Nasreen Jessani: MISiN nothing

When Nasreen Jessani was a little girl growing up in Kenya, she recalls her grandfather talking about McGill University as a place to aspire going to, a place with a reputation both for the quality of education it provided and for the warmth of its welcome to international students.

Years later, Jessani finds herself not only at McGill, but playing an active role in providing that friendly welcome to non-Canadians as the president of the McGill International Students' Network.

"My grandfather, who didn't go to any university, knew of McGill," says Jessani, who is in her fourth year in a BSc program, majoring in anatomy and cell biology, with a minor in psychology.

Jessani began working with the MISN last year as vice-president, communications. She sought the presidency last year with a few ideas in mind for improving the lot of the University's 3,000 international students.

For instance, one of her priorities is finding a housing solution for exchange students who number roughly 400 annually. Because these students stay only four months, they frequently have trouble finding accommodation.

Working with Off Campus Housing and the Student Exchange Office, Jessani hopes to enlist the "buddy system," whereby recent arrivals are matched with well-settled students, to help such students find accommodation. She also plans to lobby nearby landlords to offer short-term leases.

Her work on this dossier has impressed Pauline L'Ecuyer, the International Student Adviser. "I've met lots of students with great ideas and projects, but she realizes them fast; she's very pro-active," says L'Ecuyer.

Fostering communication seems to be one of Jessani's strong points. Last year, for instance, she initiated the newsletter MISiNformed, to keep MISN members abreast of information. A glance through the current issue reveals articles on the Network's new home in the new student services building, a regular advice column penned by L'Ecuyer, a page on culture and events listings.

Winter events, such as skating at the Bell Amphitheatre and planned trips to the winter carnivals in Quebec and Ottawa, figure in the list.

"We try to give people Canadian experiences," says Jessani, who has become an enthusiastic floor hockey player since coming to McGill -- she played field hockey in Kenya as a child, and, later, in the United Arab Emirates, where her family moved when she was a teenager. She has also become an avid skier.

Still, Jessani recognizes that adapting to this culture, this climate and this distance from home is harder for some international students than for others. While Jessani herself is Kenyan-born, she lived in Canada for a few years when she was a toddler. Her mother's family lives in Alberta. "I suffered no culture-shock nor weather-shock," she laughs.

Many members of the MISN "are like me" and have some previous Canadian experience, she says. There are also members who are not international students but who join MISN out of an interest in helping the newcomers and in learning about a whole slew of countries. Among McGill's roughly 3,500 international students, 145 countries are represented.

Next year, Jessani hopes to find herself doing volunteer work in the health field, in some corner of the developing world. Last year, while working in Pakistan teaching children how to read, she caught the bug for development work.

She enjoyed the experience of rubbing against the realities, as opposed to the stereotypes, of people from other cultures. The people she encountered found Jessani to be something of a revelation as well.

In the village in northern Pakistan, for instance, "They couldn't believe that we [of Indian origin] could speak French and English so well and they couldn't believe that [Canada's] prime minister is not Muslim," chuckles Jessani, herself a Muslim of the Ismaili community.

"It's amazing the questions you get, which is why it's so important to work or travel internationally."

Bronwyn Chester

Bronwyn Chester

ILLUSTRATION: TZIGANE

University students are often required to mull over Marx, Mozart or Machiavelli. Students at the Université du Québec à Hull will soon be spending time studying Spider Man, Superman and Spawn.

That's because, starting next year, UQAH's visual arts students will have the option to specialize in comics and become, in 2002, the first university graduates of the art form.

Visual arts professor Sylvain Lemay oversees the new program's administration and is currently preparing for his "History of Comics" class, to start in January 2000. He foresees around 13 students streaming into the program.

The curriculum includes computer animation, drawing and scriptwriting. The program is the product of student interest, says Lemay.

"A teacher in the faculty of visual arts had some of her students ask her if they could create comic book projects. So she held focus groups at colleges and universities to see if there was a demand for it," Lemay said.

Lemay, a comics expert from UQAM, was recruited to head up the program. His PhD literature thesis on Quebec comics from 1968-1979 (some good titles there include Bojoual and Capitaine Québec) has been put on hold to teach and, well, preach.

"I've done a lot of interviews," Lemay says. "A lot of radio in Ottawa and Montreal. And Radio-Canada International, too."

Those overseas broadcasts have been important. Places like France and Belgium are big recruiters in the comics industry. With a BA in comics instead of a college certificate, Lemay expects UQAH graduates to have the upper hand in the industry in the next millennium.

Marcus Gilliam

During the Duplessis era, you could not question the church. There's a bit of that here.


Philip Cercone, executive director of McGill-Queen's University Press, talking to The Ottawa Citizen about his frustrating search for a French-language publisher willing to co-publish a new book by federal intergovernmental affairs minister Stéphane Dion. Cercone suspects Dion's staunchly federalist stance is behind the lack of interest.

A recent survey of 8,650 libraries around the world resulted in a list of the 100 books that libraries are most likely to have in their collections. The list contains several items you would expect to see in a library, including Thomas Peters and Robert Waterman's In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America's Best Run Companies (first place), Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind (5), Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (7) and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (21).

What might catch your eye is the book in 14th place. More than 3,000 libraries have a copy of Environmental Tobacco Smoke: Proceedings of the International Symposium at McGill University, 1989.

The book was co-edited by now retired pharmacology and therapeutics professor Donald Ecobichon.

It was put together in the wake of a major scientific conference held at McGill on the subject of environmental tobacco smoke. The topic was heating up in the late '80s and the idea was to have some of the world's top tobacco smoke experts get together to bounce around ideas.

"We told everyone to bring along a manuscript of their presentations," recalls Ecobichon. "The conference was held between a Wednesday and a Friday. We had the book written by the Sunday. We threatened the delegates that we wouldn't let them go home without giving us their manuscript."

Ecobichon says some of the studies produced unexpected results. A German team examining the effects of compounds from tobacco smoke "found that their monitoring system's results skyrocketed whenever they opened their windows -- the stuff coming in off the streets of Hamburg was worse [than the tobacco smoke]."

Ecobichon's own research with mice and second hand smoke pointed to the smoke having a biological effect on the animals' tissues.

Although officially retired, Ecobichon still works with McGill's Centre for Indigenous Peoples' Nutrition and Environment on issues such as pesticides in the Arctic.

Go after the crime of drug trafficking or fraud, not money laundering. Money launderers do not stick a gun in your face; they don't pass bum cheques.


Economics professor Tom Naylor, quoted in the National Post. Naylor worries that a proposed federal bill will result in the RCMP shifting its focus to money laundering and away from attacking those who commit the crimes that generate the wealth.