by Andrzej Antoszkiewicz
"Is the purpose of your trip business or pleasure?" The probing question posed by the US INS agent quickly shook me out of my 5am haze at Ottawa's MacDonald Cartier International Airport. "Pleasure," I muttered; the caffeine from my first cup of coffee showing little effect. He probed further, "And what brings you to the United States of America?" I explained that I was attending the Polish American Congress in Chicago. "So it's business!" he quickly exclaimed. "It's pleasure," I reassured the agent. A few more questions, a stamp in my passport, the statutory welcome to the United States, and my brief encounter with officialdom was over.
But walking away from the customs area I dwelled on the first question. I had taken two days of vacation from my government job, bought a plane ticket with my own money, and registered for a conference on a subject I would have not cared one bit about six months ago. And yet standing where I was, I saw it as pleasure. But what was it that managed to transform me from someone who merely appreciated his Polish heritage to that of someone who embraced and promoted it?
The answer was Quo Vadis, a youth leadership conference which had taken place in Ottawa earlier that year and, more specifically, its creators Kamil Mroz and Ania Barycka.
My first encounter with Quo Vadis was in a brief call I had received from Kamil. It was late March and I heard from a work colleague that Kamil was looking for organizations that would sponsor his Polish conference. "A Polish conference?" I scoffed, and reluctantly agreed to pass my coordinates out of professional courtesy.
Until this conversation my connections to the Polish community were limited to two spheres. On the one hand my family and their friends; people who had shared the emigration experience and remembered an image of a country they left behind. On the other, the institutions these people created, Polish schools, scouting troops and churches. These institutions, not without reason, also echoed the image of a country left behind. To a child growing up in Canada, the former, provided a quirky formative context; the latter, however, quickly lost relevance. Not alone among my classmates, I wholeheartedly celebrated the last day in each year of Polish school. I went to university in Kingston, graduated, and found success in my career, quickly dropping all connections to these Polish institutions.
So when Kamil called me I answered with a sceptical ear. A few pleasantries, I'll let him talk and then tell him we don't have the budget, I thought; easy as that. Not quite. In the course of 10 minutes Kamil managed to get me excited about the conference, not because it was Polish, or about leadership, but because it was a grassroots movement in the truest sense of the word. This was a conference organized by students for students. What a novel idea. For the first time in my life I saw a member of my generation (Kamil at 23 was seven years my junior) creating a new institution in Polonia. Where others had opined, and talked and complained, Kamil saw a need and did something about it, and more importantly he inspired his peers to join him. And now he was making me want to take part too. I couldn't fund Quo Vadis that day, but I volunteered.
So what is Quo Vadis? Simply put, it is a movement to foster and develop leadership skills in young professionals of Polish ancestry with the goal of equipping the next generation of leaders in the Polish community. In May 2009 it took the form of a national conference in Ottawa. Centred on the themes of Heritage, Leadership and Unity, Quo Vadis brought together over 115 university students from all across Canada and introduced them to Polish Canadians at the very forefront of Canadian culture, business and government. The weekend also permitted participants to develop their leadership skills through workshops and build networks of contacts throughout Canada. It featured a reception at the House of Commons, participation from every level of Canadian Government and wide media exposure. All this organized by students, for students.
Now, five months later I waited for Kamil to also clear customs on our journey to meet Ania at the Polish American Congress in Chicago. After the success of Quo Vadis, the duo decided to take the conference to the North American stage. Quo Vadis II, the upcoming 2010 conference would be staged in Windsor, right on the Canada-US border and we were on our way to Chicago to get the word out. Kamil had been invited to talk aboutQuo Vadis and we had worked the PowerPoint deck to perfection. Our message was simple; inspire this older audience to get the word aboutQuo Vadis out to the youth in their organizations.
However, upon arrival we were delighted to discover that, in no small part thanks to the Szkoła Liderów in Poland and the Poland in the Rockiesprogram in Canada, many young Americans were actually in attendance. Friendships were renewed, new ones formed and I began to realize that a new movement was beginning to take root in Polonia on both sides of the border; the passing of the torch had begun.
Kamil and I left Chicago with a renewed energy, new ideas and pockets filled with business cards. On the flight back I quipped about my customs story only to find out I wasn't alone. Kamil had been asked the same question and pondered the exact same thing. What others had deemed business, we saw as pleasure. We sat back and discussed what challenges life would bring next, inevitably realizing our next stop, Canada Customs, would yield less inspiration. CR
On the picture, left to right: Ania Barycka, Andrzej Antoszkiewicz and Kamil Mróz.
Andrzej Antoszkiewicz is the President of Calatica Strategic Systems Group and volunteers as Vice President for External Relations on the Quo Vadis North American Council. Andrzej's interests lie in politics and public policy and when he's not working you can usually find him with a camera and a tripod. Andrzej holds a Master's Degree in Science from Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.
