Vampire vs. Zombies

The FORT HOPE Video

These are the links to the videos we made in Fort Hope with the kids!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9InpbMz05A&feature=fvsr

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEMsJ7EYGCs&feature=related

The Residence Life Begins

Despite only being back in London for a grand total of 6.5 days, I am now officially back at Huron University College. This week I am being trained to be a member of the 2009/2010 residence life staff. The next seven days will take me through the finer points of what it takes to be a Huron ‘don’ and will hopefully prepare me for the year I have ahead of me. It was kind of strange to once again be packing my bags and heading out the door once again. I hadn’t really had a chance to get used to being back home after my summer abroad so it was a bit of a shock to be moving again. I’m not going to say that I would prefer to still be at home, but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t wish I had a couple extra days to restart the ‘London Life’ that I suspended for the last two months!

Anyway, for those of you that followed my adventures in Fort Hope this summer, I would like to sincerely thank you. It was amazing to have a constant link to home and in all honesty; it was nice to know that people cared enough to read! I will not bombard you with a daily entry for the remainder of my life, but I am going to do my best to stop by every once and a while.

Last Day in Thunder Bay & Back to London…

Day #62

Well, I shouldn’t be awake right now. I should be sleeping because I fly out of Thunder Bay at 8:50am. I have to be coherent enough to negotiate my way to Wasaya baggage claim to get my guitar and then on to Air Canada baggage check-in. My flight from Toronto to London is scheduled to land at approximately 12:10pm, so hopefully all goes according to plan. It’s a little weird thinking that all that has happened this summer will be in my past as of tomorrow. I think that it will only be in the past in a ‘time’ specific sense however. I know that I will carry this experience with me for the rest of my life. I said goodbye to Jenette, Courtney, Nanajean and Esther this evening. It was a little sad for all of us, because we really did come together as a team and ended up having a great time together in Fort Hope. Perhaps we will all meet again someday. But if not, we will always have the memories of a great summer of 2009 in Fort Hope.

See you in London!

Back to Reality…

Day #61

I’m back to reality. I’m sitting in my Lakehead University dorm room awaiting the start of my final day away from home. I won’t even begin to describe the feelings I had today, because at this moment I cannot put them into words. I am happy as anything to be only one day away from returning to London, but I have never felt closer to Fort Hope than I do right now. So many conflicting emotions are running through me right now. The end result is a warm feeling, one that is slowly helping me to realize the truly important things in life. As we flew from Fort Hope today, in perfect sunny weather, I allowed myself to feel the weight of this summer sink in for a moment. The immensity of what has happened, and is still happening to me as a result of my experiences is still revealing itself. I don’t really know what else to say right now.

Lastly, as our plane traveled high above the Canadian wilderness, I found myself feeling closer to my country, and despite its flaws, more proud of it than ever.

The Last Day

Day #60

Well, there you have it folks. Camp is officially over here in Fort Hope. I’m exhausted, but pleased. The day was crazy. Some things went according to plan, and some didn’t. People came to our party. People enjoyed our party. The Chief and I had another amazing talk. Have I mentioned that I’m tired? I fly out of Fort Hope at 6:30pm tomorrow night. I still haven’t started to pack. I must pack when I awake. I must sleep now.

Blueberry Hunting…

Day #59

In the words of 5 year old Aaron, today we went ‘blueberry hunting.’ Today was our final day of camp, so we took a large group of kids out to pick blueberries. Aaron decided that this excursion amounted to a serious blueberry hunting trip. We piled into the school bus and a couple of pick up trucks and went out for a great morning of fun. We also had a wiener roast with the kids for their lunch. It was a really great way to end camp, and we had a marvelous time. Unfortunately, as soon as we got back we had to get right down to work. We still have incredible amounts of stuff to do before tomorrow night’s final party. We’re slowly getting closer to the end of the work though. Part of my job today was to go and interview Harry Papah and Chief, Louis Nate about their impressions of the literacy camp. Both of my conversations were fantastic, but the talk I had with the chief was nothing short of incredible. I ended up spending about 45 minutes in his office, conducting what was supposed to be a 5 minute interview. We got talking to each other and ended up having a great chat. I learned more about Fort Hope and the challenges facing aboriginal peoples in Canada within these 45 minutes than I have all summer. I feel extremely privileged to have had the opportunity to speak with him. If all goes well I am going to have another talk with him on Saturday before I leave. He offered to spend some time with me and to give me some, as he put it, ‘straight’ answers about Fort Hope. I spoke to him about my potential future aspiration to be involved in politics. He was extremely supportive, and has promised to answer my questions via email if I want to send them his way.

After conducting these two interviews I got back down to the serious business of portfolio designing, movie editing and slideshow making. It’s been a hectic few days, but the end is near. I am nowhere close to being done everything, but I have faith that I will be able to get it done. I’m going to avoid pushing my brain into overdrive tonight, so it is time for me to go to bed. If everything goes according to plan, I will be ‘up and at ‘em’ early tomorrow!

This Morning I Burnt the Bannock

Day #58

I woke up this morning and attempted to boil water…I have boiled water successfully every morning since arriving in Fort Hope. Well, I failed this morning. Instead of boiling the water, I accidentally burned the bannock. I turned on the wrong heat element on the stove. Our house is currently de-smoking.

I am tired…I have so much work left to do and not enough hours to do it. Someone please make the days longer! Alright, I did not want to break the streak of posting something for everyday, so this post is merely for show. We have to head out right now to go berry pick with the kids. Then I am going to come back and work straight through for the next 36 hours! I will be alright, we just have lots left to do before we leave…Oh yeah, and I have to pack…

The Fast, Slow Day

Day #57

Before I really launch into this I should say that it rained again in Fort Hope…Nothing new, just something that I thought I should update you on…Okay, and also, one more thing…Why is it that the number of people visiting my blog randomly spiked today? I feel very flattered by this, but I also know that there is a possibility it was just my dad checking it from 6 or 7 different computers…Still though, I am sufficiently intrigued…

Alright, well here goes…I should first apologize for my absence from the blogosphere yesterday. I was unavoidably disconnected from the internet due to our move. We are now once again connected and I’ll do my best to make up for lost time.

It is hard for me to complain about the amount of work we currently have to do, because most of it is fun and worthwhile stuff, it’s just a lot! For starters, we have a large number of Frontier College reports, interviews and forms to fill out. We’ve been conducting interviews with community members, campers and parents for the last couple of days so that we can collect data about the effectiveness of this year’s camp. We are also trolling for constructive criticisms that will potentially help the next group of Fort Hope counselors. In addition, we are responsible for creating a portfolio of our experiences in Fort Hope. Frontier College then uses this portfolio as a promotional tool for recruiting new donors. Now, the intelligent thing to do would have been to compile this portfolio page by page throughout the summer, but we basically have left the entire thing until the end. We’ve got a significant amount of work left to do…48 pages of summer documentation is a lot of work to do in the next few days, but I have faith, we will get it done!

On top of the Frontier College work, we have a tonne of work to do before Friday’s camp wrap up party. We created invitations today, but still need to work on distributing them…I personally have to prepare another video (the boys finally finished their second video today), create a slideshow with video clips for the end of camp party and create 10 portfolio pages. I’m not complaining, I just have a lot to do!

Now, for the rundown on today…

We were expecting to have very low numbers this morning, on account of camp being canceled yesterday and the rain pouring from the sky. However, to our surprise, our 4-6 year old class hit 9 children at its peak. We ended up having a great morning of picture taking and community walking. We had each of the kids walk us to their house, where we took a picture of them and their friends. I took the boys, and Nanajean took the girls. It was fun, except for when the dogs started to chase us, but don’t worry, I scared them off!

In the afternoon, I finally got the boys to finish off their second movie. It was a rather painful experience to actually get the last few scenes shot, and I have no idea how I am going to make it all fit together…I’m sure that I’ll figure it out though…In addition to the movie shoot, we managed to get the boys to do another lyric fill-in-the-blank activity. I gave them the Cofield original ‘Wasted’ as the activity. They didn’t really like the song I don’t think, but they did think it was at least semi-cool that it was me singing!

After camp, Nanajean and I got a running start on our 4-6 year old portfolio pages. Neither one of us was particularly looking forward to drawing little pictures or scrapbooking, but we managed to get a decent start. It was a rather comical process of miss-spellings, and at least on my part, terrible art skills! Oh well, eventually it will all get done!

Anyway, I’ve got to stop writing and get working on the camp slideshow. I’m going out to do sprints on the airfield with my NAPS friend and Leo tonight, so I want to get some work done before that! How many opportunities do you get to do sprints on an airfield?

Move It!

Day #56

Today was a crazy day. We were evicted, twice. First we were informed that we needed to move out of our house in order to let the cleaning staff in to clean. At first we were told that we would move sometime on Thursday, then suddenly things changed and we were to move by morning. Then, just as suddenly, we were told that we would need to be out of our house by lunchtime!

On top of this we also experienced the exact same progression of events with our camp portables. Originally we had planned our week so that we would do a final clear-out and clean of the portables on Thursday night. This morning that all changed and we ended up spending the majority of the day (the part that wasn’t spent moving our own stuff from house to house) taking down work and clearing out the portables. The cleaning staff, who have been wonderful to us all summer, asked us if we could give them some extra time to clean the classrooms. After all of the great things they have done for us this summer, it was hard to feel any irritation because of this change in plans, but it did make for a rather hectic day.

Our new house is rather nice actually. It is very ‘cottage-like’ and pretty much a miniature version of our old one. By the way, the change in house also means that we no longer have an internet connection, thus resulting in the delay in posting this.

Tonight I had one of my best experiences to date in Fort Hope. I went for a run with two great guys named Paul and Leo. We jogged out to Thomasbridge and back. It was fun to finally have some casual talk with a couple ‘guys’ from Fort Hope. It was also nice, because both Paul and Leo had spent some considerable time in the London area. It was nice to have that connection, and made for some entertaining conversation. Anyway, it’s extremely late right now, and I need to sleep. More

Raining on Sunday…

Day #55

In the famous words of Keith Urban it was ‘raining on Sunday’ in Fort Hope. Now, Keith’s words were tinged with country/religious heartbreak, designed to sell records, so I suppose that they’re not the most applicable to my day, but still, I like the reference. August 16, 2009 was one of those lazy, rainy, cold, windy days that have come to be commonplace in my life this summer. I spoke a week or two ago about these kind of days, and how I’ve really grown quite accustomed to them. I wrote about how I’ve come to appreciate the down time a rainy day offers. The chance to read a book, write some lyrics, watch a movie and just chill out. Well, perhaps it’s a sign of my imminent return to the ‘South’ or maybe I’ve just finally reached my tolerance level for indoor days, but I was antsy today!

I woke up to the sound of the rain, and instantly made the decision that I was going to force myself to go for a run. The second I emerged from sleep, I knew that I had to get moving and out of the house. Something was keeping me from sitting still and focusing on a book! So, I went out for a significantly miserable run in the rain. I returned from my run in completely the same mood as I had found myself when I awoke. Luckily I had somewhere to go immediately after I returned. We were meeting Nanajean and Esther at the school for a planning/report writing session.

Now, about the last thing I wanted to do, in my fidgety state, was sit in a 4 year old sized chair and participate in a report writing session, but that’s what happened for the next three hours. All in all I think that I contributed rather effectively to the discussion and managed to keep myself under control! The meeting was again a little bit tense as all of our ‘end of camp’ ideas converged and had to be sorted through. In the end everything worked out brilliantly, I hope!

By the end of the meeting I was sufficiently calmed down, and have now rather enjoyed being inside for the rest of the day. I just gained a running partner for tomorrow night, so I’m pretty excited. I’m going to be running with one of the NAPS guys out to a place called Thomasbridge and back tomorrow evening. I wish that he’d considered coming by earlier in the summer! Oh well, it should be fun!