Str8 Up Krazies

It’s been a pretty busy few weeks with a lot of ups and downs. Ender and I have the day off from school because of a power outage (which has since been fixed at least for the teacher houses) and are trying to get the house back in order.  But let’s start this update with the positives shall we.

The Ups

 

The spoils.

 We got a mean amount of treat making done for a bake sale for the high school. Jenn is an amazing baker and gets pretty excited when experimenting with new recipes. She tried out pumpkin cinnamon rolls and they were pretty delicious. I stuck with my tried and tested banana bread for the bake sale. There is something comforting about being able to bake a cake from scratch without a recipe and have it turn out. I’m sure that over the winter months that will become true with a number of recipes.

Last week we attended Circles of Knowledge and Practices Conference in Winnipeg hosted by MFNERC, meant to provide resources for teaching Language Arts and Math to First Nations students as well as to promote partnerships in education. Some parts of the conference were very informative and it was nice to see other teachers from other communities across Manitoba. I really appreciated what the keynote speaker Sylvia McAdam Saysewahum has to say about Indigenous Nationhood and raising students to be lawful citizens for their respective Nations. However not being an Indigenous Canadian citizen it’s difficult to know how to approach that topic in school especially in a community like Garden Hill which in recent years has become resistant to their heritage and traditional cultural practices. 

photos by Chrissy Poitras of Spark Box Studio

The conference also gave us the opportunity to make a quick visit home to Picton to celebrate our friends Tamara and Adrian’s wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony and a pretty awesome reception and we spent the night dancing, sipping scotch and eating poutine. The following day we caught up with our friends Kyle, Chrissy , Morgan and Chris, and then later had dinner with the newlyweds. Unfortunately when you are on borrowed time, you miss out on some awesome things, including when your friends decide to celebrate birthdays by lighting pianos on fire.

The Downs

At least we got some decorations up!

Our time of good fortune pretty much ends there. On the way back into Belleville we received a text informing us our house back in Garden Hill had been broken into. We had been warned about break ins and made sure to pack up anything of value and stow it in less than obvious places but we did lose some food, drugs, toothpaste and Ender’s camera as well as general feelings of security. If it’s never happened to you it’s a pretty terrible feeling to have your home broken into.  Even if you haven’t lost much (they appear to have been in and out pretty quickly) your personal space has still been violated. We have since boarded up the door that was kicked in and added additional locks to the door we will continue to use.

Unfortunetly bad luck comes in threes. Halfway through the school day power went out due to a line breaking out at Oxford House and because of a storm they were unable to get someone flown in to repair it until this morning. Water was out too until the evening and when it came back on we all rushed inside to fill containers just in case it shut off again. At this time our water heater exploded and split down the back and we had a pretty frantic hour stopping and cleaning up the water while we tried to contact someone from Operations and Maintenance. We are now waiting for a replacement water heater which will hopefully get here before freezing pipes become a problem.

We are lucky to have good friends here to help us out when our lives fall apart. In the past few days we’ve been given cookies and coffee, lent mops and towels and have still managed to try and relax and play cards by LED night bug light through all of this. It’s been a rough week but if we can come out of this alive we should have a few good stories to laugh about over coffee when we’re fifty.