No stranger to a strange land Noreen Mabiza believes that social justice and environmental sustainability are one and the same, and she won’t rest until she proves it BY ALEC BRUCE ILLUSTRATIONS BY ROB HANSEN PHOTOS BY BRUCE MURRAY/VISIONFIRE n her first day in a new country, one hemisphere and six time zones from home, Noreen Mabiza knew she had to be somewhere. It was a typical late-August Halifax day, with the sea-salt smell blowing ashore from the outer harbour and old-man summer sun spreading rumours of approaching autumn, and the Dalhousie university-bound newcomer was late for orientation. But, at that moment, she didn’t care. “I was just taken in by the views and everything, so I told myself it’s OK,” she says of that afternoon in 2014, when she decided to get lost along the waterfront. “I thought it was beautiful. I had no map, no working phone. I just kept walking.” In a sense, Mabiza’s been walking into local terra incognita ever since. She was born and raised in Harare, capital of Zimbabwe, with its embassies and World Bank towers and 1.5 million residents. But since graduating from Dal in 2018 (with a degree in international development and environment, sustainability, and society), she’s become an advocate of housing reform for low-income folks and energy coordinator for sustainable communities at the Ecology Action Centre in her adopted city. Now, the fiercely effective, increasingly influential social justice champion is about to embark on a whole new journey through territory both foreign and familiar as the project lead for the EAC’s freshly minted Green Jobs For All program. “It’s about having conversations with immigrants and newcomer youth and identifying the barriers that they face in entering the green economy,” she says. “I’m really excited to dive into this as the coordinator and also work in partnership with other organizations.” According to her colleagues, few are better suited for the job. The program had been sitting on a shelf for years until Mabiza ran away with it last year. “She talked to different people and partners and really formulated an approach,” says Marla MacLeod, the centre’s programs director. “It was like following a trail or connecting the dots, kind of like being a detective, to get the right questions to address. How can immigrant
O
22
UNRAVEL
MARCH / APRIL 2022
and newcomer youths participate in the world of green jobs? How can we ensure that this group, that we really want to succeed, get to be part of this transition that’s happening in the world?” MacLeod adds: “Noreen is deeply curious. And to my mind, that’s an exciting quality. She’s a person who finds something interesting, explores it and then brings it about.” Mabiza’s EAC colleague Gurprasad Gurumurthy concurs: “She always brings new ideas to the work. After every single meeting, she goes away and comes back with new perspectives.” A different way of looking at what could have been an intractable problem propelled her here from central Africa in the first place. She had just finished high school and, as the daughter of an engineer-father and lawyer-mother, she was surveying the international landscape for a suitable institute of higher education to continue her studies. Friends suggested Canada. It was a good country, they said, with an excellent reputation for academic achievement. She recalls her reaction with a laugh: “No way. You won’t find me anywhere in Canada. It’s way too cold.” She changed her mind after reviewing the course description for Dal’s environment program. The writeup promised, among other things, an “exploration of the links between complex environmental issues and poverty, globalization, consumption and urbanization.” Studying here, it purred, would give her skills to become “a leader and changemaker” in her chosen career. How could she resist? “I was 100-per-cent determined to go right then and there,” she says. But it wasn’t just the promise of building her changemaker muscles that intrigued her. She was genuinely interested in how people can live well, equitably, and sustainably. She was also aware that she was a child of privilege. “Growing up, I went to boarding school, and I got to do two international trips through school without my parents,” she says. “But really, as part of the regular curriculum (in Zimbabwe), we would go out into nature and see animals and talk to the wildlife rangers. I think it’s really only been within the past couple of years that
