Canadian Lawyer 4Students

August, 2016

Life skills and career tips for Canada's lawyers in training

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Dylan Mazur's LinkedIn page reads like a novel. e law student, who just graduated from the University of British Columbia's Peter A. Al- lard School of Law, has been executive director of the Vancouver As- sociation for Survivors of Torture since 2013, supporting refugees as they enter Canada. It's the latest in a long list of engagements that have taken him to the Guatemalan highlands where he negotiated with former paramilitary fi ghters. If this wasn't impressive enough, he has done it all without being able to see. Mazur's career didn't start in human rights. A schoolkid from Win- nipeg, he started his post-secondary education in the early '90s study- ing for a general arts degree at UBC, but he dropped out to pursue a career in fi lm and TV. He moved back to Winnipeg, and did well in that business, but he couldn't settle and envisaged a career in interna- tional development work. e idea of foreign travel excited him. Having saved some money from a lucrative job in fi lm and TV, he moved back to Vancouver and ended up volunteering simultaneously at Oxfam and at VAST. He was driven down this path by two important aspects of his childhood: his family ethos and his disability. "My parents were artists and my grandfather was part of starting co-op housing in Canada, so we came from real humanist, social democratic roots," he says. " is whole idea of doing good on this earth was part of the family credo." His disability also played an increasingly important part in his life as he got older. Born with his retinas not fully formed, Mazur developed glaucoma and started losing more of his sight into his teen years. He was completely blind for a year in grade 12 following an operation that forced him to repeat the school year. Since then, he has coped with fi ve- to 10-per-cent vi- sion. He narrowly missed being sent to a school for the blind. ere are good things about those schools, he recalls, but adds: "Sometimes, schools designed specifi cally for people with disabilities can limit subtly the choices that people can make." All of this gave him a sense of social justice and em- pathy for people who have to struggle with adversity of all kinds. It manifested itself in other ways, too. While he was vol- unteering, he also worked as production manager at Headlines e- atre, a local Vancouver group that created theatre projects addressing homelessness, mental health issues, and gang violence. All of these threads — the desire to work overseas, the interest in violence and mental health, and the need for social justice — would weave together over the next few years, but it would begin 4,500 ki- lometres away. It came together when his manager at Oxfam advised him to go to Guatemala. "I said 'I don't speak Spanish'," he recalls. "You'll learn," she replied. "Just go." So he went, on a six-month ticket, and ended up staying for more than two-and-a-half years. It was unnerving, travelling to Guatemala with no Spanish, no contacts, and severely impaired vision, but it was the start of Mazur's next adventure. He quickly connected with an agronomist there who asked him to help with a project to fund and build a project that would channel water from a local spring to a highlands community that was experiencing health problems due to poor sanitation. He fundraised for the project with a local water NGO to help get construction underway. In the process, he found himself mediating between former guerrillas and paramilitaries who had been fi ghting each other just 10 years prior, during the region's bloody, savage civil war. "I learned a lot in this work about the roots of political violence," he says. "It's a force that creates suff ering, the social fabric, and ruptur- The law can heal 60 AUGUST 2016 C A N A D I A N L a w y e r 4STUDENTS PHOTOGRAPHY BY KIM STALLKNECHT "This whole idea of doing good on this earth was part of the family credo" UBC law grad Dylan Mazur had to travel to Guatemala and Mexico to find out how. By Danny Bradbury

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