The next surprise was our little plane, our little bear skin plane. Yes, we all played way too much to get our bags on board, and let that be a lesson for anyone else traveling to Sioux Lookout with Katimavik. Unless you have 1 check bag, and 1 carry on where the total weight is 50 pounds, you're going to pay a lot of money. Worst part is Katimavik isn't gonna refund you that money. Not cool.
When we got to Sioux Lookout we were greeted by more than just our new PL, Sarah, but actually members of the community, there to help us to our houses. That's the other thing, we have two houses as of now. Kyle, Landen, Andrew, Marie-France, Val, and Tiffany, are at the "Prince House", named because it's on Prince Street. Or Prince Road. I don't really know because I'm in the "King House", named for the same reasons, I'm here with Cody, Francois, Jessica, and Sarah. The King house is where we have dinner, and for the most part hang out.
Those people at the Prince house came down to us for a brief snack time and orientation. The walk between the two house is about 10-15 minutes. It was long until ten jet-lagged youth desperately needed bed time.
Whatever sleep we got wasn't enough for the next day. Our work place tours were all done in one day. To make matters worse that's 13 work placements and most of them are part time. We toured:
The Salvation Army:
The local Sally Ann, gave us a cute little tour, and we all got to take one thing from the store for free! The majority of the work consisted of using the cash register and sorting clothes in the back.
Cedar Bay:
Here we toured the local house ranch, which had a variety of horses. My new horse-savvy-self even petted a couple of the stallions. The work focused around maintenance and feeding.
The Rec Center:
We visited the Rec Center which was particularly neat because were all going to receive free gym passes. So, we'll probably be back there rather soon.
Wawatay Television:
This was the headquarters of a broadcasting company that has a couple shows being featured on Aboriginal Peoples Television right now. However one of there major projects was put on hold due to political troubles, as a result they were later taken out of the volunteer pool.
The Aboriginal Womens Circle:
This was an organization was devoted to bettering the lives of women, so it had a lot of baby sitting style components . There was also a lot of administrative work, xerox, shredding documents and what not.
Meno Ya Win Health Center:
The brand new state of the art medical center that fuses new medicine with aboriginal tradition. The volunteer work was on a broad spectrum of different things, naturally, it became my preference.
Three Day Cares (Biidabin, Norah Love, and Sioux Mountain):
Each consisted of young kids, and SK and JK. For Kyle and I, this was confusing, SK is not Saskatchewan, it's Secondary Kindergarten, and at JK is not "Just Kidding", it's Junior Kindergarten.
Out Of The Cold:
This place was a regular looking building which happened to be both a shelter and a food bank. The previous volunteer had painted an incredible mural on the wall of the womens room. Most of the works seemed like cleaning or maintenance.
Sioux Lookout Anti Racism Committee:
SLARC has been around for a long time in the community, it started to combat racism but has turned into more of a community involvement movement.
Chamber of Commerce:
This was a real unique workplace, working in the tourism center for Sioux Lookout. The real local culture center of Sioux Lookout, they really like their blue berries here.
New Vision:
This was another unique workplace, with a variety of multi-media, maintaince, design, community projects.
All that in one day. Wow. Worst part was the interviews were the very next day. So at 8am we woke up to meet at The Rec Center for 9am to do some interviews. Unlike the way we did this in Montreal, we only interview our top 5 or 6 depending. So I met with Meno Ya Win, Chamber of Commerce, Out of The Cold, The Daycares, SLARC, and Salvation Army. Then we all went home while the workk placements fought it out for who they wanted with Sarah.
Later that day Sarah came home shortly after lunch to announce the news:
Cody is part time at Cedar Bay, part time Out of the Cold. Francois is part time Cedar Bay, part time Meno Ya Win. Jessica got full time at New Vision. Marie-France got full time at Norah Love Daycare. Tiffany is working at Salvation Army and Cedar Bay, very appropriate for Manitoba's cow girl. Val got Women's Circle and SLARC. Landen will be at the Chamber of Commerce and Out of The Cold. Kyle will be working at The Rec Center Full time. As for me, I got my very first choice as full time at the Meno Ya Win health center. YAY!
Later that night Sarah mentioned there was a Ladies Auction Night at the Legion. Since is was a ladies night, the guys were asked to stay behind at the house to work on another project. Val was too sick to go, so Marie-France, Jessica, Tiffany, Sarah and myself left for the evening to help out at the event. The proceeds when to the Sioux Lookout Blue Berry festival, which is apparently this HUGE ten day festival at the beginning of August. My job was to sell drink tickets, very similar to my work with G-pa and Rotary at West Vancouver Community Day. As things go more hectic it became my job to ring the bell for "shooters". This was interesting because now that were in Ontario, Tiffany and I are no longer of legal drinking age, but by the end of the night we were serving the shooters. Which was insignificant to Sarah and Jessica who were mixing the drinks at the bar. The highlight of the evening was Marie-France show casing the items as they went up for bid.
After this evening we, the ladies, went to the Prince house for a while to hang out and brag about our cool volunteer work. Then we had our first taste of running home to beat the curfew. We made it.
On Saturday we took a big hike to the top of Sioux Mountain, where Sarah told us the story of how Sioux Lookout got it's name. If you think I'm gonna recite the story, you're wrong. I'm too tried from the hike to write anymore.
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