My first week of work!!

My first week of work! Done. 

I work in a pre-school, in the morning it is an English pre-school and in the after-noon it is the Inuktitut pre-school, where they learn to speak Inuktitut. And at 3:30 the after school kids come on over, so my day starts at 8:30am and ends at 5:30 pm.  By the end of the end, I’m exhausted, literally.  Kids have this abundance of energy that I can only get from coffee. Every Friday's we clean all the toys and sanitize everything. So there are no kids that day but we still have to prepare the next week's activities and schedule. All in all it’s fun, the walk to and from work is painful and cold because they have no TTC here but again, it's interesting to see what part of my body goes numb first.  

I know some of you have been wondering what I eat and it’s all pretty much the same things as what I would eat back home.  The way it works here at the Katimavik house is that every week two people are the ‘house managers’ and they cook and clean and maintain the house while the rest of us go to our work placements.  Everyone takes turn being a house manager, in a couple of weeks it’ll be my turn.  Because everything is expensive here we are on a budget, and so to cut cost we try to make our own bread and other items.  It’s really interesting to see what people make for dinner and how it turns out.  I’m really excited to be a house manager but the only problem is that I really do not know how to cook.  And naturally the other person that I’m partnered up with doesn’t know how to cook either.  I think that week we’ll be ordering a lot of take out.

The room arrangements are that girls are on one floor and boys on the other.  With that said, if anyone has ever lived in residence, it’s like that.  I share my room with two other girls and the room across me has two girls there and the room beside me is where the project leader sleeps.  There is also the computer room (where I am typing this now) and a games room across from it. Upstairs holds two guys, the living room/dinning room and bathroom, plus a laundry room.  This is the area where everyone relaxes.  The second upstairs area holds 3 more guys and a bathroom.  The best way to explain this is to show pictures but for the month of January the house is already over the bandwidth, so next month I’ll upload them. I promise.

I do plan on trying traditional Inuit food and learning a bit of their language through their songs and stories.  And of course I definitely want to buy some of their clothes and bring it back home. I live in Iqaluit which is the capitol of Nunavut and is on Baffin Island.  When you look on the map it is the island that is shaped like an upside down dog with two heads on top of Quebec.

I haven’t really done anything exciting or unique to Nunavut expect gotten minor frostbites, so I’m really hoping that this weekend we’ll do something exciting! And if anyone knows of anything to do or has a suggestion, let me know!

My first day

My day started early with my mum driving me to the airport…

While we were driving on the highway, my mum was going 80 as usual; she gave me advice and words of encouragement. She knew I was a little upset that I was leaving everyone and going into the unknown and trying something completely out of my comfort zone. She said that friends will come and go; if you have lots of money and are successful people will always be around you. If you’re poor and have nothing you will be alone so you need to be successful and be smart. Nothing comes from nothing, you need to be proactive and do it.  With that she stepped the medal to the pedal and started going the speed limit. But I understood what she meant; I need to make something of myself and something needs to come out of this program.  No more loafing around, it’s time for me to be extraordinary, I need to do this for myself. She had no intention of saying friends are bad for you, but that I cannot stay here in one spot for them. We all have to live our lives and friendships will last even in long distance if you work hard enough to talk to them.  Along the way I will meet amazing people and I will never forget the people that I have met, but this needs to be done.

After boarding the plane at 6am, I finally arrived in Nunavut at 1pm.  The airport and everything around it is EXACTLY as you see it online. It’s beautiful. There are hills/mountains of snow and wind blowing. Getting off the plane was interesting; I literally came off and was walking outside to go into the medium sized orange airport. And of course as I was doing this I was taking a massive amount of pictures. When the 5 minute walk to the airport was over I looked down at my figures and they were white. Not kidding they were puffed up and white, of course it wasn’t anything major I didn’t have frost bites but even as I’m writing this out its midnight and my figures still hurt. The temperature was about minus 27 without the wind chill factor.  

When I arrived at the Katimavik house I was welcomed by the two house managers for the week (Chris and the UK guy) who were running around and being hilarious.   There is another girl who is from Toronto and she stayed home from work to greet me and show me around the place! The house has two floors but is separated, guys on one side and girls on another.  It’s hard to explain the separation because the house has two entrances but they face the same way. I should add pictures and video tape the place for you guys.

In total there are 11 people who live here including the project leader, who is sort of but not quite a Don/RA.  We all take turns making food and cleaning the house; if we are not scheduled to be cleaning then we goes to our work placements. My work placement is helping pre-natal and post-natal women and their children.  I am not too sure what is going to happen, because as most of you know I am not very good with children but I guess it’s time for a change.  

By the way, it is extremely cold and windy. And here are some fun facts about Iqaluit, Nunavut.  It is the capitol and it is an island.  Everything that comes here is brought to us by a boat which makes everything about 10% more expensive then in Ontario.  For example I bought a bag of Lays chips and a passion flake thing and it cost me 9 dollars. TAKE THAT IN PEOPLE. $9. It is extremely expensive.  But the people here have higher wages to make up for that, but for us who are working here for free and do not receive money (I actually receive an allowance of 4 dollars a day) it is difficult. The people of the community here have asked the Katimavik volunteers not to drink any alcohol while we are here in Nunavut because they want us to set an example and be role models to the young adults.  There is a massive amount of people here who are alcoholics and so it only makes sense for us to set an example within the community.  But don’t worry guys, when we’re in Montreal we’re all getting plastered.  Just saying.