By RON FANFAIR
Trinidad & Tobago media personality Marcia Henville was the victim of a heinous crime in 2015. One of her colleagues contacted Dr. Roz Roach, the executive director of Dr. Roz’s Healing Place in Toronto, seeking help for the abused woman.
During the two-hour meeting with Roach, Henville hid the fact that she was being violently mistreated.
“She told me she wanted information for a friend,” the psychotherapist said. “I knew it was her, but I could not disclose my source. After a while, I leaned into her and asked, ‘Are you sure you are not talking about yourself’? She denied it was her.”
About 10 days after the meeting in Trinidad, Roach received a call that Henville was murdered by her husband.
A year earlier, Zahra Abdille and her two sons were at Dr. Roz’s Healing Place that is a shelter for abused women and their children. The Toronto Public Health nurse, who had fled war-torn Somalia in the late 1990s, told staff she was running away from a long-term violent relationship.
A short time later, she and the children returned to the volatile situation.
“She said she got housing and I didn’t feel comfortable with that,” said Roach. “But you can’t tell people what to do.”
In early December 2014, she received a call from the media saying that Abdille and her two sons were fatally stabbed in their Thorncliffe Park apartment and the abuser committed suicide.
“After those two incidents, I rolled on my mat in my studio and decided I was going to do things differently,” said Roach. “After nearly three decades running around attending conferences and handing out brochures and flyers, I realized that was not working as domestic violence was claiming the lives of far too many women on a regular basis.”
To amplify her mission to eradicate domestic violence against women and children, she has written and produced a powerful musical/dance production, ‘Sistas Calling’, that premiered on July 8 at the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto.
A soca artist and lyricist who has designed and constructed carnival costumes, Roach wrote the songs, composed the music and produced the stage costumes for the play that tells the story of a 42-year-old woman who migrated to Canada at age 30 to join her husband who sponsored her.
Tired of the partner’s abuse, she and her four-year-old son fled the family home and were taken to a police station before being referred to Dr. Roz’s Healing Place.
“This play was written to penetrate the psyche of society,” the trained acupuncturist said. “The songs have nice beats and they make you want to dance. At the same time, there is a message for you to absorb from the lyrics.”
Happily married for 45 years to retiring York Region District School Board educator Cecil Roach, Roz Roach is often asked where the passion for the work she does comes from.
“I say to people that the only abuse I have suffered is racism,” she said. “I have never been traumatized. I feel I was given an assignment when I came on this planet. Very early, I knew what my purpose was. People tell me to pick my battle and I say I am a woman and I will pick that battle, I fight for children because I was a child, I fight for immigration because I am an immigrant, I fight for housing because I was homeless, I fight for poverty because I was poor. Do not tell me to pick my battles. They are all my battles and that is how I came to be.”
At age 10, Roach often talked about going to Beirut to help people.
She learned about the country by listening to Radio Trinidad and hearing about the Beirut siege that was part of the Lebanese Civil War.
When asked by an aunt where the country was, the reply was, ‘I do not know.”
Migrating to Montreal in the late 1960s, Roach was a registered nurse at the Douglas Mental Health University Institute where she met her Montserrat-born husband who was an orderly.
The holder of a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Social Sciences and a Master’s in Trans Cultural Psychiatry was head-hunted after completing her PhD in Health & Human Sciences.
With job offers in five North American cities, she chose Toronto because ‘it was the closest to Trinidad & Tobago’.
“I have never missed Carnival in 42 years and that was not going to change,” said Roach whose first job in Canada’s largest city was at Toronto General Hospital as a clinical specialist. “Carnival is my therapy.”
Along with her full-time job, she ran a private practice treating women and girls who were survivors of violence, including rape.
Women organizations in the city often contacted her to do mediation, policy, board and staff development and write reports for recommendations leading to change.
Back then, women shelters in the city were houses where women and their children hid from abusers.
While visiting one of them in Scarborough as a consultant, Roach was touched after a young White boy grabbed on to her skirt as she was leaving.
“When I asked where his mother was, the staff told me she was upstairs sleeping,” the former Elizabeth Fry Society acting director said. “The child wanted to leave with me and they had to pull him away. When I got into my car, I thought why would a little child want to leave with a Black woman in dreadlocks and someone he had never seen before. Welled up with sadness, I felt broken. The house the victims were in was not a place that was conducive to healing when you are traumatized. I told myself if I were an abused woman and I had to leave my abusive environment to come here, most likely I would stay with the abuser.”
After that encounter, Roach reached out to a close friend telling her she wanted to raise money and build a space that is conducive to wellness and healing.
‘My friend asked why I would want to do that with all my education and that what I was suggesting does not pay,” she said. “I know that my friend was coming from a caring place, but I also knew I was driven at that moment to help the world. I have always been that.”
Undeterred by her friend’s reaction, Roach contacted her ‘soulmate’, Marilou McPhedran, who was appointed to the Canadian Senate in 2016.
They met in 1990 when McPhedran chaired the College of Physicians & Surgeons’ independent task force that Roach was a member of looking at sexual abuse of patients by physicians.
“When I inquired where she was, Lulu said to me she was at Women’s College Hospital,” she said. “I asked if I could see her and the response was ‘of course and you can come to the McGill Club’.”
While sitting in a hot tub at the private club, Roach told the lawyer and human rights advocate she was considering closing her private practice and raising money for a centre that was conducive to healing for victims of violence.
“Marilou said ‘Roz, do you know the magnitude of such a project, but if anyone could do it, it is you,” she said.
That was all Roach needed to hear. Six years later, Dr. Roz Healing Place opened.
In launching the Centre, Roach was the first Black woman in Canada to negotiate with three levels of government and raise $4 million to build a healing place that is an empowerment and healing space for women and children who are victims and survivors of domestic violence.
“I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing because I didn’t want anyone to get in my way, I didn’t want anyone asking me what I was trying to prove, I didn’t want anyone to tell me it could not happen and I didn’t want anyone to tarnish my vision,” she said.
Roach also launched Women’s Lives Matter 2 to support domestic violence victims in Trinidad & Tobago and other Caribbean islands and founded Nu-Life & Longevity that is a global organization supporting the promotion of an optimal level of health and wellness.
In 2010, she jogged through eight Canadian cities as part of the ‘Stomp Out Violence Cross Country Run’ to raise awareness about the harmful effects of violence.
