Greetings from Rocky Lane,
So much has happened in the last couple of weeks. One thing about being so far north is that people really appreciate the long summer days and the warmth. I think I will break this post into two parts, one more general and one about aboriginal day.
Band Meeting – Everyone was there
Firstly on the work front, we have been moving forward. Nisha and I attended a Band meeting where we introduced ourselves to a lot of the members of the nation. Meeting with the whole band are not that common, and band members really engaged with the discussions even though the meeting lasted over 4 hours on a hot summer day.
One of the challenges with our work has been that the Band Manager was replaced at around the time we started our fellowship. The new manager is just getting started and finding his feet. In the last few days he has asked for my help in getting his office sorted. This has been unbelievably useful as in sorting through his files I have got access to a lot of information on the companies that have been run through Beaver in the past as well as some community planning that has already been done. I am yet to sort through it in detail but I think it will be very useful for both Nisha and I.
The Forks, where the fishing competition took place.
Nisha and I also attended the father’s day celebrations at a nearby river. There was a fishing competition, Barbecue, and sports and games. I got invited to join a team for horseshoes (which I unsurprisingly I did not excel at). I was also asked to call the Bingo which lead to some teasing from a few of the elders (including one who jokingly tried to run me over with her vehicle and then called concerned the next day because she was worried she had injured me!) Apparently my Bingo calling skills will be in high demand throughout the summer.
I also got to share a little bit of Kiwi culture with some of the local kids. There is a program up here called Alberta Future Leaders which is a summer program run by university students to encourage kids in artistic and sporting pursuits and also to attend various camps and youth events. They invited me to come and do a touch rugby program. Because the older kids were getting ready for their end of year exams it was mostly the younger ones who came to try and play. Most of them had never seen rugby played so we did some passing drills to begin with (to get rid of the American football quarterback style passing). It was really neat to see how quickly they picked up the game and were starting to develop all sorts of tactics (though I had to say that putting one person with the ball in the middle of a huddle so they couldn’t be touched and moving down the field was probably not within the rules). Hopefully I will get invited back to do some more sessions later in the summer. As it stands I am pretty sure the Rocky Lane touch rugby team is the best in Northern Alberta.
In wildlife news I finally saw my first Beaver, it was swimming in the river one night while we were playing baseball, I also saw another young bear when I was out for a drive. Apparently there have been bears seen in the last few days in a few spots within a few hundred metres from where I live. It is one thing to generally know that there are bears around, it is another thing to specifically have members of the community tell you where they have seen them and that I should go out walking. With that in mind I hope I can follow Nisha’s advice.
Advice from Nisha
A Kiwi in Beaver 