This story is featured in Episode 75 In February I conducted this carefree – pre-COVID-19 – interview with Kinga Heming, an amazing Polish Canadian jazz singer, who was born in Poland, moved to Ottawa when she was five and now resides in the small town of Kelowna in the Canadian province of British Columbia. I had just seen (and loved) her performance at the Kabaret pod Banką’s annual Kabareton (Cabaret Night) but most of all – she had been nominated for coveted Grammy Award. By age thirteen, Kinga had studied classical piano and voice theory, and began immersing herself classical…
Author: Malgorzata P. Bonikowska
This story is featured in Episode 74 Mental health is a very important, yet not sufficiently discussed face of the COVID-19 crisis. I talk to Dr. Ewa Antczak, a child psychologist, who deals with the emotional/psychological impact of the pandemic on kids. Dr. Ewa Antczak is a registered psychologist in the Province of Ontario. For many years, she has been working as a child and youth psychologist in the private practice and at Toronto Catholic District School Board. Dr. Antczak provides psychological assessment, consultation and counselling services to children, adolescents and their families. She is the founder of The Idealme…
The pandemic… Every day brings us new numbers – every single one of them represents someone whose life has been affected by this horrifying pandemic that has changed our world in ways we could not have imagined or predicted. Someone infected or deceased. Those numbers keep growing every day and we all pray or wish for the day when we hear that they have begun to drop. In POLcast episode 72, I presented to you my conversation with Dr. Rafal Kustra, Associate Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. This was your encounter with science. …
This story is featured in Episode 73 In my last POLcast episode 72 I presented to you my conversation with Dr. Rafal Kustra, Associate Professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto. This was your encounter with science. Today – the pandemic as experienced by someone who risks her life every day, a front line worker. Izabella (Bella) Tinc lives in the Kitchener-Waterloo area and works in a long-term care facility. She is a mother of 5 (3 boys and 2 girls) – two of her children are from foster care.
This story is featured in Episode 73 Tomorrow is Easter Sunday – we are going to spend it in ways that no-one has ever experienced before… At the beginnig of March, long before we realized the full scope of what was going on around us, I recorded a conversation with Maria Różanska of Just Be Cooking about Polish Easter traditions, which are all about being together, having the easter basket blessed in church, sharing hard boiled eggs with family members and relatives the same way we share oplatek (the wafer) before Christmas Eve dinner. None of this is going to happen…
The pandemic… Every day brings us new numbers – every single one of them represents someone whose life has been affected by this horrifying pandemic that has changed our world in ways we could not have imagined or predicted. Someone infected or deceased. Those numbers keep growing every day and we all pray or wish for the day when we hear that they have begun to drop. It’s a time of emergency and nothing around us is normal. As I announced to you last time, for the duration of the pandemic, I will be presenting to you various experts and…
This story is featured in Episode 72 Dr. Kustra completed his Master training at University of Toronto and during his doctoral studies moved to Stanford University in California where he completed his doctoral dissertation and post-doctoral training. In 2001 he became Assistant Professor in Biostatistics at the University of Toronto’s Dalla Lana School of Public Health (then Department of Public Sciences at Faculty of Medicine), where he has been working ever since. Dr. Kustra currently teaches mathematical basis for Biostatistical Methods, and application of AI and Machine Learning methods in Health Research. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles on statistical methodology…
Who would have thought just an month ago, when I was getting your Episode 71 ready, that the next one will be produced in a totally different world and therefore will not contain its regular segments. A while back Maria Rozanska from Just Be Cooking and I recorded a conversation about Polish Easter traditions – which are all about being together, having the Easter basket blessed in church, sharing hard boiled eggs with family members and relatives the same way we share oplatek (the wafer) before Christmas Eve dinner. None of this is going to happen this year. It will…
This story is featured in Episode 71 Canada – this good country, always on top in all the world rankings of safety, living conditions, happiness. But there is also its other face, which has been exposed in the last years – the disturbing history of Canada’s relationship with its aboriginal peoples, those who had been here for millennia before the Europeans came. The infamous residential schools were government-sponsored religious boarding schools established to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. They appeared roughly after 1880 and existed for a hundred years. With their aim “to kill the Indian in the child”…
Apologies to all of you who tried to listen to this episode here and heard nothing. There was an error in uploading the file. Sorry! In Episode 71 you will hear: Interviews: • “Memory is Our Homeland” – a tribute to those whose story was never told This happened during WWII, after the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east just 17 days after the Germans attacked Poland from the west, thus beginning the second world war. Thousands of Polish families were forcefully deported to labour camps in Siberia and other parts of the Soviet Union, where many of them…