charity fridays: organizations worth supporting

Apologies for not posting much this week. Between my crazy work schedule and my laptop dying unexpectedly (eep...) I haven't been able to post much. Now I'm slowly painstakingly typing this out on my husband's Galaxy tab.

Anyway, enough about my tech woes. For this week's Charity Friday, here are some organizations advocating for great causes that I think are worth supporting.

• Jer's Vision: I met Jeremy at a birthday dinner once, but I'd heard of him long before. As a teenager, while the rest of us were angsty about homework, parents, and our prom date, Jeremy was fighting with his high school about the right to start up a LGBT-postive club at school, resulting in a human rights complaint, and one of the largest human rights settlements in Canadian history. What did he do with the money? He started up Jer's Vision, a non-profit organiztaion to eliminate bullying, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of discrimination in schools and the community. It's an inspiring story - but then,  Jeremy himself is quite inspiring. Donation page here.
• (Ottawa) Hollaback!: This is a very creative initiative to raise awareness about street harassment. People post their stories about being harassed - intimidated, cat-called, called a racial slur, groped - in the safety of a supportive community, thanks to the availability of mobile technology. It's a really interesting project, with local bases in each city.  Donation page here.
• Leave Out Violence: My friend Leila let me know about this project. She's on the board of directors for this organization, as if she wasn't busy enough being a lawyer. This organization is based in Toronto and is devoted to fighting youth violence. Check it out! Just keep im mind that the website is http://leaveoutviolence.org/ and NOT love.org like I originally tried...that is a completely different website.

I'm still participating in the 30×30 challenge to spend 30 minutes outside every day for 30 days! Which isn't always easy, considering sometimes we have snowstorms. In May.

Day 3: On your next walk, stop to smell the flowers

what flowers

Day 4: Outdoor picnic in -30°C weather at the ruins of the old stone church

Nunavut dog drama

There is some mad dog drama going on in town.  Cambridge Bay apparently has a problem with packs of dogs that run loose through town. Some of the dogs are really friendly, like the three-legged Malamute that I've nicknamed Lefty, who joins me spontaneously on my running route sometimes.

Some of them are not so well-trained.  People have complained that the dogs running wild steal their own dogs' food, or worse, attack their puppies. These fights that occur are often unfair, because domestic dogs are chained up to the yard, while the loose dogs are not. There's a certain sense of helplessness and resentment on the part of the owners too, who have been following the rules by keeping their dogs on a leash, and yet feel like they can't defend their dogs when attacked because it's only the by-law officer who is allowed to put down dangerous dogs.  People grumble about how they're going to start to need guard dogs for their guard dogs.  You can bet in the old days it wasn't like this.

Even worse, there have been cases of rabies reported recently in some dogs. They've had to put down the dogs and remove their brains to examine the disease.  This is how it all ends, my friends. The zombie apocalypse starts with a few seemingly innocent reports of rabies outbreaks in stray dogs.  Soon enough it becomes undead people, hungry for brains. I always thought Cambridge Bay Nunavut would be the last haven from the hordes of zombies, not that catalyst.  You heard it from here first.

And then there's baby-making that goes on. That's a whole different kind of drama.  It seems like all the dogs in town go into heat all at the same time. I don't know if you've ever heard a dozen dogs all howl the same lovesick song at high noon, but it's a creepy sound.

I've seen this pair of dogs in particular running all over town, causing a scandal with their PDA

There's one dog that I always pass on my way to work: I call him Circle Dog because he always runs excitedly in a circle around the metal pole that he's tied to.  He always seems so confused, the way he runs around in circles but apparently Circle Dog is not so naive, because he's the baby daddy of a bunch of new litters in town. Keep in mind that this guy is chained to a pole all day long. The lonely girl-dogs come to him to get pregnant. What a life.

Meet Circle Dog, the top dog in town.

life in the goldfish bowl

carrying a bag of chips, pretending this is my ride

The sun's been coming up at 3:30AM these days. It's pretty early. And it's not like it's really ever getting dark either. Night time has been replaced by a permanent daylight, as though the world is stuck in that time where the sun has just gone down or is just about to come up.  

permanent twilight: Cambridge Bay at midnight

As you can imagine, it makes it a little be difficult to sleep. With the sun rising so early, your body feels like it should be waking up at 4AM. We've got these blackout curtains that keep out most of the sunlight, but you'd be amazed at how the smallest crack of sunlight shining through will keep you awake at night. For now, this is the solution that we've worked out:

maybe not the classiest solution, but it works.

It means we end up waking up in total darkness. This can be pretty disorienting in the opposite way, so right now we're working on training a monkey robot to come in and open the cutains at 7AM.

With the gloriously long days of sunshine, the weather has gotten warmer - at min, and the kids have all been playing outside, in the most uniquely Arctic way possible.  Little boys pushing their BMX bicycles through the snow-covered ice roads.  Kids playing street hockey on the streets outside - on ice skates. Children riding their sleds down the hill - a hill that happens to also be a road. Because the roads are completely covered in ice here, they also make for excellent toboggan hills for the kids, who seem to have no fear for the drivers backing their trucks out of the driveway. Come to think of it, the kids like to play in traffic a lot. They are completely oblivious to the oncoming trucks and snowmobiles. The world is their playground, dammit.

We've been slowly getting used to the other quirky aspects of living in the Arctic. Have I told you about the hair drier yet? As you know, one of my first adventures in the Arctic was having to use a hair dryer on my colleague's front door lock to unfreeze the damn thing enough for my key to fit in.  For some reason probably related to the weather changes, this has become a regular part of our life now for our own house, and we often have to leave a hair drier outside on the porch whenever we go out.

classic Nunavut front porch tools

We're also becoming better at grocery shopping in the North. As I've mentioned before, I am constantly surprised by the food items that do make it all the way here. Like eggs. Eggs aren't particularly exotic, but if you think of the long trip that has to be taken to bring fragile, delicate eggs over several planes to get here, it's pretty amazing to realize I can eat eggs here.  Even if everything isn't available all the time, we've learned to enjoy the stuff that we do get as a treat. The produce available at the store guides what our menu for the day will be. When the store has beets, we make borscht. When the store has zucchinis, Rob makes hobak-jeon, Korean zucchini pancakes. Sometimes the store even has bok choy, and then Casa Glob has a Chinese food night.  

and then sometimes, the grocery store looks like this.

These are the things that make life in Cambridge Bay the unique experience it is. Sometimes it feels a bit like living inside a goldfish bowl, or maybe that scene from the Matrix movies when Neo is stuck at that subway station to nowhere. But there's a lot going on inside that goldfish bowl, and I'm slowly getting used to the typical sights of the town, the little ladies riding ATVS with babies strapped to their backs, the giant ravens circling above my head (I am just waiting for them to develop the evolutionary ability to take me down), hunting culture. This weekend, we played poker at a house that was the site of a triple murder five years ago, followed an outdoor picnic in -30°C weather, finished with a dance party in a beautiful house that was equipped with a sound system, smoke machines, and midnight sun. We're getting used to the peculiarities of the community, but it's never dull. 

hunter culture

hunter culture: I love this ad selling a harpoon set

little lady with a baby in her hood, filling up her ATV

giant, Hitchcock-style ravens, ready to eat my face as soon as they figure out how to

Canadian North

charity fridays: run baby run

It's Charity Friday again! Which, if I had an alliterative mind at all, I would have originally named Fundraiser Friday.  Either way, consider offering your monetary support to my colleagues, who all apparently love to run:

•  My friend Erin is running her very first marathon this month for the Ottawa Race Weekend. I always laugh at the phrase "first marathon" because once I hit my first, I'll be happy and quit. Anyway, not only is she running her first marathon, she's also raising money to fund scholarships for the Afghan School Project.  $25 will fund one month of English and computing courses for students in Kandahar. Only $25 will make such a big difference in a Afghan students life! That's how much I spend on muskox earrings! Donate here.


• Over on the other side of the river, my friend Geneviève is also running for charity. She'll be running for cancer research on Team Sylvia Reiter as part of Montreal's Defi Canderel. This event involves participants running through the streets of Montreal. I would personally find it difficult to run through the streets of Montreal without stopping at every other shop to eat the delicious dishes Montreal has to offer...so power to the runners of the Defi Canderel for exercising their will power not to do so.


• Over on the other side of the ocean, my friend Leigh is running the 5K race for the Race For Life London in the UK, where she currently lives. I am suggesting that she run her 5K race "Gloria-style", which means, with snow pants and spikes on the bottom of her shoes. Regardless, give her your support. Proceeds go to funding cancer research.

Meanwhile, some of you know that I've signed up for the 30X30 Challenge, by CBC and the David Suzuki Foundation. The goal is to spend 30 minutes outside, every day, for 30 days. You'd think it won't be too hard for me, since I tend to go for jogs outside and I walk to work.  But we'll see when a spring blizzard hits.   Anyway, I'll be posting some photos from my challenge on a weekly basis.

Day 1: The first challenge was to drink your daily coffee under a tree instead of at your desk. However, we have no trees above the treeline, so I decided to drink my tea on a frozen beach instead. Reading comics. In my snow pants.

Day 2: Beautiful sun dogs in the sky

posters for court

Court is in town next week! Here in Nunavut, the court travels on circuit to each community, so that people can experience the justice system in their own community.  In Cambridge Bay, court comes every couple of months.  In preparation for court, the Law Centre puts up posters like this to remind people who have been arrested and charged to speak to a lawyer before their court appearance.

hunters

caribou head: skull-licious doggy treat

The other day, somebody in the community Facebook group was advertising fresh grizzly bear meat for sale, from the kill that a hunter had shot the other day. I wanted to buy grizzly bear meat! I would have no idea how to cook grizzly bear meat. Maybe in a stew, like rabbit, like my partner suggests, since it would probably be tough and gamey.  It's probably a good thing we didn't buy grizzly bear meat. Next time, Smokey...

Do you ever feel like a lot of North Americans want to avoid thinking about where our meat comes from? Our fish is served without scales or heads, and even when we walk into the butcher, the chunks of meat hanging from hooks don't resemble anything like the cows or pigs they once were. It's like we want to tell ourselves that burgers come from the burger tree and not from animals that were once living.

It's not like this in other parts of the world.  Just visit the markets in Barcelona, where the heads of ducks and rabbits are intact so you can see from the eyes of how fresh the meat is.  Order a "smilie" dish in Namibia, named after the fact that the goat's head served to you appears to be smiling. Or just take a stroll through Chinatown and peek into the grocery stores where feet and tails and faces of various animals greet you.

The Nunavummiut have less qualms about where their meat comes from. A lot of them go out on the land with the snowmobiles and catch the meat themselves.  It's pretty neat to see modern hunting culture among the Inuit.  Sometimes the hunters post in the community Facebook group, asking for assistance in removing the antlers off a caribou skull, as well as assistance in cutting the caribou head in half. (I wonder if we can take some advice from my friend in Africa and use a bandsaw?)

I also enjoy the hunters' postings on the community bulletin boards at the grocery stores.

for the record, I haven't figured out yet what a kalvik / kavik is. 

In the traditional community spirit, people often share what meat they do catch, especially offering the first cuts of meat to the elders.  This weekend, a community member invited everyone to a potluck dinner at the church to share the polar bear meat that had been shot this week.  This means, by the way, I've now turned down two opportunities to eat bears in one week.

 The Nunavummiut love country food, like muskox meat and char.  At the local grocery store, the "country food" section also has Korean-style galbi ribs for some reason, so I guess I love "country food" too....

I used to be a little squeamish about meat and fur.  I didn't eat seafood for a decade because Koreans like to serve their dishes with the whole fish intact, and I don't like the way they would look at me with their fishy eyes. I got over it, though. I think that you shouldn't eat meat, if you aren't comfortable with where your meat comes from. And I like to eat meat. Which means my Inuit neighbours can now totally hang up their wolverine and fox hides on their porch and I no longer blink an eye.

sled

yes, that's a leg poking up from the roof.

And deal with fish heads, randomly lying on the side of the road for no reason that I can really understand.

why is this still here? why has no one made bouillabaisse out of this yet?

charity fridays: cycling for a cause

If you're like me and you'd rather your money go towards charitable causes than to the tax man, there are all sorts of great fundraisers and charities to donate to.  I've decided that I'm going to devote Fridays to listing my favourite social causes and events of the week:

• CN Cycle for CHEO: My good friend Jasmine Woodley is going to do a 70 kilometre obstacle course on her bicycle, because she is *crazy*. And by crazy, I mean full of all sorts of courage that I lack. Read more about CN Cycle for CHEO here, and open up your wallets to support kids with cancer.

• Team aca-Pedal harmoKNEEs for the ORCC Spin-a-Thon: My friend Janet Lo is also going to do crazy things to her legs by spinning for EIGHT HOURS in order to raise funds for the Ottawa Rape Crisis Center. Those of you who know me know that supporting survivors of sexual assault is an important cause to me. Help my friend Janet out...and maybe we should send her a massage therapist for her legs afterwards too.

• Calgary Housing and Employment Services: My friend Josh Lam is very passionate about justice issues, because, well, he's just generally a really nice guy. After doing some great work for the International Commission of Jurists in Kenya, he's now helping to start up a new project in Calgary where he's based, Calgary Housing and Employment Services. This organization provides individuals facing homelessness with supported housing and employment strategies along with specialized legal services, and they very much could use your funding to get started.