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. …
Author: Malgorzata P. Bonikowska
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”…
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 died of starvation, disease and exhaustion. Then, when Germany attacked its Soviet ally in 1941, Poles were freed by Stalin and made their way south,…
This story is featured in Episode 71 Our loyal POLcast listeners will surely remember a very popular story we featured over two episodes – Episode 46 and Episode 47, entitled “A child’s journey from the Arctic to the Equator” (Part 1 and Part 2), where I interviewed our POLcast friend Irene Tomaszewski, autor and the editor-in-chief of a great online magazine Cosmopolitan Review. We talked about her childhood and the unbelievable journey she and her family made from Siberia to Africa. This happened during WWII, after the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east just 17 days after the Germans…
This story is featured in Episode 70 It’s fantastic that children of emigrants, Poles who settled in other countries such as Canada, even though they were often born and educated here, are interetsed in their roots, cultural heritage and want to incorporate their Polishness into their identity. There are a few Polish Canadian youth organizations, including the one and only Quo Vadis movement, which we have featured on POLcast. A Polish Canadian young professionals’ organization, whose launch we celebrated on POLcast last year – Konekt is a bit different from other such groups. It’s been growing and expanding. To learn…