“Me?” said Roger Thorne. “I’m too old to be a government informer. I’m here because I’m particular about my food.”
They seemed to be willing to take a chance on him after that, as though they realized how ridiculous it would be to plant an agent to spy on a group of elderly men drinking tea. He learned that they were all exiles from the Gaddafi government crackdowns of the 1970s, and most of them had completed their working lives as skilled tailors in Toronto men’s stores and retired. Mahmoud Tanzir and Abdul Othmani had emigrated at the same time from the same street in Tripoli, and were old friends.
Roger Thorne’s fluency in Arabic had to be explained. He said his parents had been Canadian archaeologists who had been based in the eastern part of Libya near Benghazi. When he was a young child they had left him in the homes of Libyan friends while they were away in the field. They had spent months at a time studying the twelve-thousand-year-old rock paintings in the Acacus Mountains.
Roger Thorne began showing up at the Salaam Restaurant nearly every day to join the conversations at the table. Othmani and Tanzir were always there, joined by a constantly changing group of friends and acquaintances.
During the same period Alan Spencer began to devote time to relief organizations. He visited a number of Toronto groups, talked to administrators and volunteers, and read everything he could find on the subject of Canadian relief efforts in the Middle East. Finally he selected the Canadian People’s Relief Corps and became a member. He began by giving the group a five-thousand-dollar donation. It was large enough to bring him a personal thank-you note from the director, but not enough to cause much curiosity.
The Canadian People’s Relief Corps’ mission was to organize, fund, and equip teams of relief workers and send them where humanitarian aid was most urgently needed. They provided water purification systems, generators, food, clothing, and materials for temporary shelters. If the country was infested with mosquitos they brought mosquito netting. If the region was hungry but stable they brought well-digging equipment, seeds, tools, and even imported livestock. And no matter where they went, they brought medical supplies, doctors, nurses, technicians, and trained volunteers.
The organization had been operating for over twenty years, and Spencer saw references in the literature to teams that had been to Bosnia, India, Timor, Bangladesh, Mozambique, Mali, Rwanda, Nigeria, Liberia, Ukraine, Syria, Eritrea, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya.
During his second month Spencer donated another five thousand dollars. After the third month he made the monthly donation permanent and began attending meetings. He never spoke during the business portions of the proceedings, which were usually reports on current missions in various countries or deliberations about future missions, but he sometimes stayed after with a few others to discuss the issues without speaking publicly.
On one occasion he happened to be talking to some of the board members about missions to the Middle East when the president brought out a letter from an official in Iraq. Spencer said, “I can probably tell you what it says.”
When the president handed the letter to him he read it aloud in English and handed it back. The director asked him why he spoke Arabic. He repeated the story he had concocted for Abdul Othmani and his friends about his parents bringing him to Libya as a child.
A month later, after a regular meeting of the Toronto group, the director introduced Spencer to a pair of doctors who were planning to take a large group on a mission to North Africa in a few months. One of them was a woman named Labiba Zidane. While they were speaking about the difficulty of operating in Libya, Dr. Zidane unexpectedly switched to Arabic.
“The director says you’re fluent in Arabic,” she said in Libyan Arabic. “Are you?”
He replied in Arabic. “I am only a poor student of the language, but I can get by in most situations. And you are a physician. May I ask what your specialty is?”
She smiled. “My practice is in pediatrics but I have some experience in infectious diseases.”
The other doctor, Andre Leclerc, was French Canadian. He looked at them in amused puzzlement. But the pair kept talking in rapid Arabic.
Dr. Zidane said, “How old are you?”
“I’m sixty,” Alan said.
“Healthy? No trouble with your heart or lungs?”
“No trouble.”
“Would you consider coming with us to Libya in the fall? We desperately need volunteers.”
“I’m not sure. What sort of work would I do?”
“Triage, most of the time. Often people in the remote areas or the poor in the cities don’t see a doctor from one year to the next, so they come in large numbers. You would greet the patients and ask them if they have any specific problems, ask them their names, then make them understand where to sit to wait, and take their temperature and blood pressure. Obviously, if someone is terribly ill you would take them to the front of the line.”