Salluit, QC: 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.