One pink prostate and two proud parents!

Ellie chillin' with some homies (in matching coats)

Last week ended with our best moment in Pond yet (that is until yesterday) when we took our leadership course kids on a field trip the health center. We met with Apphia, the community health rep and looked around the resource room showing them all the great info that is available to them. Then Apphia gave a small talk about what she does which turned into a motivating speech about how change in the community has to come from the youth, that it has to be people like them (our students) talking and looking out for the little ones. The youth are the ones who really know what is going on in the community and what the issues are. Ellie and Emma were just onlookers, it was really cool to see how captivated the kids were with what Apphia was saying and how genuinely interested they were about meeting with her after we go to help her spread healthy messages! It made our week! 
The weekend consisted of the usual yet again, bannock comas, lesson planning extraordinaire, playing soccer with kids into the wee hours, and long walks on the beach. Everything is melting so quickly, lots of brown and Emma loves taking photos of muddy streams of water, much to Ellie’s dismay and mockery. Friday night was also a blast… a Bieber blast! That’s right we did end up showing the JB movie at the school. Highlights included a grade 6 boy saying “I didn’t used to like Justin Bieber but now I can’t stop watching!” That made Ellie ecstatic!

Amazing leadership kids!

Our leadership kids teaching, Emma on pigs lungs

Monday was one for the books as we took our leadership kids down to Ulaajuk, the elementary school, where 6 of them taught 3 classes about smoking. And they rocked it! You must understand what a huge feat this is because many of them are so shy they care barely get up and speak in front of the class for 30 seconds. It was a little touch and go as we were running late, a few of our key speakers didn’t show up for class, and scripts were missing in action. Emma helped out by only bringing the healthy pigs lung from the health center so had to run back between lessons to get the cancerous one. However, the kids were great and obviously were equally as proud of themselves as we were of them! They really supported each other and answered the kids questions so well – maybe a few will be inspired to become teachers themselves! It would be great if we had time to do this with more kids or other lessons, maybe something to keep in mind for next year! We ended the day by feeding them brownies, what better way to say “well done” than with chocolatey gooey goodness with M&M’s on top. Well deserved.

Today we taught what felt like our most solid lesson yet – puberty! The kids were quiet as mice, much to our surprise. They are all definitely getting packs of gum at the end of the week for being so mature about it! Ellie’s art skills came in handy for our fabulous diagrams and the health rep Apphia sat back and let us do our thing. After talking about everything from periods and how babies are made, to erections and ejacualtions we got quite the chuckle out of the fact that at the end of one class the kids innocently requested to play their favourite game – squirt! Looking forward to contraceptives and STI’s tomorrow. Unfortunately there was a funeral in town this afternoon so school was cancelled, as is hip hop tonight. 

And the egg travels down the fallopian tube...

We miss you all!
Love and snowflakes,
Barf.

Rainboots and Roads!

Spring has sprung here in Pond and we have traded in our Sorels for rainboots. This also means we have to actually walk on the roads as cutting across the fields and yards results in being swallowed by the melting slush which is thigh deep! It has been a very busy and eventful week, although it started off with a lovely long weekend. Last Friday we went out on the land for the first time with the teachers to meet the senior high students who were on a 5 day camping trip.  We travelled two hours by Qamuttik to get there and it was completely white-out most of the way. It felt like we were in a snow globe because you could barely see 10 feet in front. Nevertheless Emma managed to spot a giant seal on the way! At the campsite we found a real live igloo that the students had made which was the coolest thing of all time. On the way home the weather cleared so we got our fair share of wind/sun burn on our faces but it was beautiful all the same. When we stopped for lunch we discovered an amazing cave which was covered in ice crystals. They were yummy too!

Ice crystals

The rest of the weekend was spent doing the usual: walking around town, lesson planning galore, hanging out with the fam, and eating loads. Highlights were going to brunch with Alice and Ely at the hotel and Ellie receiving the Justin Bieber (note to Webequie, careful with your spelling) movie in the mail which we enjoyed over a carton of Ben and Jerry’s. We are showing it at the school tonight, the girls are really excited! And by girls we mean Ellie.

This week we tackled mental health with the grade 7 and 8’s – taught bullying, anger management, conflict resolution, and peer pressure - which was challenging material, but we got some great questions and they loved our skits. We are glad we had the time to teach this unit as we could tell the kids really wanted to hear about these topics, especially bullying and peer pressure. Besides this we have been keeping up with girls basketball, art club, walking club, bracelet/nail polish club, hip hop and we’ve added a new one – fiddle practice! Emma discovered that a bunch of the kids can play the violin and since the teacher who usually runs the program is very pregnant (Julia!) she was happy to pass it over for the rest of the year. This was a great discovery and Emma was uber impressed with how good the kids were! The kids were pretty stoked with her skills too. In the mean time, Ellie wrestled boys for beads.

Play on, play on

Our most exciting news this week is that we kicked off our leadership course with the senior students. For 9 days, 3 hours per day, we have 8 students ranging from grade 9-12 who we are teaching health leadership to, with a focus on confidence building and the importance of being a good role model. We are now three days in and although we were a bit nervous at first we are really happy with how it is going! Some of the kids are very shy but we have already seen a change in them as they slowly break out of their shell. Our lessons have covered leadership, role models, communication, cooperation, diversity, initiative, gossiping, and community issues. Alice’s granddaughter Alex came in one afternoon to speak to them as she is a great example of a young leader and positive role model in the community. Today we are going to start practicing lessons because on Monday we are going to the elementary school Ulaajuk to teach about smoking and bullying – mini-QHO right here in Pond! The pictures we included are of one game for cooperation in which we taped their wrists together in a circle. They loved this one! The other photo is of us playing the “laughing game” – ha ha ha ha. Emma and Ellie were obviously the worst at not laughing! Anyway, we are so pumped that we got the opportunity to work so closely with these older kids, and even more so when we realized how enthusiastic they were about wanting to make a difference with the younger kids in the community and help raise a healthy generation.

Laughing game!

All taped together

In other news, we have now tried a few more Arctic treats such as raw caribou and narwhal! Ommm num num. And Sarah and Emily will be proud to know we have only eaten one can of tuna (Emma) and no chickpeas as of yet! Just over two weeks to go now which is a very sad thought, so we’ll forget about that for now and continue to make the most of the time we have in this wonderful place!

The "darkest" part of the day (around 12:30am)

6 lbs of trailmix down 2 lbs to go,

Erm & Eam

"If someone had twins they could call them mary and juana"

Lessons learned:

1.     By no means is the ‘Hoedown Throwdown’ a hip-hop dance.

2.     Emma and Ellie are boy magnets – even at nail polish club.

3.     Bannock is more addictive a substance than nicotine.

When we woke up Tuesday with only three classes to teach we thought it would be a slower paced, relaxing day. So funny how we both ended up falling asleep by 10pm (taking notes from you Pickle/Mish!).  The classes on alcohol went well, another tricky subject to talk about as the kids know a lot more than you would think, but we were stoked when some of the remembered learning the recovery position from Emily and Sarah last year! Yippee!  We went to girls basketball practice again and ended up on opposite teams marking each other. Emma got a little feisty, Ellie woke up with a few bruises this morning, say no more. After that we went to supervise hip-hop, and casually realized we were in charge of 40 ten-year-olds. Here Emma incurred a few bruises in the form of kids stomping on her feet, while Ellie was spontaneously forced into teaching the Hannah Montana Hoedown Throwdown to her group as ammunition for the “3-on-3 batttle” when the hip-hop “expert” who was supposed to teach her group got distracted by the sound system. 

Highlight of yesterday was bannock! Not only did we get a few bites at school but Alice taught us how to make it in her own kitchen – and it was much much better. Ellie and Emma are both suffering from bannock comas. For those who don’t know it is basically flour, milk, and a bit of salt and sugar deep-fried in oil. It sort of tastes like a pancake mixed with an English muffin mixed with greasy deliciousness! Even better with peanut butter, jam or Nutella!

Another highlight was in our anger management class that we had to teach the Grade 9’s on a whim after we performed our first skit one of the kids blurted out “real people, way better than TV.” Our smoking lessons went over well for the most part, we grossed them out with some great YouTube ads (the ones in the kit!) and Emma gave a riveting quitting smoking speech about her “friend” and how they quit.

Afterschool we had our first beading/bracelet/nail polish club. It started out with lots of girls, but most of them trickled out and in came the boys. We thought they would stick to the black, white, and red bracelets but nope, out came the nailpolish and half an hour later we had at least four boys with perfect manicures. Flowers and stars to boot! I think we’re going to have to have a bouncer for girls night.

Nail polish and beads, oh my!          

We taught 5 classes on drugs and inhalents today, with an awesome game of jeopardy to review the whole which the kids loved – classic battle between the monsters and kitty cats aka. boys versus girls! Looking forward to the long weekend and getting out on the land tomorrow with the staff trip. We are going to meet all the senior students who have been out on a 5 day adventure!

Our pal freddy - covered in X's

Chow for now,

Bannock Babes

“You eat turgid! You eat ham!”

We love Nasivvik!

The above title is what happens when you tell some grade 6’s at walking club what your teaching partner is scared of.  Yes, Emma is scared of the word turgid, and the kids thought it was something edible. Luckily our first night of walking club included many other hilarious and wonderful chats with the 7 kids who joined us! Funny how you pick them up as you go. Monday was a hard day of teaching as we dove into some of the more serious stuff – it’s substance abuse week! We learned quickly these are hard lessons to get across, and you have to word things very carefully but it was clear a lot of the kids were listening and we had loads of great questions from them. Our hearts jumped a little when the principal asked us to see him in his office after school (we thought we were in trouble!) but he just had a student there who wanted to ask us if we would supervise hip-hop tonight as the teacher who regularly does it is out on the land trip. Of course we said yes!! Today will be a day of not only teaching alcohol but embracing our fitter selves, much to Ellie’s chagrin, with girls basketball practice after school and hip-hoppin’ all night long!

Last Thursday we ended the week with our exercise lesson, which was great fun – even the older kids were into our jumping jacks! After school we had our first drawing club meeting which had a surprisingly high turn out, almost all boys too! There were lots of Arctic scenes, apples and animals flying around the room. Ellie’s master art skills came in handy, the kids all think she’s the best – although a lot of the pictures were still “To Emma, From ______”. We found out loads about their taste in music, which was surprisingly G-rated, even though they didn’t have much to work with on Ellie’s iTunes. Justin Bieber, Shakira, and the Black Eyed Peas were the order of the day. Highlight of the night was when one Grade 7 girl smeared peanut butter on her mountains…. multi-media, rock on! 

The weekend was nice here, starting with Friday off school! After a failed attempted at getting into the public library, and no poutine being served at the Co-op (Friday the 13th was against us) we planned some lessons and went for a hike. Dinner was at Tessa’s place with her nephew as well who is a 2nd year student at Queen’s and was here visiting and doing some work with the radio station. We’re hoping to get a broadcast out ourselves!  Afterwards we hiked down the infamous “candy shop” which is a ply-wood contraption where a 77-year old Hungarian man named Jim Coax sells candy through a window after everything else closes. We saw lots of our students down there as it was certainly the place to be on a Friday night! Saturday and Sunday consisted of lesson planning, which included making our huge body picture to use this week, affectionately named Freddy by one of the grade 9 classes. We also helped at girls basketball on Sunday night and they totally showed us up. It was Emma’s first team sport practice ever! Way to go! We also found the garbage dump on Sunday. At last!!! The view is indeed as beautiful as Sarah and Em said it would be. Will definitely make that a regular trekking destination.

Garbage galore + amazing view!

The 'candy store'

We can’t believe we have been here for two weeks already, the sun feels warmer and the roads are melting, but we are soaking up every minute and miss you all very much! In other news, exactly one month today Ellie is getting laser eye surgery! 

Kaputau (phonetically speaking) –see you later!

Turgid & Ham.

Diabetes with our Sweeties!!

 Sorry all, this post should have been up a couple days ago-silly internet!!

Pond Greetings! We have had a wildly wonderful past five days, beginning with relaxing yet productive weekend and busy and fun first few days of teaching!!

            Saturday was our day of exploration! We were on a quest for the infamous garbage dump which Sarah and Emily spoke so fondly of. For two hours we tromped around, first down to the beach where the view of the mountains is incredible, and then up past the school to the top of Pond! Unfortunately the garbage mountain was no where to be found… how mysterious. With cold feet and hungry bellies we went back to Alice’s empty house for lunch. In the afternoon we went to the weekly flea market at the community hall (C-Hall) where we chatted away with people selling jello, bannock, and bits & bobs. The evening consisted of lesson planning, Zoolander, and Alice arriving home at 12:30am with a very cold heel and sore back from her 5 hour skidoo ride from the cabin!  Fierce lady!

On Sunday we celebrated Mother’s Day by walking down to the beach with a big home made card and sending some photos home. More lesson planning and leadership course brainstorming ensued before an evening of hanging out with our awesome Inuit family. Ellie and Jennine (3 year-old granddaughter) are soul sistas! While Emma and Alice had a serious chat about global warming in the Arctic, Ellie acted as a human playground. We fell asleep with first day of school jitters in our tummies.

Day 1: Hygiene! Kicked off with five classes in a row (two Grade 9, two Grade 7, one Grade 8) and all the kids were surprisingly receptive! Although we felt a bit silly standing up there covered in toothpaste after one of our activities!! Our questions were half hilarious half “Hi Emma” (poor Ellie), but there were a handful of legit ones which means kids are actually listening to us! Wahoooo!

Yesterday we taught nutrition using loads of fake food we got from the health centre which the kids loved. It was so convincing it made Emma really homesick from Kraft Singles slices. Webequie’s sweet “Northern Store” activity totally flopped for us, I guess we didn’t have the Fisher Price cash register charm, so we had them make breakfast, lunch, and dinner in groups instead.  Also, our price tags kept falling off. Fail. But the good news is, the rest of the lesson was great, including the Ziploc bags full of sugar – they were gasping at how much was in a can of pop. Success!! Tuesday night we went for our first Hip Hop experience at the C-Hall which was completely student-run and hilarious to see the kids break out their ghetto-tude. We made tons of Hannah Montana-lovin’ Grade 4 friends. A dance party is in order in the near future!! Before bed we hung out with Alex who gave us each a Qilaruti (translates as “something to tie your hair with”), a beautiful beaded Inuit treasure!

Mildred's Grade 7 class 

                                         

Today was a sweet day at school because we managed to make diabetes fun (we think anyway)! We really liked teaching it, especially Ellie explaining insulin – bio nerd alert –and the kids didn’t lose interest and seemed to get it. Awww yea!! The health center had our back with some great props and a video on diabetes in Nunavut. The rest of the day will consist of planning for our first Drawing Club meeting tomorrow, lesson planning, and washing socks.

Peace out homies,

Jennine’s jungle gym.

Qilaruti

Hi Yemma! Hi Yemma!

Hello dear friends!

Glad to know although it feels like another world up here, you know you're still in Canada when you can hear hockey blaring on the TV and see little kids shooting a puck around on the pond outside Alice's house. They really do play all night! The busy house has cleared our for the weekend as everyone has gone off on a 5 hour skidoo ride/seal hunt to the cabin for the weekend. I'm sure much of the town will do the same. We're looking forward to holding down the fort, Emma being chef extrondinaire, Ellie contributing with Hannah Montana seminars and laughing at everything.

Last night we had our first taste of caribou and it was indeed tasty! Alice knows how to cook up a mean stew (Emma wants the recipe). Ely's grandaughter Aaliks (Alex) hangs out most evenings, she is is 23 and really interesting. She wants to go to Carleton for anthropology but in the mean time substitutes at Nasivvik. So far our chats have been extremely informative but it's also nice to have someone our age in the community to talk to. You realize pretty quick that we all have a lot in common no matter where you're from.

Yesterday we headed to the highschool bright and early and found the mega box of QHO stuff... thanks for your REALLY EXCITING PERSONAL letter Emily and Sarah (not). We met Tessa who is an awesome lady and so supportive of everything we do. She wants to help us coordinate a weekly girls crafts and a big girls night near the end of the year!! She also gave us keys to the school muahahaha. We were suprised to learn from the principal that we are in charge of a 30 hour, two week long CTS (career and technology services) course on leadership. SWEET!! What an amazing opportunity since that was one of our main goals! A tad daunting to say the least but we have put in a few good brainstorming session and we are excited about going for it! Also great news, we put up a schedule and it is practically full! Teaching begins on Monday with a hilariously rowdy Grade 7 class we have spent a couple periods with. In the afternoon we went up to the Arctic College to help out with a fundraiser and discovered a sweet idea for next year, a game called 'String Pull'... to be elaborated on at a later date. We won $20 though!! (which we then bought 10 polar bear cookies with... no we didn't eat them all ourselves).

Today we rocked up to the health center and met with Appiah, our main girl, who gave us loads of resources, from plastic hamburgers to the Nunavut food guide. We lugged home an entire box of health goodies, even though we were offered many rides by curious onlookers as we struggled up the hill. With a stop-off at Ulaajuk (elementary) we made plans to come in with our leadership program team! Awesome! Our day ended with the Arctic College grad which was very moving (Emma cried as she is also graduating, and is a wuss) and caught the end of the Friday night movie night at the school. It was Transformers 2. Ellie only laughed once, it must not be very good.

One last thing, everyone thinks we're twins but can only remember Emma's name. Luckily Ellie has made friends with the dog next door who is a Saint Bernard. We have affectionately named him FMB (freaking massive beast).

Ps. Ellie is actually terrified of him.

Tavvauvuti from where the sun never sets,

Alice’s Angels

   

Pondward Bound!!

We are now sitting on the floor of the living room of the one and only Alice Panipakoocho! Quite a journey getting here, from a lovely car ride being forced to listen to Ellie’s mom’s boyfriend’s country beats to propeller planes and skidoos!

Ellie and her mom arrived in Kingston early Monday afternoon to pick up Emma and hit up to infamous institution that is Costco. We quickly discovered that one should go to Costco with an open mind, not a shopping list. So with three hockey bags, and one suitcase – over 300lbs of food – we were on the highway to Ottawa. When we arrived at the hotel a fourth hockey bag was added after a row with Ellie’s mom over whether or not to take the commercially freezer packed meat (it’s here).

We got on the plane to Iqaluit at 9am yesterday morning and arrived in sunny Nunavut at approximately 12:30 only to be informed that our connecting flight to Clyde River was 4 hours delayed. No problem. We wandered to “downtown” Iqaluit and found the brand new Tim Horton’s where we enjoyed a lunch and some interesting looks. Back at the airport Emma slept while Ellie read a Harlequin novel picked up off the book rack called “Shotgun Baby”.

Finally we hopped on the prop plane and had two very smooth flights from Iqaluit to Clyde River, Clyde River to Pond. The Arctic really does look like a snow covered Sahara!! We got to Pond Inlet and were warmly welcomed by Shelly (our main contact) and Alice and Ely (our Pond parents). We snow-mobiled the one minute journey to the house and ate Arctic char and iceberg water for dinner yum!!!

This morning (yesterday) we met up with Shelly at the Arctic College and she gave a tour of the town. We went to Nasivvik (the high school), Ulaajuk (the elementary school), the Co-op/coffee shop, the Health Centre, the Parks Office, the Hotel, meeting LOADS of people all along the way. Shelly is one connected lady! Other sites included polar bear skins, adorable kids in parkas, icebergs, dogs, sewage trucks and the most serene view of the mountains across the water.  We met Rob and Lorne the principals of the high and elementary schools and they are both enthusiastic about our program and having us in the schools. Tomorrow we will be meeting some of the teachers and hopefully sitting in on some classes. Then in the afternoon we are going to help with a fundraiser at the Arctic College. All our practice this year will pay off!

Emma managed to lock herself out of her room but her and Alice solved the problem by brute force. Ellie was impressed.

Tavvauvuti from where the sun never sets,

Alice’s Angels