Change of Blog!

I will no longer be posting here -- My NEW BLOG is now at http://vagaregirl.wordpress.com

I look forward to seeing you all there!

On Starting Fresh

My house is an inappropriate blue colour in the kitchen and dining area, I've decided. Actually the colour extends into the hallway and perhaps even into the rooms upstairs, but I can't remember and I don't feel like going up to check. The living room is white -- actual white, not eggshell or ivory or whatever -- from the days when people actually used proper white on the walls of their houses. But other than that it's a very likeable and charming place. I just moved in today and I think I am completely and solidly alone for the first time since I left Ottawa only three weeks ago. It seems like a lot longer.

On Sunday we all went to dinner at various places -- Dave, Tyler and I to the house of a good Katimavik friend in Sheshatshiu and Mike to a friend's place in Northwest. Going to Sunday dinner at Helen and Dave's was like something out of a Christmas movie -- she grew up in Sheshatshiu and him in Newfoundland and they have six grown children with husbands and wives and kids, all there almost every Sunday for a big dinner. When we got there we were treated not like guests but like we belonged. We barely even got greeted when we came in -- the women were cooking big pots of veggies and three kinds of meat on the stove, and there seemed to be random relatives popping out of the woodwork every few minutes. Most of them didn't introduce themselves to us but were very welcoming and friendly in their way -- I was glad I'd had some exposure to and understanding of Native culture or I might have interpreted the opposite. I'm pretty sure they were making fun of us in Innu from time to time; we tried to keep up and not to be overwhelmed, or to appear overwhelmed anyway. Of the six grown children, five are coupled up with white people, and so there was a good mix around the table. While we were eating it was like musical chairs around us. You'd turn one way to talk to someone at the long table (there had to be at least 12 or 15 seats) and then you'd turn back the other way to see three new people sitting down, then you'd turn back and the person you were talking to was now replaced by someone else. It was too hard to keep track of all the couples and cousins and sons and daughters-in-law and sisters and so on. There was lots of banter and noise and kids running around, and there were a million stories to be told. There are a million stories just in photos on the walls of that house.

Afterwards we went down to help with the renovations of one of the sons' houses and the guys were put to work right away while Helen and I went back to the house and got to know each other.

"When I was a kid I lived in the country," she said, meaning in the traditional way, on the land. She lived in Labrador tents until her parents moved to Sheshatshiu when she was young, and even then they would go back to the "country" for the fall. Of her six kids, three are adopted -- adopting kids from other family members or from friends' families seems to be a pretty common practice here when children are born to very young parents or to parents with drug/alcohol problems, or when the kids are orphaned. She told me sad stories of the backgrounds of the kids she took in and raised. She made tea but didn't offer me any. Eventually Dave, her husband, came back and shuffled around the house getting water, and while he was there there was a knock at the door. Helen answered the door and I heard the voices of two little girls speaking to Helen in Innu -- she got them glasses of apple juice and I watched them drink it by the door under the low ceiling. It made me think of being small and of winter, and suddenly I felt like I was back in time. Dave gave them $10 before they left and said, "That one's my granddaughter."

That night we all slept in the Northwest River Katimavik house (which as a reminder is about a 5-minute walk from my place) instead of going back the 40-min drive to Goose Bay. When I was falling asleep I remember thinking that in all my wandering around I might not have ever slept anywhere so quiet -- sheltered from natural noises that you hear when you sleep outdoors, and missing the general constant racket of the city. It was so quiet. There wasn't even a strong background electrical hum, or the creaks and whistles that an older house like mine makes. It's very still here.

Then Kelsey, the Rigolet project leader, left yesterday with his group. Mike left today and finally it was time to move into our own houses -- Dave and I picked up groceries in Happy Valley and headed out to unpack into the places we're going to live for the next 10 months. This day seemed harder than the numerous other days I've moved in and moved out, in so many different places around the country and world. Maybe because the winters are long and cold here? Maybe because we're so far away? Maybe because I'm anxious about the job, or because I really did like living with the guys in the furniture-less Goose Bay house, doing domestic stuff together and working on our laptops while sitting on the bare living room floor. It actually kinda did feel like it was our place, as ridiculous as that sounds after one week.

I unpacked my food and made lunch. On the box of Red Rose tea I bought it says "best before February 2009." The grocery stores here are unreliable like that, I suppose. I couldn't bring myself yet to start organizing all my belongings again for the third time in as many weeks, so I went around trying out light switches to see which one controlled what (a lot of the bulbs are bare and some have pull-strings) and then went outside to check out the yard. There's this weird thing that looks like kind of like where you hang people, without the actual gallows, and there's a mini picnic table in the backyard, and a broken down clothesline that I might try to fix. I've been told that people have seen faces looking out the windows and I kept catching myself looking up for them while I was in the yard. It wouldn't be that surprising really. It's also a windy and creaky kind of place, and I found myself thinking about the creepy basement while I walked over the hole in the floor that lets you down there. Right now I can hear the storm door at the front swinging back and forth.

"Did you notice the weird smell in that place?" Helen asked me on Sunday. I said no. She said Val (last year's Sheshatshiu project leader) used to come over smelling like that place all the time. When I came in today I definitely noticed it -- and I opened the windows until the 10-degree temperature outside made it too cold. Yesterday we went for a little hike and it was cold enough to get your nose running just a little bit, although not cold enough for tuques and mittens. Pretty soon though...

Trapped and Tendered

So travel is sometimes about having no expectations, and sometimes about your expectations being shaken a little bit, or sometimes blown away. Yesterday we went to Northwest River to meet with Dom and then were invited to tour the new school in Sheshatshiu with Gabe, a guy our age from Sheshatshiu. Coincidentally we know him because he did Katimavik as a participant with Dave, my co-worker, way back in the day. The way life always works.

We thought we were getting an informal tour from Gabe, but it turned out that it was an open house to the whole community. The school is this beautiful multimillion dollar facility with brand new everything -- every toy, chair, book, piece of chalk. The school is governed by the Innu nation and not by the regular school board, giving the community more control over the education of their own people. Many brand new young teachers have moved up here to be part of it, and they were all there yesterday for the open house along with many of the people who will be my work partners and community contacts and friends. It was the perfect surprise -- I met many of the people I needed to meet and got the chance to see a lot of the community together in one place.

There were presentations in the beginning that were 80% in Innu, with summarized translations for the non-Innu-speaking among us. I knew that their traditional language was prevalent in the community, but I didn't know that it was truly the first language -- many young children don't speak English, as well as some older people. On the wall were these big stark posters of old black and white photos of Innu people, with quotes on them that were at the same time commonplace but very moving. One was a young man holding a small child, and in handwriting underneath it said, "If I told you to forget everything you had learned since birth, wouldn't you feel like a part of you was missing?"

After the tour there was a free meal where we ended up chatting more with some of the teachers who were largely from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. Before we knew it we were invited to a party that night at one of their houses, and then out to the bars after. Oh, how it's great to party with Newfies. And as they kept reminding me, "We're not even drinking tonight."

Today I received a call from one of my work partners at the school, asking me to call his mother, who is one of our big supporters in Sheshatshiu. She wanted to invite us all over for dinner tomorrow night. And so it begins.

Beer and Cheesecake: Supper of Champions

YESTERDAY

It was about 100km outside of Labrador City that we had the flat tire. Mike was driving and he pulled over because he felt something amiss. I saw the look on his face when he came around to the passenger side. I opened my door and smelled the burned rubber before I saw it – the back tire on my side was destroyed.

This is what will happen on a thousand kilometres of mostly gravel road between Baie-Comeau, Quebec and Goose Bay, Labrador. A thousand kilometres of mostly gravel road. But on our final leg, between Lab City and Goose Bay, there really is no pavement at all, not until you’re about 50km outside of your destination. When we stopped for gas in Wabush before hitting the road, the station attendant said to me, “Just be careful on that road. It’s bad.” Only another 560 km to go.

Not only was it raining, but everything that could have gone wrong with the tire change went wrong. A 12-passenger van has its spare tire attached underneath, behind the back axle, on a winch that’s lowered through a hole above the bumper. We broke several things trying to lower the spare with no luck and had passed over an hour, before a magical man named Rob pulled over to help us and managed to lower the tire before quickly taking off again. After that we brazenly went forward taking off the bad tire, only to find that three of the bolts were impossible to loosen. Now over two hours had passed. A Montrealer stopped to help us and was soon followed by a Brit, who loaned us a tarp to kneel on as well as a better wrench and jack. The Montrealer saw our situation and asked us, “Where you off to? Goose?” Where else – the only stop between Lab City and Goose Bay is Churchill Falls, which you could miss if you looked the other way for a heartbeat while you passed by it.

“How many spares you got?”

“One,” I say.

His eyes widen, “Holyyyy shit.”

Finally the ordeal is over, almost three hours later, and still more than two hours from Churchill Falls and about seven from our destination. It’s 1:30pm and we’ve got a long way to go on a pothole-filled gravel road with no more spares to be had.

It’s after 9pm when we finally roll into Goose Bay. We’d been on the road for twelve hours and I’d spent the last forty-five minutes wallowing in anxiety. Is this the place I’ve chosen to live for the next year? I’m exhausted and ready for a beer – my stomach can’t handle anymore diner food and dampness and rain. To top matters off we know that the house we’re staying in Goose Bay, the Katimahouse (see?), has no inventory at this time. That means no furniture except the mattresses left out for us by Dom, our supervisor. Mike takes off to visit some friends and the guys and I go down to the gas station to by Dominion beer. On the box it says, “Only for Newfoundlanders.” We sit on our mattresses on the floor in the empty living room and drink them and eat Sara Lee cheesecake that we bought in Churchill. It’s still raining.


TODAY

We got up and the house was a mess in only the way a house with no furniture can be. Outside it was beautiful.

Today was the day that it really hit me that we’re here. We have five weeks before our participants arrive, but participants from the Rigolet project up north arrived yesterday. They’re doing their program orientation in the town of Northwest River before they take the ferry up to Rigolet in a few days, so Dom wanted us to run a few errands and then drop by Northwest River to see him and touch base. Northwest River is about 35 km from Goose Bay, and is right across a bridge from the reserve Sheshatshiu. My project.

Tyler will live and work in Goose Bay and Dave is in Northwest River, where Mike was the project leader last year. My house is also in Northwest River, right by the bridge you can walk across into Sheshatshiu. My house is old and strange and haunted but I love it. It looks like a house stuck in the 1970s, with these bright orange heavy curtains and similarly coloured furniture. The kitchen is tiny and there’s a weird border across one wall and then baby-room curtains across the small window. If you lift up a chunk of the floor you go down into an old cold storage that is one of the creepiest places ever, tiny and dark and dank with dirt floors. Tyler and I went down there with a lighter and found a piece of the jawbone of a caribou, teeth still in it and all. Everything is painted a light blue and the staircase going upstairs is narrow and feels like it could collapse at any moment. My room has the most bizarre closet setup that must have been an afterthought. But you walk in and there’s space, and there’s that great sense that older houses have, older houses that haven’t changed in awhile – a sense of time and life and of many things happening inside its walls. We have a huge yard and mudrooms that feel like they should have shotguns hanging off the coat hooks.

It somehow doesn’t feel that strange to me here. I thought it would be more foreign but it’s not – it’s small towns set among vast wilderness, like so many places I’ve visited before in Canada. We drove along the river and there was the skeleton of a steambath, just like the ones we used in Alaska, all the way across to the other side of the continent. Seeing the house made me happier somehow. I understood the concept of eleven participants living together with me in a house – for the first time I really understood how it’s a good idea. Not only is there a lot of time passed in my house, but more than one Katimavik group has passed through, and I liked imagining the experiences and memories that would be had there by my participants. I know. It sounds lame. But I remember leaving home for the first time with Canada World Youth, and I have to keep remembering that feeling in order to know what they’re going through.

Long

HALIFAX TO MONCTON
Saturday

It’s almost over as quickly as it’s begun. On Saturday we packed up the van at the Katimavik office in Halifax after two weeks of training in Truro. We take computers and boxes and fill up the back of a 12-passenger van with Katimavik written all over it. They tell us we’re not allowed to park it in liquor store parking lots. It’s Tyler and Dave and Mike and I – Tyler and Dave are the other project leaders in Labrador and Mike worked there as a PL last year. He’s joining us for the drive because Dave and I aren’t yet licensed to drive the Katimavan (after 1 week of training I was already feeling like slitting my wrists if I had to hear the prefix ‘Katima’ added to another word, and you will probably feel the same) and he was stoked to make the long trip north again. After all, we’re not only getting paid to do this, we’re getting paid for everything we do – two hotel rooms every night in Moncton, Matane, Baie-Comeau, Lab City. We sit down to restaurants at every meal – one of our ‘problems’ is that we have to get up to eat before 11 if we want our breakfast expensed.

People at the Atlantic region training were from all over, most of them returning staff and a few newbies like us – and by us I mean me, Tyler, and Dave, all three. We’re all excited to go to Labrador but I can’t tell if I’m the only one that feels like we might be getting in over our heads. Like I might be getting in over my head. Kathleen, one of the project coordinators (immediate supervisors of us, the project leaders) told me when she said goodbye, “You’re going to rock Sheshatshiu.” I said, “I know.” And I know that I will. But we’re heading up to an empty and lonely place. Mike says he’ll introduce us to some of his friends there, but I still feel that same stab of fear I always feel going off to a place like this. Will I feel alone?

It poured rain in Halifax, a city I had the chance to see for a night only despite being in Nova Scotia for two whole weeks. It poured rain the whole four hours to Moncton.

MONCTON TO MATANE TO BAIE-COMEAU
Sunday and Monday

Civilization gets left slowly behind. New Brunswick was what I always imagined it to be – not that much. Small working-class towns and Moncton, and then cheap diner food in Bathurst. Why the melange of languages surprised me so much I don’t really know – it shouldn’t be much of a shock that French and English would be so interchangeable there.

We’re constantly reminding each other how luckily we are – not only is the whole trip paid for, but we’re being paid to be on the trip. All our meals are paid for and the organized staff at the office have carefully faxed pre-authorizations to every hotel we’re staying at, so all we have to do is sign the receipt. We find ourselves ordering more food, and even eating when we don’t really want to eat, just to make sure we use our allowed food budget. On top of that it’s $6/day each for groceries since we have to drive so long on our third and fourth days, and that adds up to $100 for snacks over the trip. Can it possibly be too much money? And it is.

Then back to Quebec, through small villages in on the Gaspe until the St. Lawrence. Villages get quainter and fewer and far between. We stop to skip rocks by a river and find some kind of fishing canoe, with a couple of wooden chairs and a pole for pushing it through the rushing waters. We pass the same hitchhikers, young people like us, a couple of times. It’s cloudy but beautiful.

Finally we reach Matane, the St. Lawrence. This is deep into the real Quebec, on the Gaspesie peninsula. We eat more diner food at 9pm after checking into the hotel. Even on our second night it already feels like a rhythm, the driving, sitting in squeaky, sticky booths and eating chicken and Caesar salad with way too much dressing. The way hotel rooms feel when you’ve been too transient for too long.

Now we have a whole day until we catch the ferry to Baie-Comeau at 5pm the next day. On Monday we wander around in the forest and find a waterfall, where we skip more rocks and take some pictures. It’s still cloudy in all of them, but no rain.

The ferry leaves for Baie Comeau and it feels like the Canada I know is slipping away. I like the feeling of heading north. One guy that was in Canada World Youth with me was from Baie-Comeau, and a long time ago I would always say I would visit him there. But after awhile it became clear that I probably never would. Why would I go there, so far up, even past beautiful and dense Sanguenay? Past Tadoussac, where we saw the whales a few years ago? This is one of the magical moments of traveling, to find yourself in a place that you thought you’d never go to.

Halfway across the St. Lawrence the sky clears, and the sun sets, and we arrive. When we check into the hotel the receptionist tells me to initial at the bottom of the form to say that agree not to smoke or bring animals into the room. “It’s for cigarettes and animals,” she says. I laugh but I don’t really know why. She says, “Everybody laughs at that.”

BAIE-COMEAU to LABRADOR CITY
Today

Today is the day – tonight we’re be there, in a place that three months ago I would have bet my life savings that I would never see in my life.

It’s cold already – last night was 13 degrees and this morning we turned the van on a couple minutes early to warm it up. It’s all right though – summer was already gone a week into training, and now, already, there’s that feeling of it never having been here at all. It goes away so quickly but winter memories always stay. The British Virgin Islands are certainly a million zillion miles away.

The road started out paved, then changed to gravel, then back and forth again a couple times. First there was the stretch between Baie-Comeau and the first rest stop, 211klm down the highway. Trees and lakes and some other cars. Further down became short views across nothing, and then long views across nothing. Forests burned down to nothing, an abandoned mining town that has left not even a ghost – nature had claimed it all back. We stop a couple times in the middle of nowhere. There’s nothing except quiet and wild blueberries and everything being damp and cool. We play games and listen to music and sometimes we’re just quiet and we look out.

“I’m kinda sick of the scenery,” Dave jokes.

“Don’t worry,” I answer. “Once we cross into Labrador, there’s nothing but chocolate land.”

We arrive. First sign of civilization is Fermont, a Quebec mining town right on the border. It’s the first settlement-type thingy we’ve seen since leaving Baie-Comeau ten hours before. Fermont is strange in an Edward Scissorhands kind of way – everyone works at the mine, and school buses are dropping off workers with big metal lunchboxes as we pull into town at the end of the workday. There is a huge horseshoe-shaped building that holds almost everything the town possesses – in a mall-type area are the restaurants, shops, post office, school, daycare, administration, everything. Adjoining are rows and rows of apartments – one can only assume their inhabitants don’t ever have to go outdoors to get anywhere in the town of they choose not to. Behind is a cluster of old-looking, small houses painted all different colours – the kind of thing you might imagine a mining company would build en masse for its workers. That’s all there is – the giant indoor town and a few houses hidden in behind it. It takes two minutes to drive around the whole town after we climb around on a huge mining truck in a park. For a moment the sun comes out and I realize it’s been days since I’ve felt heat hitting my face.

Fermont is one of the stranger things I’ve seen in life and I’m having trouble getting my head around it. “This is going in the blog,” I tell the guys. “In all my travels one of the strangest things I’ve seen is right here at home.”

Here’s a choice: you can travel wherever you want in the world, but never return to your home country. Or you can go anywhere within your own country, but never step outside its borders for the rest of your life. Which one would you choose? The first time I heard the question the choice was as easy as it is now, or maybe a little less easy because it only gets easier the more and more I travel. Of course stay here is the answer, and travel through a hundred different countries while never leaving my own and still never be able to explore it all in a lifetime.

We arrive in Labrador City well before darkly. Now we’re here. Everyone speaks English again. Despite having driven the whole way from Halifax, it still feels hard to imagine where we are, that we’ve almost made it. Tomorrow is another day like today. Another 550klm, another ten hours probably. And then maybe once we’re in Goose Bay I’ll be able to tell you if it’s hit me: this is where I’m spending the next year.