It’s not every speaker than can keep a gym full of kids quiet for an hour or more.
Norbert Georget can do it, and he did, when he delivered his “it’s OK not to drink” message to students in Grades 7 to 12 in our town.
Georget, a former paramedic in Saskatoon, has for the past eight years been travelling the country delivering his message. Why? Because, he told his audience simply, “I care.”
Georget’s message is simple: drinking and driving kills. But his presentation is often hard to watch.
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This is reality, Georget tells his audience, standing in front of the slide of a car cut almost in half by a collision with a power pole.
There is more reality as the presentation goes on: a car crash with the dead driver lying alongside.
Death is not pretty. There is also a close-up of two teenagers, faces hidden, lying in the front seat of the car where they died, and of another victim, mouth open, head back, the seat soaked with blood.
Sometimes all we can do for you is cover you up and leave you, Georget says, next showing pictures of the morgue with a sheet-wrapped corpse in a steel drawer.
If this hasn’t got the message across, he calls a member of the audience up to help him with a package.
The package contains a black body bag. A used black body bag.
“We only use these once,” Georget tells his audience. “Don’t ask why.”
There is a bang in the darkened auditorium. Students jump, sparks fly.
Then silence.
Then a new slide on the screen, a wrecked car with the message 120 to 0 in 3.1 seconds.
That’s all it takes.
Georget said some of the students listening to him will walk out the doors of the gym and never drink and drive.
Others will not heed the message.
He asked those who would still drink and drive to do three things:
- When they go out, leave the outside lights on so the police can find their way more easily when they come to see their parents.
- Fill out the donor card on their driver’s licences.
- Kiss their mom or dad.
Georget left his students with the message: “You’re not born winners, you’re not born losers, you’re born choosers.”
