The Christmas Update

It's been an extraordinarily long time since I have posted here; it seems my posting patterns have diminished as I've moved ever away from the centre of the human world outwards to its furthest corners. There is so much to tell, and so little that I can say. So let's try the FAQ approach.

How cold is it up there?

The past couple of weeks have been a balmy –25°C; three weeks ago, it was –47°C with windchill, which is extraordinarily painful on the exposed skin. It is set to become much colder. The sundogs herald it well, though; the sky gives you 48 hours warning.

Of course, at –40°C the school closes. We have had a couple such days. Though compared to Ontario the cold isn't as chilling; the dryness of the air makes it tolerable.

Is there a lot of snow?

No. We got about a foot of snow in mid-October, and it hasn't left. The sky has been clear and blue since. It is too cold for water to evaporate to make the clouds to make snow, for the most part.

The snow itself is beautiful. There is no slush, even on well-worn tracks. Snow stays snowy and white. It does not even melt on your boots.

Is it dark all year round now?

Not quite. We're still south of the Arctic Circle, though we are close enough that we have been going to school in the dark at 8:35 and coming home in the dark at 16:00. The most disconcerting part is how at noon the sun always looks like it is about to set. When it does set, the process lasts for more than three hours.

When are you and Kirsten coming back to Ontario to visit?

We don't know. We are in Price Albert (called "Down South" where we come from) for Christmas and will be back on the reserve shortly. That is, after all, where our house is. It's a nice house. We like it. Flights back to Ontario are very expensive—even flights down to P.A. are very expensive. Now, in Europe, when we flew from Spain to the U.K., it cost 35 euros each, all-in. The flight from here to Ontario is no further, but it costs some thirty times more. It's not an insignificant trip.

 Is your reserve affected at all by the "Idle No More" movement?

Not directly. Folks are aware of it, and they are talking about it. Like all such movements, interest may increase over time, or it may decrease widely over time. But to anyone who is interested in the movement, pro or con, I'll say the same thing as I say to the students: read the Treaties. Start there. The debate is clearly about Treaty rights, and it's ridiculous that folks on any side of the issue are even opening their mouths until they know what those rights are.

Seriously, read the treaties. It will take you five minutes. Don't read some pundit's interpretations of the treaties. Read the treaties themselves. I don't know why anyone would inconvenience themselves with the debate if they haven't done that.

Have you had caribou yet?

Yes. It's very good.

The caribou are taken some hundreds of clicks north of our reserve. It is a major expedition. The master trappers will run lines there as well, sometimes making as much as $90K in a season. Packs of wolves, wolverine and marten abound.

What other wildlife is there?

Not much in town. It's a town, after all, with ATVs and snowmobiles and trucks zipping up and down the streets; wildlife stay away like they do in any busy town. There are also dozens upon dozens of semi-wild dogs that live out and about the town, further lessening the chances of many animals wandering close. But we have seen spruce grouse, ptarmigan, and many great flocks of snow bunting, which are a remarkable bird for their prescience and their telepathy.

We also had a very large pine marten clinging to the door frame of our house one evening. Stepping out accidentally two feet away from the gigantic weasel, it was ferocious with its hisses through its tiny sharp teeth. Très cool.

What's it like teaching on a northern reserve?

This is really the question to which everyone wants an answer, and you have to understand that it's also the one that is most difficult to put into writing, especially publicly. There are three things you should know. First, it is a positive experience. Second, there are challenges, but they're not, for the most part, anything like the ones that people say they are. Third, if it's fair to say that there are unquestionably problems (and it would be madness to pretend that there weren't), every party involved is at least partially complicit in those problems. There are feasible short-term solutions to the problems that would not only allow parity, but would also result in First Nations schools becoming a model for school systems around the world. But political will would need to be present among many, many players.

As always, I look forward to hearing from all of you.
—Vance

Craziest Thing

Kirsten and I have begun the process of settling into our beautiful three-bedroom house. I am sitting at my desk, beside a window that shows all midnight hues now but hours before filtered the shimmering Lake Athabasca through birchy yellow-green leaves.

If you ever have the opportunity to fly Transwest Air, you should do it. No lines, no question about cargo or baggage or luggage arriving safely, and as the plane is bording, the friendly attendant is likely to recognize you and make sure you get on the plane. Flying over Northern Saskatchewan is difficult to describe—in the early morning haze, perhaps like a felt fabric ocean speckled with pools of mercury. Here—spruce forest and rocky outcrops mottled by lakes stretching beyong the limits of human imagination.

In the short time we have been here, three people have acted as tour guides, each of them pointing out different features of the town. Though the community will be out of gasoline for some time, we had no trouble getting help driving our half-ton of supplies to our house.

Tomorrow, we will pick blueberries from the vast swaths of bushes that stretch for miles behind the school. A gentleman who was born and raised here has offered to take us fishing on Sunday.

If this is the craziest thing that we've done so far, then it's good to know that crazy people seldom know that they are.

Time to go see if we can see some Northern Lights.

Go Time

We are sitting in the living room of my uncle's house in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. We are further north now than most people on the planet will ever venture. And yet tomorrow, in about nine hours in fact, we will fly north further still, almost to 60° but not quite. That's exciting for a few reasons.

In the first place, crazy people who want to teach in remote areas always set the Territories as their goal. We've thought this way, too. But such dreamers are, of course, an entire demographic. We're excited to be among the handful of people who have ever set a Denesuline First Nation of Northern Saskatchewan as the ultimate destination.

Second, we are intrigued by the mystery. We went to ship our freight at the P.A. Airport today, and a worker there who had lived in FdL said to us, "Wow. That's West." What a conception. In P.A., already North, and P.A.'ns know that they're north, to fly three hours even further north is conceptualized as West. I won't interpret the words at this point—your ideas are as good as mine are.

As I write this brief entry, I am sipping my last alcohol for, perhaps, nearly a year. We are flying to a "dry reserve" and intend to follow the rules. I am worried that my poor liver will not get enough exercise, especially since I have worked so hard to train it vigorously, but I suspect it could use a vacation.

"This might be the craziest thing that we've done yet," Kirsten tells me. I'm inclined to agree, though neither of us quite know why.

Relocation

This story ends, and begins, with Kirsten and I in Canada.

We love Spain.  We love England.  We love Zambia, too.  And there is much of Europe left to explore.  Our work with VHS has been terrific, allowing us to truly work meaningfully from any of a number of places (albeit, some more successfully than others) and we proved to ourselves (if no one else) that living in such a fluid way was feasible and wonderful and something of a dream.

We had several concepts about the next stop after England, the "rest of Europe" being a big one, after we could get back in to the Schenegen Area.  But we also started talking about living in Québec for a while.  Both of us are "bilingual" from the point of view of facility in a language, but not "bilingual" from the point of view of fluency.  So we thought, perhaps we might relocate to Québec for a year or so to improve French.

This got us talking about a future course that we will be writing for VHS on Native Studies.  We realized that we could not really effectively research literature from Europe, making Canada all the more enticing.  And we discussed how we had thought, in the past, of teaching in a First Nation, and/or somewhere in the far north.  But our work with VHS has made us into big believers in Online Education—and specifically, asynchronisity.  We have come to believe that the classroom can be confining, especially in places where the outdoors and community have so much to offer.  Yet (and I think the discussion thread between David Armour and me a couple of weeks ago highlights this point) the classroom (or, more broadly, the community) is the only milieu for certain types of development. They're types of development that don't fit neatly into "standards" or "outcomes" or "expectations," but they are universally acknowledged as important.

On this basis, we noted a First Nation in the far north was looking for teachers, and we applied for these jobs, using these concepts as the basis of our letters and interviews.  And as it turns out, they not only agree, but have been moving in this direction for some time.

So Kirsten and I are back in Canada.  If you are in any of the places that we will be, you will see us until about the end of August, at which point we are going to fly northwards, and see another part of Canada that we haven't seen.

We do love every place that we have been so far—including, of course, Canada, always our home.

Such a Good Idea

I was in England for the first time when I was fifteen.  Besides two day-trips into the United States when I was in elementary school, it was my first experience in a foreign country.  I spent five days in England, four days in France and four days in Switzerland.  It was in connection with an essay contest that I had won, and I travelled with one other person from every province and territory in Canada and one from every state in the U.S.  It was easily the most formative single experience of my life.  In the wake of the Charlottetown Accord, the campaign for the second Québec sovereignty referendum, the Turbot War (Spanish Fishing Crisis) and the North American Free-Trade Agreement, I, like many Canadians, was brimming with thoughts of nation and patrimony.  Combine this with a fifteen-year-old masculine sense of honour and duty and pride, and I think my patriotism could have burst, blasting maple syrup all over any unsuspecting stander-by.  Though I didn't know it at the time, I went to Europe in search of Canada.  I caught glimpses of it in my conversations with Americans and Britons, with French and Swiss, with Québécois and Newfoundlanders.  I saw the differences, and came back understanding those routines I had mistaken for silences as something that a concept like "Canada" unexpectedly represented.  I came to see, I think, that if there is to be a nation at all, and if it is to be real and good and intelligent  and at peace in the world, then the very things that define it would be at all times invisible to its citizens.

In a similar way, I came to know myself by negative relief.  A small town can be something of a fishbowl and, for all that one might love it and honour what it is, one can and I think ought to wonder how one might change simply by virtue of not being watched.  Europe was also my first experience in the presence of many and the absence of any that I knew.  And, unfettered by perceived expectations, I discovered something very much like Vance.  Nothing surprising.  Just, likely a more comfortable version of Vance, Vance happier with himself and at peace with his choices.

The experience, then, of making the inverse trip, of living first in Zambia, and then Spain, and then England, is remarkably different.  Having seen something akin to extremes of difference from Canada, being in the U.K. makes me conscious of our similarities.  English Canadians got a lot from the British.  It is hard to articulate what, because it is not immediately obvious in language or culinary preferences or social habits.  It is more in subtle things, like the shapes of the knobs on guardrails, the tacit desire to label things, the belief that clothes cover the body rather than expressing the soul.  These phenomena are not universal.  Then, the use of flags as decoration, seen throughout the United States, pales in comparison to what is done in Britain.  And oddly, certain aspects of Zambia that seemed very foreign—the love of cakes, the clustering of like businesses, the predeliction to expressing enthusiasm or endorsement with "OK!"—turn out to be British, as well, like Britain was a plum pudding that was picked apart over centuries, raisins going to one colony, peel to another, dough to another.

Meantime, Kirsten and I are finishing up a Canadian history course.  I am writing about the Charlottetown Accord and the Turbot war and the Québec referendum and NAFTA for students who were not alive when these things happened.  Except now I have lived in Québec and I have lived in Spain and I have crossed truly open borders and I have politicked with the people who first tried to revamp Canada's Constitution.  All those things that got my patriotic adolescent heart pounding almost two decades ago, they're now integrated somewhere in something like Vance.

I've accidentally come into accord with John Ralston Saul, that Canada is an idea, or it is nothing at all.  And not only is it such a good idea, but finally, after looking for it for so long, I'm finally acquiring the language to describe what that idea is.

Canada's Really Big

We Canadians (or us Canadians, as we also sometimes call ourselves) do enjoy making fun of our non-Canadian friends for having no concept of how big Canada is.  We smile inwardly in a very self-congratulatory way whenever an American shows up to southern Ontario in July and wonders where the snow is, or when we meet a German biker on the Trans-Can who thought that he could cycle from sea to sea in a week flat.  The righteous among us say its sad, but no one thinks that it's sad.  We all absolutely love it.

Kirsten remarked to me the other day that the days here are extremely long--longer than either of us had ever known. Google Maps confirmed what we had suspected: being in the south of England as we are, we are at the same latitude as southern James Bay, indeed the furthest north that either of us have ever lived.  That's a weird for a Canadian to get his head around, but not too surprising.

But the part that jarred me was when I discovered that when we lived in the south of Spain, we were at the same latitude as Virginia Beach.  It seemed impossible that when we moved from Spain to England, we travelled the same distance as almost-Carolina to almost-Nunavut's southern isles.

Why was this so surprising? Was it because, as a Canadian, I tend to think of every country in Europe as a Huron-County-sized blip on the map, no matter how much I might know better intellectually? Perhaps the thought never occurred to me that any distance in Europe (which is still a little bigger than Canada, after all) could be that far.  Silly, yes.  I know better, yes.  And I'm willing to bet a lot of American skiers and German bikers know better, too.  They suddenly don't seem so ridiculous to me.

And a part of what is disturbing is realizing that you cannot take a two hour flight from southern Ontario to James Bay for $50, and even if you could, that's as far as you could go.  And you wouldn't even be a half of the way to the southern part of mainland Nunavut, neither would you be a quarter of the way to the northern-most point in Canada.  And that's not something that we think about a lot, because we don't really have any concept of how big Canada is, either.

Why? What? Where?

It has been more than three months since my last blog entry, and folks are getting angry. Admittedly, I had some things to get my head around. Kirsten and I left Zambia ("exiled from Eden" we like to say) and came to Spain. Now we are in England. And I freely confess that there was some part of me that suspected that the readers of this blog were a tad more interested in education in Africa than they were in what I was up to.

But there have been so many questions, that I thought I'd perhaps dedicate this re-entry blog to answering the main ones.

Why did you leave Zambia?

From the very beginning, the idea was to continue to teach and write whilst working on the Zambian school. While internet is accessible, and sufficient for emails, blog postings and the occasional grading of student work, it was not sufficient for the development and research that we needed to do. The message isn't so much "never again" as "not yet."

Perhaps, then, it was a tad inconvenient, or less comfortable than you had in mind?

Trust me, comfort had nothing to do with it. Two weeks before leaving, the first time that we came to the conclusion that we'd need to leave, we had something of a breakdown at the mud hut, our first home, on some of the richest and most beautiful land in the world. We profoundly did not want to leave. We determined to redouble our efforts to stay, coordinating time at cafés and hotels in Solwezi to get ahead. It was like spinning tires in mud, making it worse. Money was required to pay for internet space and time, and with frequent power-outs and internet downtime, we lost more than we made. We needed another plan before we ran out of money completely.

So it wasn't a matter that Zambia itself was a part of the problem?

If Zambia didn't have a host of challenges, we would not have been there in the first place. There is a lot of good work going on, and there is a lot of good work that is yet to be done. Of course Zambia's infrastructure was a part of the problem, but that wasn't directly why we left. We left because we could not afford to stay.

So why Spain?

One evening in Kitwe, at a YMCA internet café, we studied options for plane tickets. The goal was to find the cheapest ticket to a country with reliable internet. The winner: Lusaka to Barcelona by way of Johannesburg and Istanbul.

OK, but you ended up in Granada, half-way across Spain from Granada. How'd that happen?

The night before departure, we investigated cheap rental properties in Spain that would include internet. Most of them were at or near Costa del Sol. We rented a car in Barcelona (for very cheap) and drove there, attempting to call and email landlords along the way. The first person to return the call was Tim Shepstone, who had a beautiful and cheap place in Acequias. We took it without having even toured it. Who knew that we would wake up to see the splendour of the Sierra Nevada from our balcony? We were happy not to sleep in the car.

Right. So now you're in—England? Why?

The Canadian visa in the Schengen Area, which includes Spain, lasts for only 90 days, after which we were required by law to leave for another 90 days. Schengen encompasses Portugal, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and just about everywhere else except the UK and Ireland, so our options for a cheap next-stop were limited. Meantime, Tim, who has become a good friend, had just purchased a property right on the seaside at St. Leonard's-on-Sea, and offered to rent it out to us at a good rate.

Right. So what's next? When are you coming back to Canada?

Don't know, and don't know.

But you're coming back, right?

Yes, that's the plan. We just don't know when, exactly.

Have you concluded your work with Zambia?

There is still much to be done and there is work from away that we can do. However, we found ourselves in the unfortunate situation of needing to work like mad to get our heads back above water, which dampened the momentum we had with the project. More work is possible in the future.

Would you go back?

Definitely. But we have to be able to work, no matter where we are.

Hopefully this clears a few things up... I'll resume my travel musings shortly. It occurred to me to switch blogs to do so, but I don't think that I will. The work we are doing with Virtual High School is good work, and it is also "chance building" for many students all over the world. There is great potential for online learning to do even more. This blog's name has outlasted the plan it was intended to label, and has gone on to encompass something else. I cannot help but be happy about that.

—Vance