Another snowy day in May!

As we sit writing this blog the snow keeps falling. The weather report calls for sunshine, but the chilly weather keeps persisting! While this might be hurting our plans to gain a raccoon tan, its great for the villagers who are still able to fish on the frozen lake.

On Victoria Day we worked on our Mental Health week lessons (school was closed), and got a surprise call from Josapie, a village elder. He invited us to join him and his grandchildren on a ski-doo ride across the lake, to the entrance of the Hudson Strait! We expected to be riding on the back of his ski-doo, but were slightly nervous when we discovered we would actually be riding in the komatik (pronounced homotik) behind the ski-doo (ie. a large rickety wooden box on skis). However, as the trip began we realized we should consider ourselves lucky, since we could have been riding on the komatik behind the other ski-doo, which was driven by Josapie’s 12-year old grandson! Despite the perilous ride the views were beautiful, and we felt extremely privileged to be invited along on the trip.

Visiting Josapie's fishing cabin with his grandchildren

          This week was jam packed with classes; we taught 7 lessons almost every day! As we finished up our sexual health lessons we had more great questions from our classes. We are so glad the kids feel comfortable enough to ask us questions about these sometimes embarrassing and taboo topics. Lessons on Self Esteem, Bullying and Conflict Resolution were not met with quite as much enthusiasm, but we tried to keep it interesting with lots of skits and activities. In our last class on Friday we taught about Self Esteem, and the class loved the “Compliment Game” we played at the end. We were pretty exhausted at the end of the day, but we stayed after school to sign-up volunteers for our dance on Saturday. We're very excited to see how the dance works out, but nervous as well as we are told not to expect any real dancing- apparently the kids just walk around the gym in a circle. Heidi and Nikki (last year’s Peer Educators) had two successful dances last year so we hope we can live up to the standard they set and encourage some dancing!

On Friday Barbara was given an arctic char (the most common type of fish caught in Salluit) by the culture teacher…not fillets of char, the entire thing. We took it home and tried to figure out how to cook it (this involved Kat googling away). Eventually we settled on baking it, and it was delicious! Now that we’ve had a taste of freshly caught fish we can’t wait to try out more wild game- seal blubber or wild geese anyone? 

Outside of school we’ve been keeping busy with another hip hop class, joining in on basketball practice, and our first scrapbooking club meeting! Suize, the secretary treasurer at the municipality, invited us to the meeting, and when we got there we couldn’t believe all the scrapbooking “stuff” they had! At the end of the evening we each headed home with beautiful scrapbook pages with pictures of our trip with Josapie. Although this was a great evening, we both agreed that scrapbooking was a little too much work to become our new hobby.  

We also had the chance to visit Suzie and the mayor at the municipality. She kindly translated while we talked to the mayor about our organization, and some of the health issues in the community such as alcohol and substance abuse. This meeting happened at a good time as we will be teaching the revelant topic of drugs and substances.

Our hip-hop class on Wednesday

Wish us luck for our first Salluit dance! (We feel like we’re in highschool again…what do we wear!?)

Northern Love,

         Savy Scrapbooking Sistazz 

From Movie Madness to Henna Hysteria

As this blog is written we are sitting in our living room with feet up and a warm drink in hand, completely exhausted from an incredible 5 and half hour hike through the tundra with two of Ikusik’s teachers. The view, the land, the birds, the calmness and the difficult climb left us amazed. Though it may take time to realize it, the North is truly an incredible untouched gem.

              In the last couple of days we have been going non-stop as per usual! Teaching sexual health at Ikusik has been as much fun for us as it is for the students – they are very curious as we can see from their silence and devoted attention. We have learned to explain pregnancy and menstruation like pros! Some students even asked us how twins were made – that was something we had never thought to explain and we were very glad they asked. Teaching physical activity at Pigiurvik, the elementary school, was great too. We were very fortunate to be able to use the gym for the whole day and have kids come to us. Thankfully, the gym teacher was tri-lingual (French, English and Inuktitut) and helped us translate throughout the entire day. The children were full of energy, therefore, it was hard to get them to sit down and listen to us talk for a short 10 minutes. They enjoyed playing “Kathryn Says” or “Melanie Says”, doing relay races and playing huckle buckle. We ended the day at Pigiurvik by showing the movie Ratatouille in the school gymnasium. It was a challenge scrambling to get the movie working and even more of a challenge trying to get the kids to sit quietly and watch.  At first we tried to make everyone sit quietly but eventually we realized that they did not understand a word that was coming out of our mouths (the kids don’t learn English or French until Grade 3). We ended up with kids running everywhere and climbing on walls, and some (including boys!) playing in our hair making strange hairdos. All in all a great success for a last minute event!

Movie Night (the kids look deceivingly calm in this picture)

            Another event we had this week was our Girl’s Night! This night, attended by approximately 25 Ikusik girls, included bracelet making with the talented Miss Kathryn Chadwick, and baking and henna tattoos with the versatile Miss Melanie Meehan. Eventually the girls got their hands on the henna tube, and the artwork expanded from hearts, flowers and peace signs to a whole range of interesting designs that all vaguely resembled giant blobs. This was a great opportunity to get to know some of the girls, as they are usually extremely shy around the boys. Everything went smoothly until the end when we had to start cleaning up. It took us 30 minutes to get the girls to leave, with protests of “I want to finish my bracelet” or “I forgot my hat inside” (she was hiding her hat)! The girls were mostly in grades 5 to 8, as the older girls usually work after school, so we hope to have an older girl’s night soon as well.

Muffin making at Girl's Night

            That same night, we were very lucky to be special guests at the elder’s community health committee meeting. After the introduction prayer, we quickly realized that we were not simply sitting in on the meeting, but they had organized this meeting for us! We had a chance to talk about QHO, our projects in the community, and our goals for the future. But most importantly, this was a chance to get to know the committee members and ask them about their ideas and opinions surrounding health issues in Salluit. We even talked about opening up the community health worker position once again, as this would be a great resource for the community, and someone for the future Peer Educators to work with to ensure sustainable projects are implemented. The meeting was an incredible opportunity, and we hope that it will lead to greater communication between the elders and QHO Peer Ed’s in the coming years. By the end of the meeting one of the elders had decided we both had to return to Salluit next year to “find ourselves an Inuk man to marry and become the new community health workers!”

            Saturday was our second attempt at setting a QHO/ nutrition information table – this time it was at the Co-op grocery store. It turned out to be a great success, as we got to meet many different community members and see many of the children we teach at school. We talked about our teaching project, handed out food guides, and attempted to explain what food labels and diabetes were! All in all everyone was very kind, welcoming and most of all curious about what we were doing standing at the Co-op on a Saturday afternoon (while many families were out fishing for the long weekend) with our signs and smiles. That night we had another delicious potluck at Barb’s with some of the Ikusik teachers – so much delicious food and so hard to resist! 

Tomorrow we start planning our Mental Health Week lessons on self esteem, bullying, conflict resolution and anger and grief management. These are certainly not light topics, so we are glad to have gotten to know the kids in the past few weeks before touching on these difficult issues. 

Northern Love,

            Sore Sistazz

“What rhymes with uterus?” We’re not very good at blog titles…

Our second weekend in Salluit was tiring and exciting! We were pumped to set up a table at the garage sale on Saturday at Pigiurvik, with info about QHO, Canada’s Food Guide, food labels and more. Sadly, as beautiful as our posters were, there were only three families to see them. Apparently the garage sale was not as happening a place as we’d expected…however we were very excited when one of the parents looked at our posters, and even took home a food guide. Success! We’re hoping to set up our table at the Co-Op (the grocery store) this weekend, which we expect will have a better turn out, since it is one of the only two grocery stores in town.

The garage sale was an epic fail, at least our table looked good! 

         The rest of the weekend involved playing pool with the kids at the Youth House, preparing our Sexual Health lessons, and hiking to the airport for a beautiful view of the valley and surrounding mountains. Sunday night was spent attempting to put together a dance for our first hip-hop class on Monday- having never choreographed anything before this was a bit of a struggle to say the least! Fortunately, when we had our class on Monday there was a huge turn out, and the kids loved it. They’ve been asking us about the next practice all week!

         On Monday we also took a quick trip to the nursing station, and returned with a full stash of Sexual Health treasures, including a plastic penis, a breast for practicing breast exams, tons of different contraceptives and a HUGE box of condoms. Sexual health week began with lots of silent classes (this is usually very hard to achieve!), wide eyes, diagrams, and great questions! There was a bit of an awkward moment in one anatomy lesson when Mel held up a female reproductive system poster in front of her lower body for the kids to see better…it took her a while to understand why even Kathryn was laughing. In another rowdier lesson Kathryn bribed the kids to stay quiet by threatening “If you don’t listen we won’t tell you about penises and vaginas.” That got them listening pretty quickly!

        

On Tuesday, we had our first lesson at Sapumivik, the rehabilitation centre in Salluit. The boys loved our lesson on hygiene, physical activity and nutrition, and we loved the delicious dinner with them afterwards. After dinner a heated game of floor hockey began at the elementary school gym, and we quickly realized knowledge of Malkin and Staal was the way to these boys hearts! When we offered to play music, the boys asked for Fireworks by Katy Perry – they even knew all the words! We’ll be returning to Sapumivik for three more lessons, and we can’t wait to get to know the boys better and have more Katy Perry dance parties. Even though we were exhausted after hockey, we couldn’t resist waiting around until open gym time at the elementary school. The local basketball star Abdula (from Tanzania’s national basketball team) had asked us to come by, and we were glad we did! All the older students were there, and we loved the opportunity to hang out with them outside of school.

         As the weeks go by we keep adding more and more stuff to our giant “to do” list (those who know us well will not be surprised that this list exists). We hope to host a second girls night (our first is tomorrow!), have a school dance, continue hip-hop classes, teach a women’s health lesson at the adult education centre and meet with more community members to hear their ideas on health initiatives in Salluit. Oh yeah, and teach too…

Wish us luck!!

             Salluit Sistazz

Mel carrying Nathan in an amotik, the traditional coat worn by Inuit women

The Salluit Sistazz Settle In

Mel "out on the land"

            We can’t believe we’ve already been here for more than a week! Time flies when you are running around all day with classes here, meetings there and after school activities.

            In the past couple days we’ve started teaching at Ikusik, the secondary school, and Pigiurvik, the elementary school. We have been teaching hygiene, safety, nutrition, and physical activity. We’ve been practicing the hand washing steps (hands are getting really dry!), teeth brushing and flossing (my dentist would be proud!) for hygiene. In safety we are getting pretty good at presenting RED as the treatment for cuts and bleeding and identifying all the different warning signs that can be found on household products. In nutrition, the kids loved drawing their favourite meal, and matching foods with their food groups. We sneakily added pop, candy and chips to the food to be sorted- and enjoyed watching the kids interpretations of which group they belonged in! In physical fitness, we transformed “Simon Says” to “Mélanie Says” and taught the kids that hamstring do exist and that it’s hard to touch your own toes (although the kids like to remind us that it’s not hard at all – while trying to hide their bent knees)!

While teaching we’ve come to realize many things. Although everyone tells us children have short attention spans, it doesn’t really click until you are standing in front of a class and you realize that half the kids are looking up in the air with their mouths open and looking at you blankly. We’ve become quite good at modifying our lessons on the spot to include more activities and use resources in the class room – even skits if that’s what it takes! We even had our first hand raised for a question today – which by the way is a really big deal! The kids are usually too shy or don’t think it’s cool to ask questions. The question box always brings up interesting questions – which proves that they are secretly listening to us (!) – but mostly a lot of “my favourite food is caribou” and “my favourite activity is hockey/basketball” responses. It’s also interesting to see that most of the girls are incredibly quiet and shy. One the other hand – some of the boys are big chatter boxes (especially our grade 5 and 6’s). We have planned a girl’s night for next week since most of the after school sports are taken over by boys. We hope to do some healthy baking, bracelet making, henna and other fun games. We hope that by promoting the activities in class and attending them ourselves other girls will be more willing to come. On Tuesday, Mélanie participated in the basketball club and Kat went to the jewellery club. While Mélanie and the boys at practice were being yelled at to do sprints by our drill sergeant, Kat was having difficulty keeping up with the girls in ring making (all 12 and under). After school on Wednesday a teacher vs. kids soccer game ended on an embarrassing note with our team (the teachers) losing and being forced to do push ups!

            Our new love = breakfast club! We’ve been participating in the breakfast club which goes from 8:15 to 8:45 every morning, and all kids are welcome. This program is important, and man can these kids eat and eat! Not only is buttering and peanut-buttering toast at lightening speed fun, but this club is also a great way to get to know the kids outside of class.

Kat's new ride

            On Monday we were really lucky to have the opportunity to “go out on the land”! We suited up for a breezy but incredible four wheeler ride into the snowy peaks. The view was unbelievable with the untouched white field and the shimmering light from the sun. The oddly placed rocks pierced through the snow appearing as though someone had lightly dropped them on the surface of the earth. On route we met other community members on their ski-doos coming back from ice fishing in the nearby lakes. We were hoping to see a fox or a wolf but Mélanie was secretly hoping to see a “Nanuq”, said “Nanook”, which is a polar bear. But our drivers assured us that we did not want to see a nanuq because we did not have a gun and our four wheelers were not fast enough!

In the week to come we are excited to start teaching at the Rehab Center (Sapumivik), have our first hip hop class (and maybe break dancing too if Mélanie can brush up on her skills), host our girl’s night and have our first movie night!    

Hope you are well!

Northern Love,

                        Salluit Sistazzz

Salluit at Last!

After finally arriving in Salluit on Wednesday evening, we have had an amazing first week getting to know the town!

We have gotten to know all of the teachers at Ikusik (the secondary school), who are incredibly welcoming and enthusiastic about our lessons starting next week. The kids are all very shy and curious about us and we can’t wait to get to know them more as we start teaching! We’ve also met with the principle at Pigiurvik (the primary school) who is excited to have us teaching there on a regular basis this year. On Thursday we met with the head nurse, a midwife and a social worker at the nursing station, as well as the Lieutenant at the police station. Everyone was very helpful in informing us about the community, and the most relevant health issues. We also met with Annie, one of the elders who has been involved in various health initiatives in the community. We hope to involve her and other community members in our teaching project, as they have much experience and knowledge to contribute.

The weather has been an experience to say the least! All week the wind has been blowing so hard that even getting to school is a challenge (60-80km/h!). On Thursday night the house shook so hard that Kat had to be dragged out of the house Friday morning, and only after much assurance from Mel that it was safe. Luckily, the past two days have been pretty calm, and the sun is even beginning to shine! We are looking forward to sporting raccoon tans matching those of the local kids.

A blustery day in Salluit!

Grocery shopping has also been quite the experience. Prices are even higher than we’d anticipated, for example four pieces of frozen chicken breast: $16, large honey nut cheerios box: $20, small bottle of olive oil: $10! There are two grocery stores, the Co-op and the Northern. Prices vary between the stores and even day to day, and fruits and vegetables come in at random times and are quickly swept off the shelves. We are looking for some friends on the inside who can give us the heads up! The hike home from the grocery store is a mission itself, uphill with the strong wind against us. Kat’s city girl training didn’t prepare her for this! Luckily Mel has taken on the role as her trainer/drill sergeant, with regular workouts in the school gymnasium.

Today we broadened our horizons by going to an all-Inuktitut church service. The singing was beautiful, and the community members greeted us warmly. Throughout the week we’ve realized that Inuktitut words often involve adding an “ie” sound to the end of English words. For example, the only words of the sermon that we could make out were the repeated chants of “Jesusie Christ”. Despite the language barrier, we followed others in the service and fit in fine…that is until we stood up to sing, looked around, and realized only women were standing. When our neighbour turned around and said “Happy Mother’s Day” we realized our mistake…

We’ve already grown to love this community and have learned so much. We hope to be able to give even just a little back in return. With a recent suicide in the community, the teachers, nursing staff and police say we have come at a good time. We hope that our week of Mental Health lessons (including topics such as grief and anger management) will be helpful to students in this difficult time.

Northern Love,

Salluit Sistas

P.S. For those who haven’t heard- Mel has been accepted to Ottawa U Med School! We will miss her at our Northern meetings next year, but are excited for the amazing opportunity that awaits her! 

Mel and our new love Nathan!

Bienvenue…Puvirnituq?

We have had little Internet service for the past couple days and haven’t been able to post, but here is what we’ve been up too!

            A slight detour in our flight to Salluit on Tuesday turned into a surprise stay in Puvirnituq! Because of high winds (90km/hr!), our flight was grounded in this small town with no indication of for how long. Luckily we had plenty of dried lentils to live off of during our mini-vacation- yum! On our flight from Montreal we had met a young Air Inuit pilot, whose friendship turned out to be very useful when we a) had no idea what was going on at the airport, and b) desperately needed a ride to the Puvirnituq co-op hotel!

Our mini vacay turned out to be pricey- $350 (yes that is not a typo) for a room at the only hotel in town. After breakfast the frantic phone calls insued: Air Inuit customer service, our contacts in Salluit, the airport, the hotel manager, and anyone else who would listen! When we called the airport asking about flights to Salluit the response was “Oh we’re not going there.” To which we timidly responded “Ever…?” Finally around 10am we were told to come to the airport and wait…so we did…until 3pm… While we were watching “Honey” to pass the time the tough looking cleaning lady came over and quickly snapped, “What are you girls trying to do, starve yourselves?” before shoving piles of cookies, juice and water bottles on to the table. The first sign that someone knew we existed, and cared!! We were ecstatic! Over the course of the day as travelers came and went we became known as “the two girls trying to get to Salluit”.  At least our stay in the airport allowed us to meet some interesting community members! Among them were the mayor, the famous local singer Elisapie Isaac, correctional services, pilots, community health workers, medical evacuation staff and other friendly community members. All in all this what a great time to chat and get to know people in Salluit and the surrounding communities. Finally it was announced that everyone on stand by (aka us) would be allowed on the plane!

On our way to Salluit we stopped in two villages – the first for an extremely important Pepsi pick-up (no one got on or off the plane…). In the second town the pilots told us that we might not be able to land in Salluit because of the high winds, and may need to turn around! Knowing we could not afford another night in Puvirnituq’s hotel we hoped and prayed we’d make it, and luckily we were able to land with a shaky and turbulent descent, and all the passengers cheered!  

Kate (our community contact), her husband, and Francois came to pick us up in their four wheelers and skidoos. The ride was incredible – the sun was shining and reflecting off the frosty hills and we caught a glimpse on the whole town down in the valley. Once at Barbara’s (the teacher we will be living with), we had a chance to unpack and eat a lovely dinner that she had prepared for us. We also met the very charming Nathan, a 21 month old Inuk boy who Barbara is fostering. Following dinner we took a walk into town to explore where we met several children eager to race and play. We were exhausted after our long day but relieved to be in Salluit – finally!

                                At the Montreal airport- Mel weightlifting our 10kg of dried food!

                                      Salluit- our beautiful home for six weeks!