Poverty is a hard sell

“Me, with my children, if things aren't going well at school, I call the teacher, I call the management, I call everyone. I am, yes, tiring", joke, half, Christian Vachon, creator of the foundation bearing his name, whose mission is to do everything possible so that the school is as little as possible an ordeal for those who, otherwise, would arrive in class wearing ragged shoes.

“The parents we support are not tiring enough. They are often disorganized, they fight every day on many fronts, but they get discouraged by the forms. They do not have enough self-confidence to claim a service to which they are entitled. So we have to accompany them. I say that, but sometimes, yes, the problem is also that there is just no service. »

In view of the start of the school year, 350 children went to a store at the end of August with their parents, to choose the clothes they would wear with their bulging chests on the way up on the bus, their backpacks full of pencils and erasers. This is what the Christian Vachon Foundation has been doing for a decade : buying school supplies and clothes, paying for meals, enrolling young people in activities, guiding their parents to help resources.

In other words : to build ramparts on the winding path, bordered by vertiginous precipices, that school is for those who were born in the wrong neighborhood, or who do not have a particular talent for learning in the very traditional sense of terms. I'm talking about those for whom the ball on which they can let off steam when the bell rings is also a lifeline.

"We want everyone to start on the same starting line, for disadvantaged young people to go incognito," explains Christian about the magic tricks his team performs, completely without the knowledge of the children. There is a little Océanne somewhere who came out of a Giant Tiger or a GGC Library without knowing that her mother had, at the end of the previous school year, submitted a request to the Foundation.

Because it's not just the cubes

On September 23, 2006, Christian Vachon ran the 104 kilometers of shoreline along Lake Memphremagog to raise funds for École Sainte-Marguerite, his elementary school. This ambitious feat will lay the foundations for the Relais du lac Memphrémagog, the Foundation's flagship event, which will hold its tenth edition on September 24. The enviable aureole of the superhuman that haloes the father of two children will not, however, always have allowed him to chase away the stigmata that stick to his cause.

"It's great, the organizations that have been running for a few years, and which promote healthy lifestyles or physical activity, but we won't hide, there are some for whom the accessibility to healthy lifestyle habits don't exist, he regrets. We have to make sure that our young people eat, that they have pencils and, afterwards, they will perhaps be ready to listen to the message of the cubes. I'm not saying that meanly and I don't want to throw arrows at anyone, but don't forget the poor. Poverty is a hard sell. I have lots of donors who tell me : “Christian, I'm going to help you, but I don't want it to be known. »

He suffered less from poverty than from a school ill suited to his behavioral problems, in which the letters ADHD would probably be affixed today. By ending up in a specialized class from the third year, Christian will experience marginalization and jeers, but will also befriend all the "not the same" in the school. Those who were very meanly called the DMLs when I was little, were they your gang? “They were my buddies, yes,” he replies very proudly. The Foundation is obviously somewhat in their honor.

No day off

I ask Christian Vachon what little miracle he tells his friends when the time comes to praise the merits of his foundation. Long silence. I see thousands of faces crossing his clear blue eyes.

“I look good and brave there, but I can't call the families. It happens, but it's rare. If I made calls on a daily basis, I wouldn't be there anymore, it gets too much into me. It makes me too angry. »

Without denying that the popularity of a foundation like his sadly symbolizes the bankruptcy of a certain Quebec model, the 40-year-old paramedic and firefighter refuses to blame the government, an all too common reflex, he thinks, even if he doesn't need to be asked to say that we should “inject at least double what we cut into specialized services. »

But to reduce Christian Vachon's message to a desire for reform would be to miss the point. To the devotees of work triumphing over everything and of the cash that will rain down on you as long as you want it hard enough, Christian Vachon reminds us that the holed shoes of childhood are transformed most of the time into eternal cannonballs.

"You, I'm sure, resemble your father and your mother, and that there are surely some of their faults which you would have preferred not to inherit." Well, imagine if your father had been an alcoholic, or if your mother had had a drug problem. I have sold perseverance all my life and sometimes I find myself facing the limits of my own values. I remember a guy to whom we had been called with the ambulance, a guy my age who told me outright that he wanted to die. Looking at his life, his environment, what was coming for him, I wondered if I, in his place, would still be alive. We forget that when we are poor, everything is complicated, everything is hard, everything is rough all the time. You don't have a day off. »

Do you know, you, Christian, why we are so afraid of the poor? “That's a big question. I imagine there are all kinds of prejudices, but I think people are afraid of the poor, because they are afraid of getting caught up in the game. They are perhaps afraid of realizing that they are not so different from them. »