international uproar, but they were in dire states then and a lot of them being close to death before they've finally been taken to a regional country to get treatment.

AMT: When you say you've never seen anything like it before, what did you see? What were you seeing?

NM: Well I've served 16 years in the Royal Navy and I've worked in a variety of war zones around the world - alongside Canadians at times, in places like Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. I'm used to seeing people who've been exposed to trauma, and what I saw here was an absolute level of despair, which I've never ever encountered before. Because these people it's not illegal to seek asylum under Australian law, but they've been locked up effectively for five years now, some more than five years. They're not committing a crime and they've been given no hope whatsoever as to their release. And so they are stuck with all their dignity and all their hope taken off them and that certainly took its toll on the parents and the kids stuck on Nauru.

AMT: We know there are multiple reports that children as young as eight or nine years old have developed what has been called resignation syndrome. What is that, what does it look like?

NM: It's a horrible thing, just withdrawing from the world. So it's children basically retreating to inside themselves. They take to their beds, they stop eating, they stop drinking. Sometimes they won't communicate, sometimes they won't even leave the room to empty their bladders or their bowels. They just, they would rather be dead than to continue living in the state they're in. And it's absolutely horrifying to watch and frankly just disgusting because it's so avoidable. And the Australian Government saw this happening, they had psychiatrists, they had psychologists, have lots of experts they flew in to Nauru on rotation, who are seeing these conditions happening and worsening and did absolutely nothing about it.

AMT: And so it's not an act, doesn't sound like it's an act of protest, this is something that happens because of the conditions they're in?

NM: Absolutely. It's certainly not an act of protest. I mean it was dismissed and in fact any suicide attempt or self harm or things like resignations syndrome would be dismissed by the Australian Border Force and the Australian Government as protesting behaviour, but it's not. It's just the behaviour of people who are completely despairing and have no other options left to them. The only thing they can control is their own body and that's what they do and for the kids in particular, they just give up. I mean, I've got young kids and just to see a small child have nothing to live for and takes their bench because they genuinely think they'd be better off dead. It's a terrible thing to do to a human being.

AMT: I want to play another clip from Dr Ruffler. This is Dr. Ruffler describing her team's expulsion from the island and her fears for the refugees.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE: We were shocked and we were devastated when we received the letter saying that we would have to stop our activities. It was seven o'clock at night and we were forced to close our activities by noon the next day. This meant that we were not able to see any of our patients again and the only way we had to inform them was by text message. We were very concerned about how our patients might react and how they might see this as yet another reason to continue to lose hope.

AMT: What do you make of how she and her team were expelled?

NM: I think the way that MSF retreated was absolutely appalling and I think their press conference they gave was incredibly touching, and obviously came from the heart. We could see they were distraught about what happened and I suspect a lot of that was, Nauru just tried to shut down the information getting off island. Naturally the Australian Government's tacit consent.

AMT: We did ask the Australian Government for an interview. Officials denied our request. They said, they did send a statement. They said there are adequate health services on the island, including 65 contracted health professionals, more than 30 mental health professionals. They referred us to Nauru's child protection unit and other counselling services. What do you make of that? They say there is support.

NM: I don't want be swearing too loudly on your program this early in the morning, but that's absolute balls. There are not adequate mental health care or physical health care facilities on Nauru, whether they be Nauruan stopped or Australian funding stopped. And frankly the number of cases that comes to the high courts in Australia to achieve that kind of help, to get the health they desperately need and the government has lost every single case, best testament to that. There is no way the Australian Government can -- well, it does appear they saying it's adequate healthcare, but I can tell you categorically, it is absolutely not.

AMT: What does it say that that the governments of both Australia and Nauru need so many health professionals to help people that they have detained?

NM: It shows that they have created entirely preventable manmade tragedy. They have created this condition by their process of offshore processing, which the Australian government has decided to go down that route and now they're desperately throwing money at it, by saying well maybe they won't kill themselves if we put another psychologist on the island. And I would say that's a ridiculous way of victim blaming in a way. These people need to have safety. They need to have some kind of security, whether that be in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, France, England, I don't really care where. But they have not got that in Nauru. It's a tiny, tiny island. You know it's smaller than Toronto Airport if you looked at it on a map and to put a thousand people there and then say oh no you're not in detention, you're free to walk around the island. It's unbelievable.

AMT: Dr. Martin, thank you for speaking with me today.

NM: You're very welcome. Thanks for your time.

AMT: Dr. Nick Martin, he was Australia's senior medical officer in Nauru from November of 2016 to August of 2017. He spoke to us from Normanton, Far North Queensland, Australia. Well what is happening on Nauru is reverberating in Australian society and in its politics, especially today as it looks as if Australia's ruling Liberals may have lost their one seat parliamentary majority in a byelection. Two independent lawmakers are demanding action for children held in Nauru in return for their support for the government now. Nick McKim is the Australian Green Party Senator for Tasmania. He's the party's spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration and he joins us from Canberra. Hello.

NICK MCKIM: Hello, Anna Maria.

AMT: Has the crisis in Nauru reached a tipping point?

NMC: I think it has. We have to remember we're talked about five years of humanitarian calamity, five years of abusing people's human rights, of indefinitely imprisoning many hundreds of people, including some 40 children who were born into detention in a row and have never known freedom. So it's come to where we are because of backlash from the Australian people who have quite frankly decided enough is enough and they are simply not going to have a systemic regime based on torture and child abuse.

AMT: How did it get to this point in the first place? What were these so-called processing facilities intended to do?

NMC: Well they were intended overtly so by both the major political parties as setting up a deterrent to other people who may wish to seek asylum in Australia and arrive by boat. Now the only way that it's possible to deter desperate people from taking that course of action is to create a system that is worse in its human impact than the things that those people are fleeing from. And it's important to remember that the overwhelming majority of the people who sought asylum in Australia and are now on Nauru have been found to be genuine refugees - that is they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their home countries. And by the way that applies to Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, where there are still seven or eight hundred single men who are detained in very similar conditions.

AMT: They call them offshore processing facilities. How do you see them?

NMC: No, they're not offshore processing facilities, they're prisons. As Dr. Martin just told you, it's all very world, they lock the gates to the compound are open and you can walk around, but there are many people on both Nauru and Manus Island who are just too scared to come off of their beds or the rooms. They're basically withdrawn from Nauruan life; they don't trust the medical contractors that are paid by the Australian Government, that's why it was such a terrible day when Medicins sans Frontiers were expelled from Nauru because they were a genuinely independent medical organization that many of the refugees and people seeking asylum on the roo actually trust it.

AMT: What are you recommending should happen?

NMC: We're recommending that every single child and their family because you cannot separate families in this situation, immediately be brought to Australia for medical assessment and treatment by independent health professionals in Australia. So that we can give them the care that they so desperately need because of the way that our country has treated them. Unfortunately, both the Labor and Liberal parties, the two major political parties in this country, are refusing to accede to that request. So the Greens have sponsored legislation in the Commonwealth Parliament to give effect to our demands and that legislation will be debated at some stage within the next few weeks.

AMT: Legally speaking who is responsible for the welfare of the people who have been transferred to Nauru or Manus Island in Papua New Guinea?

NMC: Well if you ask the Australian Government, they say it's all a matter for the Nauruan or Papua New Guinea governments respectively. However, when people arrive in Australia and there are some who have been transferred for medical reasons to Australia over time, the legal courts of Australia have expressed in effect a very different view. And they've expressed a view that in fact these people, these children, these men, these women, are in fact Australia's responsibility and under international law and conventions such as the Refugee Convention that Australia has signed, there is no doubt that all of those people on Manus Island and Nauru remain Australia's responsibility and the United Nations has been abundantly clear about that.

AMT: The prime minister in Australia, Mr. Morrison, has said he might accept an offer from New Zealand to resettle some 150 refugees there. Is that going to happen? Can you tell us about that?

NMC: Look I'm not sure whether that will happen. He did tentatively as you've just mentioned, that was in the week leading up to a byelection, which the governing party looks like they will lose and therefore lose their parliamentary majority. So it's a bit hard to tell whether that was just an election play or whether he was serious. The catch to Mr. Morrison's offer is that he is saying that that deal can only go ahead if the Australian Parliament signs on to a lifetime ban on travelling to Australia, which would be applied to every single person who's ever been sent to Manus Island and Nauru. And that's in effect using children as political pawns and would have a significantly negative effect on the many hundreds of people on both Manus Island and Nauru who have no chance of resettlement, either in the US or Australia, and it would condemn them to effectively a lifetime of indefinite offshore detention.

AMT: This is happening at a time when humanitarian agencies have already raised so many flags about the number of people, migrants trying to escape their conditions in their home countries and the level of crisis that this is around the world. What has to be done here?

NMC: Well certainly we need to do more to address the reasons that people are fleeing from their home countries and that can be things like increases in international aid and programs that assist with things like peacekeeping and education in those countries. But there is you know, the latest UNHCR figures somewhere between 55 and 60 million displaced people around the world and with the breakdown of that climate, it's occurring, it's overwhelmingly likely that those numbers will increase over time. And that's why it's so important that rich countries, comparatively well-off compared to most other countries in the world like Australia, actually step up and play our role, be good international citizens, abide by the conventions like the refugee convention that we have signed and do our fair share to taking more people who are fleeing persecution in their home countries, but tragically that's not what Australia is doing and instead we have offered a really dark and bloody chapter in our country's history and it's quite disgusting and quite disgraceful.

AMT: Senator McKim, thank you for speaking with me today.

NMC: Thanks, Anna Maria.

AMT: Nick McKim is the Australian Green Party Senator for Tasmania. He is also the spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration. He joined us from Canberra. We did request a comment from the government in Nauru, as well as from a company called a Canstruct. That is the Australian company running what is called the so-called offshore processing facility there. We did not hear back from either. Let us know what you think. You can find us on Facebook. Got to our website, cbc.ca/thecurrent. Click on the contact link and you can also reach us on Twitter. We are @TheCurrentCBC.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: The CBC News is next and then Michael Palin is my guest. The founding member of Monty Python has a nose for history and a great yarn. He joins me to talk about the obsession that took him to the Canadian Arctic on the trail of the Erebus. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current on CBC Radio One, Sirius XM, online on cbc.ca/thecurrent, on podcast and on your radio app.

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Michael Palin's new book retraces doomed voyage of HMS Erebus

Guests: Michael Palin

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come. Living with an eating disorder can take over your life to the point where your husband might wonder if you're having an affair. That was the reality for one Saskatchewan couple. But Andrea Parmar secret liaisons were really with food. It is a serious mental health issue, one we don't hear much frank discussion about. In half an hour from now, Andrea and her husband Mick join me to talk about living with bulimia and how it affected their lives and their marriage. But first.

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VOICE: A now for something completely different.

[Song: 'Northwest Passage' by Stan Rogers].

The late great Stan Rogers with the ode to the mystery of the Franklin Expedition in his classic, Northwest Passage. Two ships, the Erebus and the Terror carried 134 officers and crew into the Northwest Passage in 1845. They never returned. Since then, scattered clues about the disaster have surfaced across the Arctic, but the ships were lost until a discovery in 2014. Prime Minister Stephen Harper rose in Parliament to share the news.

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VOICE: I'm delighted to confirm that we have identified ship from the Franklin expedition has been found. It is in fact the HMS Erebus.

The saga of Sir John Franklin continues to be a source of fascination for people around the world, including the writer and world traveller, Michael Palin. Of course Michael Palin is probably best known as one of the founding members of the iconic British comedy troupe Monty Python. He's also a prolific writer. He's a former president of the Royal Geographic Society. Now he's written, Erebus: One Ship, Two Epic Voyages, and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time. Michael Palin is with me in Toronto. Hello and welcome.

MICHAEL PALIN: Thank you. Nice to be here.

AMT: The Stan Rogers song, when you hear that, what is it about?

MP: Oh It moves me. It really does.

AMT: What did you think when you heard Prime Minister Harper announce that the wreck of the Erebus had been found and identified?

MP: Well that was a great moment for me because I'd picked up on the story about a year before that when I was doing some research on a man called Joseph Hooker who was a great botanist around Kew Gardens in the Victorian time. He had been on HMS Erebus on a previous expedition. I'd learned a lot about the first expedition Erebus had made to the Antarctic. Then to hear it went to the Arctic and disappeared, I mean there's a great story there of great success followed by catastrophe. But then to hear that the ship itself still existed, had been found, could be touched, could be seen, when that announcement came through, I thought that's when I got to write the book.

AMT: You needed to be in there.

MP: Well yes I wanted to be there. I've always wanted to go and scuba dive down to the wreck. I had this romantic notion of sort of being able to touch the sort of the oak of which it was built for myself, but Parks Canada have wisely not encouraged me to do that.

AMT: Well you did a lot of research for this book. Give us a bit of a rundown on what you did to get this story of the Erebus

MP: Well first of all, I went to various institutions where you would expect to find material like the Scott Polar Research Institute, the National Maritime Museum in London and the Royal Geographical Society. And they all had items there that sort of started me off. There were journals, there were letters, they made you then follow up on the story. I was given names of some of the descendants of the family, especially the Franklin family, who turned out to be incredibly helpful. There was a great generosity of the scholars, if we can call them that, of the north and indeed of the rest of the journey. So that was one way of doing it. The other way was to actually going to some of the places where the expeditions had gone. Far off places like Stanley in the Falkland Islands and Hobart in Tasmania and the Northwest Passage and be there and feel what it was like or what it must be like for them, but also to meet people there who knew about the story.

AMT: Did you feel transported back in time as you stood in some of those places?

MP: I tried to. I was trying to do that very much. I've got a very vivid imagination. And there were certain places like Hobart in Tasmania, which is now a modern city and yet where Erebus and Terror were tied up and where they spent a lot of their time. You know it's still not built over. The long estuary of the Derwent river, which was a haven for these ships when they came back from the Antarctic or escaped from the gales of the South Indian Ocean, has a lighthouse called Tinpot lighthouse. And this same lighthouse would have been seen by Franklin and James Clark Ross, the captain of the Erebus at the time, would have been seen by them when they came up and it's still there. And to stand at night on the point where the ships were board and looked down the Derwent and see the light from the lighthouse flashing and kind of feel that that would have been the last sight as they disappeared to Antarctica while that did affect me.

AMT: They called it the Erebus, which is the Erebus was the son of Chaos.

MP: Exactly.

AMT: In mythology.

MP: Yeah in Greek mythology, it's the son of Chaos. It's also, it's a place that really means you know the darkest pit of hell I think, which is an odd name for a ship. But Erebus and her, the other ships of her class, were all originally designed as bomb ships they called them. They had mortars onboard board, which fired heavy missiles at coastal defenses with a lot of noise and smoke and they're really designed to intimidate as much as sort of injured. They were called after various names denoting fire and anger and smoke and destruction. So there was a ship called Fury. There's one called Sulfur. Terror of course, which sailed with Erebus a lot of the journey.

AMT: Erebus and Terror was more like a twosome.

MP: They were like a twosome, yeah.

AMT: So it was outfitted as a warship,. but it goes from a warship to be a polar research vessel, first for the South Pole.

MP: Yes.

AMT: So how did they change it?

MP: Well it was originally built, the thing about the the bomb ships was that it had very strong howls and they had some diagonal planking and things like that on the deck, which a normal ship will not have, just withstand the recoil from the big guns they had. They were quite sturdy when they were built. And I think that's why they were chosen for the Antarctic journey. They didn't change them a lot. They made them more functional. They stripped the decks down, they took away all of the warships that had a lot of decoration. They took all that away and stripped it down to the basics and filled it with various things for gathering data on terrestrial magnetism was a big thing. And also flora and fauna of where they visited. It was a big scientific expedition. Sixty seven men squeezed on this fairly small ship. It's only about 30 metres long.

AMT: So by the time Erebus and Terror head off to the Northwest Passage, they have a very successful and a real sort of like you know by the skin of your teeth, excitement in the Antarctic. But Sir John Franklin is the man who's going to captain this. Tell us about him.

MP: He was an Arctic explorer of great note around about the same time as some others including James Clark Ross and Captain Derrimus in the Antarctic. He was an older man. He'd had a lot of experience, but mainly on land journeys and there would be one dramatic land journey where they'd been three years away and nearly died of starvation. He wrote an account of it and it was published with great success and talked about having to eat his shoes to keep going. So Franklin was known in the British press as the man who ate his boots. He was quite old, certainly by standards of exploration when he was made captain of the Erebus for the Northwest Passage. He was 59 years old. He was a very affable man. He had been for a while, Governor General of Tasmania, hadn't worked out. He wasn't good at politics. He wasn't really interested in administration like he was interested in just getting away and discovering places and life at sea. A lot of people felt he was too old for the expedition and a lot of people felt the expedition shouldn't have gone anyway.

AMT: He had a very ambitious wife. She was one of the driving forces behind getting him appointed to this one, was she not?

MP: Yes. She's a very very important figure in the whole story. Exactly. She was very energetic. She was a great networker. She knew lots of people. She liked to get things done. She was much more dynamic than he was really and when he kind of fell out with the administration for the people in Tasmania and was really brought home. It was seen as a failure and she said no it's not a failure. It's just they framed him, he's a good man and she pushed all she could to get him another appointment to the Navy and got him the position of the Captain of Erebus on the Northwest Passage.

AMT: And so the Erebus leaves May 19, 1845 with the Terror.

MP: Yes.

AMT: And how long was this expedition expected to last?

MP: Well it's interesting. There are letters from the officers, which say we'll see you in Hawaii in a year's time. They thought they just sailed through the Northwest Passage, down through the Bering Strait, into the Pacific. Job done. They were very, very optimistic. This must have been the buzz on board ship, except when you look at some of the letters of the crew and they were for me were the most fascinating things of all because they're not written in proper prose. They're not written as Admiralty reports. They're written by people very poor education in many ways, but they really tell you about what they're feeling. And there's one letter, just before leaving the Orkney Islands to go off into the North Atlantic and a man writes to his wife and says, you know every night in my hammock I think of you and my dear children. If we don't meet again you know look to God and all that sort of thing. But he was saying if and really suggesting that there were dangers ahead.

AMT: And the British Admiralty of course had some very optimistic view that they would sail right through, but there was one person who said to Franklin you're going to make the nucleus of an iceberg.

MP: Yes that's right. He's rather a good character. I can't find much about him. He's called Richard King. And he was very sort of testy, rather grumpy man, who nobody liked very much. But he had the problem with him was he was generally right. He'd done a lot of exploring in the Arctic and he felt that the expedition shouldn't go ahead in the form it was with two quite heavy ships. And yes he said sending Franklin up there, sending him to be there the nucleus of an iceberg, which is quite dramatic, but almost sadly true.

AMT: Let's talk about the ships being heavy. Some of the provisions you list like the thousands of pounds that you read and that like the having, they brought whole libraries onboard. Give us a sense of what they loaded that ship up with.

MP: Well a very significant thing was that when they went to the Antarctic, they were purely under sail. When they went to the Arctic, again against various people's advice, they fitted small motors, not very strong, 25 horsepower motors and those were really they got locomotives from local railways in London, put them in the ships and that would help to get through the ice. They thought in order to fuel these engines they needed coal. So you've added to the weight considerably just the coal and the engines themselves. And then Franklin was very keen that the men on the journey if they had to over winter that there should be an educational element to it. So lots and lots of books. There were those sort of carpentry room, where people could learn carpentry, languages, all that sort of thing. It was you know an enormous amount was invested in the journey.

AMT: They brought a monkey too. I forgot to ask you.

MP: They brought a monkey, yes. Lady Franklin gave a monkey to the officers and there was also a dog, a dog called Neptune on the I think it was on the Terror, but there was this monkey and no one knows really what happened to the monkey. I think there was a story that maybe he ran off, fairly early on.

AMT: And they should have really had more dogs because when they wanted to go overland they had to pull their own. The mean had to pull the sledges.

MP: Well this is the thing they had no, they made no allowance for having to leave the ship. They believe the ships were like fortresses. They had everything on board, so long as they stayed on the ships, everything would be fine. And of course it wasn't and in the end when the ships got stuck for so long, they had to leave the ships. As you say, they had sledges, but no dogs to pull them. So the men had to pull them and then by that time, when the men abandoned the ship in 1848, most of them were too weak to pull these very heavy sledges. So that again that was something, which had not been sort of thought out before.

AMT: When did people back home start to worry that something had gone wrong with the Erebus and the Terror.

MP: It was about two years after they left, which seems to us now extraordinary that people would just go and we wouldn't hear anything for two years. It must be a disaster. But as I say, there have been expeditions that have gone for two or three years. The first, one the first people to get really worried was ironically Lady Jane Franklin, who had persuaded her husband to go, take command of this vast age of 59 and she was the first one had an intuition that something had gone wrong. And she started to press the Admiralty for searches. The Admiralty wouldn't countance any searches for about two and a half years.

AMT: And why was that?

MP: Again they thought well this is this will just, it's quite normal, they're probably on their way through. It's only the second winter. Give them another six months then perhaps we should worry. I think it was just this British of feeling that they knew everything about ships and you know they'd crack the Antarctic. They had their fleet was unconquerable and they defeated Napoleon. They knew a lot about the science of navigation and all that, they just didn't, I don't think they thought that this anything could go wrong, amazingly.

AMT: So what happened to the Erebus?

MP: Well so little is known of what happened because there was really no written evidence of any kind. Apart from one note, which was found on a place called King William Island, about 500 miles north of the Canadian mainland, in which there were two messages. One was written in 1848 saying all is well. Captain John Franklin captaining. This was 1847 that was dated. And then someone had written around this note 11 months later, obviously taking it out of its can and written around saying we abandoned the ships having been beset in the ice for 18 months and we're heading south now to try and find the river on the Canadian mainland.

AMT: And they said in that letter as well that something like nine officers had died and fifteen crew had died at that point.

MP: Yes. And also that Sir John Franklin had died and yeah.

AMT: He died two Years in, didn't he? Was it something like that?

MP: Yes that's about right. Yeah.

AMT: And then no one ever knows what happened to his body?

MP: No no. I mean that's one of them, if you can say these things, that's the sort of holy grail of inquiry at the moment. Now they found the two ships. So they don't know what happened to Franklin. They know what happened to some of the others. They've discovered the remains of what they think are 42 bodies of 129. But that's taking a long long time putting together, sort of matching bones and remains and all that sort of stuff.

AMT: So eventually the crew and the officers abandon the ships and we’re talking what year of this time?

MP: They abandoned the ships in 1848. Yeah.

AMT: Tell us a bit about what their trek across the ice would have been like that year.

MP: Well we know that they didn't get very far. The Inuits had already they'd told of seeing 40, as they call them foreigners, pulling a sledge south on King William Island. And this was later proved to be true by a search party in 1858. It was that far away from the from the disaster. But they found the ship. They found the boat and the sledge with the remains of two men in it. Lots of things they carried with them to go south, including old things like sort of curtain rails and soap and sponges and all that sort of stuff. And willow pattern plates and monogrammed teaspoons with the officer's initials on. Not the sort of thing you'd normally take south, if you're going south and you're limited for weight. So they found the sledge. They some of the men did get across Simpson straight, which is onto the Canadian mainland and died in a place called, what's been called Starvation Cove and that's the furthest south anybody got.

AMT: You write that there's almost like a trail of human skeletons along the route that they would have died maybe of scurvy or like they would literally like fall and they would just end up staying there.

MP: Yeah I mean the way they found the bones were just they'd fallen face downwards and laying there and nobody had attempted to sort of bury them, which seems to suggest that the men were very weak at the time. Why, no one is absolutely sure, there's been various theories including lead poisoning, which has now been largely discredited. The likelihood is that it was scurvy had set in, which is why people died quite fast for lack of the right foods. But also they were two of the bitterest winters in living memory in the Arctic and that was just you know they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. And by the time they left the ship, I think they were just, they had very little food and they weren't able to sort of trade. There was one meeting with the Inuit, where they traded some fish, but then there was sort of awful pathetic moment where the Inuit sort of described them exchanging the fish and they gave them some officers gave them something. I don't know what it was, sort of that might be useful to them, cooking utensils or something and then they just, they both left each other because they didn't speak the language. No one could communicate. And one wonders if they'd stayed with them, maybe those Inuit could have said well there some people here. This is where we can get more food for you.

AMT: At some point there are some, there are search parties and they find the bones of Europeans and tell us the story behind that. What happens? There's an allegation of cannibalism.

MP: Well yes I mean in 1854, a man called John Ray, who was an Arctic’s sort of surveyor and trapper from Hudson's Bay Company contacted some Inuit. They said yes we have found remains of the men and it's clear that they had to eat their comrades in order to stay alive and there were mutilated bodies that were sort of bodies and parts and bodies and parts and all that and cuts on the bones, which suggested that had been maybe prepared for eating. And Ray went back to London with this news and it was received with absolute total shock and horror and denial. And Charles Dickens of all people who could have, rose to Jane Franklin's defence at her urging and said you know how can we believe these savages. You know with their domesticity of blood and blubber. I mean awful awful things, racist stuff about the Inuit. I mean that was just their way of dealing with the most horrific knowledge, not just that the expedition had perished, but there had actually been cannibalism involved I mean in the British navy. It just it was almost too much to take in.

AMT: They just didn't want to believe it.

MP: They didn't want to believe it.

AMT: I'm also struck by the fact that when the Erebus is found, it is essentially found where the Inuit had always said, by the way, there's a boat over there.

MP: Yes and it was found a lot further south than where it was abandoned. In the note, the victory point note of 1848, they said exactly where they had left it. The northern part of King William Island. It was found a long way south of King William Island and no one had really bothered to look there and yet Inuit had described seeing the mast of a ship in the water. And just because there was an oral history, rather than written history, people tended to be confused by it or think it was confused where as in fact it was fairly specific.

AMT: How close did you get to the ship?

MP: Oh frustratingly close. We got down into the Victoria Strait, which leads down to King William Island. If we'd been able to sail along, it would have been a matter of a day, we'd have been right in the area where the wrecks were found, but the ice was too thick. This was 2016 and I say last year when the search had to be abandoned after sort of a day and a half, we realized the ice is still there, despite global warming. There's plenty of ice up there and if it gets into those narrow channels and gets stuck, that's it. So we sort of had to turn away. It was very frustrating really.

AMT: But it must have given you a sense of you know like with all the modern technology, you were still stopped by nature.

MP: Yes. It gave me a great respect for nature and how difficult it is, even with a I mean I think the ship we were on has a 40,000 horsepower engine, whereas Erebus had 25 horsepower. So how vulnerable they must have been.

AMT: So you got close, but not close enough. Are you going to go back? Are you going to try to dive?

MP: I feel quite close to it all. And I suppose if there were a moment when they said, oh it's going to be a lovely summer, clear seas and Michael just get your gear on and come out and you can come down with us and sort of caress the hull of this ship that you love so much.

AMT: That would be something. Michael Palin, it was great to talk to you. Thank you.

MP: Thank you. Lovely.

AMT: Michael Palin, past president of the Royal Geographic Society and a founding member of Monty Python. His book is Erebus: One ship, Two Epic Voyages and the Greatest Naval Mystery of All Time.

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AMT: Coming up in our next half hour, living with an eating disorder doesn't just affect your relationship with food, it affects the relationship with your family too. After the break, a Saskatchewan couple opens up about what it meant for them and why there is hope for recovery. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Nurse reveals her secret 16-year battle with bulimia to inspire others to get help

Guests: Andrea Parmar, Mick Parmar

AMT: Hello. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current. I'll give you a word of caution before we start this next segment. We're going to have a candid and sometimes graphic discussion about eating disorders. As many as a million Canadians suffer from eating disorders every year and they can be fatal. Anorexia causes more deaths than any other mental illness in Canada, including depression. But eating disorders are a hidden epidemic, especially among adults. They're seldom spoken about in public. We're about to hear from a Saskatchewan couple, however who are doing just that.

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VOICE 1: I lift my head out of the toilet and hope it will flush. Thank God, it did not overflow. I exit the lady's washroom and head back to my booth at the restaurant. I chose this place because they have an all you can eat buffet. I dish up my fourth plate of food and hope that the waitresses don't notice how many trips I've made to the buffet table or to the bathroom. In the car I put on my lipstick and start driving down the street. I pull up to the acute psychiatric unit. I'm one of the nurses working the evening shift. I put on my happy face. I'm ready to work and do what I do best, help people. I only have one concern. I hope that I don't faint because my blood sugar is so low. Remarkably I was able to live this lifestyle for 16 years.

VOICE 2: It felt like Andrea needed her eating disorder more than she needed me. It often felt like she was cheating on me, not with another man, but with food. There were lies, there was deceit. I even began spying on her. I would pretend to leave the house and then peek in the dining room window to see if she was pulling food out of the fridge or the pantry to binge. I couldn't believe that our relationship had gotten to that point, but that is the honest ugly truth.

AMT: Wow. You just heard Mick Parmar and before that, Andrea Parmar, reading a passage from their new book, it's entitled, Alone in a Crowd: A Story of a Registered Psychiatric Nurse's Struggles with Bulimia and Mental Wellness. And it lays bare Andrea's years of living with bulimia and the impact it had on their life and marriage. Andrea and Mick Parmar live in Langenberg, Saskatchewan. They're with us from Regina. Hello.

ANDREA PARMAR: Hi there.

MICK PARMAR: Hi Anna Maria.

AMT: Andrea that lifestyle you lived for 16 years, as I listened to that excerpt from your book, I want to know more. What were you doing day to day?

AP: Well day to day was filled with a lot of planning, a lot of planning around what I was going to binge on and to be honest a lot of that time seemed like a blur to me. When I was writing this book and I was kind of looking back to those moments and I really couldn't believe that that was what I was doing and somehow I was able to navigate through life and still work as a psych nurse and continue with my eating disorder.

AMT: So how much of an obsession was food?

AP: Oh food was something that I went to bed thinking about. I woke up in the morning thinking about and the only time that I was really truly present was when I was working. I was able to put on my working cap and do what I do best, help people. You know otherwise it was food. It was how am I going to get the food? Where am I going to get the money and seeking out privacy to be able to continue with this disorder.

AMT: Well you would even shop outside of like your own neighborhood of your own town, wouldn't you?

AP: Yeah when I moved to Langenberg, I grew up in Regina, I spent 29 years there and that was a little easier because obviously there's more stores to go to. When I moved to Langenberg, there's one grocery store in the town. So that made things a little more difficult because people know you know how much you're buying. So I would go to different towns and I would you know be driving in my vehicle and have a big bag of chips and chocolate bars and be bingeing while I was driving, get to the next town, use their washroom and come out and reload up on food in that small town and that you know continued on for several years.

AMT: I want you to read another excerpt from your book I think you have it in front of you. You know the one I'm talking about?

AP: Yup.

AMT: When you're ready maybe you can do that?

AP: When I was preparing for a binge, that was all I thought about. I would go into some sort of trance, almost like being hypnotized I imagine. That maybe sounds crazy, but that's what it was like for me. There wasn't anything normal about the thoughts that went through my head, which kept me from truly being present in the moment. At my worst, I could be in a room full of people, yet I was very alone. I was not only disconnected from the people and the conversations in the room, but from my feelings as well. I was clearly addicted to my eating behaviours, as I was consumed by thoughts of my next binge. I craved the rush I got from planning and executing the process. I floated along in the sky, nowhere near the ground.

AMT: I want to hear more about that feeling you got.

AP: You know depending what the setting was, whether it was a gathering for a wedding that we would be at or something and conversations are going on and I'm you know I would nod and say yes and maybe say some things, which I wasn't even you know aware that I was saying because in the back of my head it's just okay. So yeah how am I going to get to the washroom? Is anybody else going to be in there? Like sometimes I look back and it's just it's amazing at how much my psyche was changed by food and the rush and then you're overwhelmed with guilt and then you have to get rid of that food and it's just that vicious cycle that continues on and on.

AMT: Talk to me a little bit more about the rush.

AP: Well for me, it was and I think for most people with eating disorders is that you know it's about control. And so I didn't have control in other parts of my life, but somehow you feel like I can control this. You know you plan this binge and feel yeah I'm in control and I can say when I want to do this and then you get rid of it, but then you're right back to feeling in control and it's like you know with people would do maybe with alcohol or drugs.

AMT: And how often were you binging and purging?

AP: Well I think on an average I would probably have to say you know maybe ten times a day and there were some periods like obviously you know when Mick was gone on conferences or when I was at home, my parents were gone and I had the whole house to myself, this was great because I could just you know load up on food and I could just you know sit and watch TV and binge and purge and binge and purge and some of those days got close to 30 times a day, which might sound hard to believe but that's how it was for me.

AMT: You describe your life as a bulimic as an ongoing battle of good versus evil. Why that idea of good versus evil?

AP: So when I good versus evil to me, I think of the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other. And I did like to I truly care about people and I I did lots of good things for people and I would be a very good listener, a good counsellor, I was kind to people. So I had all these wonderful qualities and then in the other breath, I was doing all these horrible things. And it was like my eating disorder was pulling me over. You know it was kind of speaking to me like, okay yeah you've done all these good things now and but now it's time to go binge and purge. In that way it was truly a battle.

AMT: And it also, when you use those words for it, it also speaks to the shame you felt, right?

AP: Oh for sure.

AMT: There was a devil, that it was something bad and something to be ashamed of.

AP: You bet.

AMT: And as you point out, through many of those years you're leading this secret life, you have the shame, but you're a psychiatric nurse.

AP: Yeah how does that work?

AMT: How does it work?

AP: Well you know when I, that's one thing that I can say is when I was working as a psych nurse, that's one of the few situations that I was truly present in the moment and I I can honestly say I was not thinking about food when I was working with my psychiatric patients. And you know a lot of them said gee it feels like you really know what I'm going through and in the back of my head I kind of thought, yeah you're right, but that was very important to me. And yet, you know I still had this terrible disease and I was kind of preaching what I needed to practice my most for myself.

AMT: When did all this start? When would you say, like what was the trigger that started all of this?

AP: I would have to say, when I was in grade 9 we planned a trip to Hawaii, a family trip and for some reason I got this thing in my head that you know if I lose like maybe five or ten pounds before we go, I might look a little bit better in that bikini. And at the time, I was average weight like 5 foot 3, 110 pounds, so I was not overweight. So I went on this kind of starvation thing, I was eating like just a couple apples a day and I think I almost passed out at one point because my blood sugars were low and anyways I did lose about six or seven pounds and got to Hawaii and just you know ate like normal and got back and noticed that I had gained this weight back. And that's the first time that I actually noticed how clothes felt on me, like that they were tighter and so that definitely you know that's kind of how it started. And the starvation with anorexia and bulimia, it all seems to start with this kind of restricting thing like starvation diet, restricting yourself from food.

AMT: How did you conceal what was going on from your parents when you were a teenager then?

AP: At the beginning, it wasn't too hard. My mom did a lot of baking and you know I would kind of make my trips down to the freezer and kind of steal food and she didn't keep track of it too much. But you know as time went on and I was increasing more, it got a little more difficult when I would have to you know purge. I would actually run the shower while I was throwing up and I would then finish with my purging, shut off the shower and come out in a towel and actually like put some water on my you know on my face and my legs to make it look like I had a shower. And I did that lots.

AMT: And at some point your family moved to a larger house and you have your own bathroom and that helps you a little bit, right?

AP: You bet. It's a very secretive disease. I mean it's something that you don't want people to know about.

AMT: Did you ever steal money to get food when you were a kid?

AP: Yes I did. I stole from my mother. There was even she had some old jewelry that had chains that had broken or whatnot. And I remember taking that jewelry and taking it into a pawn shop to get money for food.

AMT: So when you were growing up, how prevalent were eating disorders or what knowledge of eating disorders?

AP: Well I know that there was a couple of friends of mine that were eating and throwing up and that's kind of where I like after going to Hawaii and losing the weight and then shortly thereafter, I actually caught a friend in the bathroom and she was throwing up and I asked her if she was sick and she said no that's sometimes just what I do when I eat too much food. So I do know now the prevalence and the numbers from when I was in high school to today, they're just getting higher and higher and hopefully more people are coming forward because it is a very serious complex mental illness.

AMT: Mick I want to bring you in as you listen to her go through the early days of all of this. How aware were you of what Andrea was doing at first?

MP: Well I'd say when we first started dating I wasn't very aware at all. I just saw her as you know a pretty kind soul and we had fun together and we obviously fell in love. But as time progressed, I would just notice some strange eating behaviors and I even started noticing after she'd eat, there was almost a regular trip to the bathroom within five ten minutes of us eating together. And just you know you just start your spider senses start tingling a bit, I guess. And then we, you know we she had a conversation with me eventually about the fact that she did binge and purge occasionally, but mostly just to cope a bit. And but she was sure that she could quit anytime. So I put my my confidence in her because obviously I trusted her and loved her at the time and thought it would just kind of fade away. But instead it got worse and to the point where I discovered that she was doing it all the time. So we obviously had some strong conversations or slash arguments about it. I was quite frustrated and occasionally got quite upset with her. It was a very stressful few years and I was uncertain if our marriage would even last at times to be quite honest. But I'm very glad that we found a way through it.

AMT: So Andrea what lengths would you go to hide the food you were bringing home or using to binge to hide that from Mick?

AP: Every imaginable thing. I got you know I, one of the facilitators that I met at Bridgepoint, when I went for treatment, he said you know addicts are very smart people. Like the planning involved is you know I went through a lot of lengths and then like I said, he caught me a few times and some of them were very embarrassing moments and I do have them in my book.

AMT: Give me an example.

AP: I was at home and he had gone to school and I had my regular morning binge of whatever five bowls of cereal and four pieces of toast and lots of milk and then I went to purge and hear they had shut the water off in town. So I panicked right away and I thought what am I going to do. I can't throw up in the toilet and it's not going to flush. So I found a bag that I would purge into a Ziploc bag and I zipped it up and I thought OK I'll just get rid of this later and then I heard him come in the front and my heart started beating and I ran downstairs in our house with this bag and I pretended I was doing laundry, which was kind of odd because the water was off and I took this bag and threw it under the dirty clothes. And he came down and said What are you doing. So he knew something was up and I said nothing, nothing. I'm just doing laundry and I came back up stairs and about less than a minute later he came up holding this bag of vomit. And he said to me, you need help.

AMT: You remember that moment, Mick?

MP: Very clearly. I could even feel the warmth of the vomit in my hands, to be honest, with the bag, as I brought it up the stairs. And I was very I thought maybe that was the moment that was gonna be the last straw for me. I was very close to when I walked out that door to keep walking because it had gone so far and she was so sick. And I guess you know what brings you back as those vows you make when you get married. And you know, for sicker or poor, that's in there. So this was very very sick. And I just knew I wasn't going to be able to help her myself and that's when we really started talking about her visiting some inpatient facilities such as Bridgepoint and without a doubt, that's saved her life perhaps and saved our marriage for sure.

AMT: And you were ready Andrea to make that step?

AP: Yeah I was. Sorry I just got a little bit emotional here with that last part. I was ready. I remember going there for the first time and it was like OK I'm here because I want to quit with this behavior. But yet I didn't. I didn't, I didn't. And that's why maybe it took me three inpatient admissions of three weeks each time. So that was over the course of about a year and half and slowly by slowly the behavior stopped going, when I actually worked on the root problems and discovered my inner self and that's really what these eating disorders are about. It's not about the food.

AMT: And that's a really important point. It was never about the food.

AP: No.

AMT: How hard was it to get to that underlying issue, so that you could actually confront?

AP: It was the hardest thing that I have ever done in my life is to take a look at myself, the good, the bad, the ugly and work on really getting better and saving my marriage. They say that eating disorders are you know ten times harder to cure than alcoholism and I think that makes a lot of sense because with food.

AMT: You gotta have food right. You can't not have food.

AP: Exactly. It's basically retraining myself how to eat and I had to make food food again.

MP: One thing that I remember Andrea had said to me and when she reflected upon you know her life of bulimia and I found it very on point was that the eating disorder itself is often the very last thing that goes. It was when she, I noticed as the journey went along, her negative self talk lessened before the binging and purging stopped. You could just see her start stop being so hard on herself and having so much self-doubt and it just, the eating disorder kind of just morphed into something better or healthier.

AMT: That's a really important observation because it goes again to that feeling of guilt and shame and self loathing and when that falls away. The other thing I wanted to ask about Andrea, when you first go to these group sessions, everyone's talking about abuse that they had as a child or later in life and you weren't relating to that. You were kind of a little like that wasn't your issue, right away.

AP: Yeah exactly. There was 13 of us girls there and every single one of them had some abuse issues in their past, mostly sexual abuse. And I thought to myself, gee that's weird because I'm the only person here that hasn't had that. And as time went on I started having some dreams and it was of a certain person and they kept recurring and I just thought it was kind of odd. And I mentioned this to my one of my older sisters and she said no that's not a dream that happened. So there was some abuse issues that happened you know it was just then that I started you know having these memories. So.

AMT: And this was involving a babysitter, am I right?

AP: Yeah.

AMT: Yeah. And so in fact there was a had trauma.

AP: Yes there was.

AMT: That you hadn't been able to pinpoint.

AP: That's right.

AMT: That's very powerful to understand how something like that can then just have an effect.

AP: Yeah.

AMT: And It kind of gets buried.

AP: And I guess your mind you know allows you to remember things as it feels that you're you know able to handle it.

AMT: And how's your health after years of doing what you were doing?

AP: Remarkably, well the biggest thing I have is my four front teeth are veneers and I had lots of damage done to my teeth. Nothing on the inside fortunately and that was the thing that actually kept me going because every time I go to the doctor and they check my esophagus for a tear or something and all my bloodwork would come back good and so I saw that as a green light to continue doing what I was doing. Now I'm in really good health. I do have multiple sclerosis. I was diagnosed with that two years ago and oddly enough that's actually when I started back with my journaling and I really don't know if I would have finished this and wrote that book, if I wasn't diagnosed with M.S.

AMT: What do you want us to take away from your story?

AP: I'm someone, I'm a psychiatric nurse saying it's ok to need help. If you have a physical problem, you get help. If you have diabetes, you get insulin. If you have a mental illness, you can get help. And I hope that by sharing my story that if I could change the life of one person, I would feel like I've done my job.

AMT: Well it's important to hear your voice and your voice as well Mick, as her support in all of this. Thank you both.

AP: Thank you, Anna Maria.

MP: Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: Andrea and Mick Parmar in Regina. Their book is called, Alone in a Crowd: A Story of a Registered Psychiatric Nurse's Struggles with Bulimia and Mental Wellness. If you're looking for more information about eating disorders, head to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent or contact the National Eating Disorder Information Centre. That's our program for today. Stay with Radio One for Q. I've just come back from Texas, where I've been working on a documentary on the particular quirks of U.S. politics as the country heads into midterm elections on November 6th and you're going to hear the whole thing closer to the midterms. But Texas is big are Republican and the race everyone is watching has a Democratic upstart, Beto O'Rourke running against Ted Cruz for a Senate seat. Everyone's looking at this and one of the people I met down there was talking about it as well. Tess Clark runs a nonprofit group for refugees in Dallas. Her politics has long been informed by her Christian evangelical faith. But she says she's had to do some real thinking about her political allegiances. So we're going to leave you with what some of what she had to say and you'll hear more from her when we give you our whole documentary from Texas. In the meantime here she is. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thank you for listening to The Current.

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VOICE: I have been, I've voted straight Republican ticket until 2016. I was like in a lot of ways my upbringing informed my politics. And so I didn't ask a lot of questions. I just was told that Christians vote for the Republican Party because they're pro-life. In Texas particularly, the whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps mentality, that we don't give handouts to people because that is enabling people. And so I kind of had a certain viewpoint of like someone who might be on welfare or someone who might have had an unplanned pregnancy and then choose to terminate that or whatever those things looked like I just, I had no context for what actually might be happening in people's lives. And so when 2016 rolled around and I voted Republican in the primaries, not for Donald Trump, but when he got the nomination, I'm going this man is stands for nothing that I stand for, as just a follower of Jesus. But he's claiming that he is and it was just, it was almost an embarrassment to me and to my faith. So I had to do a lot of soul searching, a lot of researching and even now my hope is to really engage in politics, but not in partisanship. That's not what I'm about. I'm really trying to look at all of the candidates who are on the ballot in the midterms and choose the right people for those positions based on my convictions.

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Oct. 22, 2018 episode transcript

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