Traveling up the coast...

This past week I had the opportunity to travel up the coast to visit a couple other communities. Taking the flight up the coast seemed more like taking a train. Even though we were traveling all the way to Peawanuck, the furthest community up the coast, you still have stops at all the other communities. So to get to Peawanuck you’re going up and down 4 times with stops in Fort Albany (20min), Kashechewan (5 min), Attawapiskat (30min), and then 45 minutes to Peawanuck. Apparently the flight between Fort Albany and Kashechewan is the shortest commercial flight in the world, as it is only a 10 minute drive on the ice road.

Peawanuck has a different feel than the other communities. It is more isolated than the others, and people rely more on traditional food systems, such as fishing, trapping, and hunting. Unlike the other communities it seemed as if the community had their dog population under control, if you’ve read my blog post “It’s cold and there are dogs” you understand why this is one of the first things I noticed.

While the community has many positive attributes, delivering health care services to an isolated location still has its challenges. The nursing station has a high staff turnover, with nurses usually staying for only a couple weeks at a time. The current nurse in charge of the station had only been there for a few days, and only found out he was the charge nurse the day he left for Peawanuck. Physician services are few and far between, even though there is supposed to be a doctor in the community every month or so, it is rare when it is that frequent, and for anything beyond basic care people need to be flown south to Moose Factory, Timmins, or Kingston.

I had a chance to visit the grocery store in Peawanuck, which had a produce section slightly better than a 7-11 back home. Alongside the moldy limes and lemons, was a sad head of broccoli for $13, while instant noodles sold for 95 cents. Some people order directly from stores down south, to bypass the retail mark up, but the situation is far from ideal.

  

Another highlight of my trip up the coast was doing home visits in Fort Albany. This also provided me with the unique opportunity to counsel through a translator, as many of the elders speak Cree. At first it was an intimidating experience, but after realizing how unique and limiting the situation was, I started to relax. Using plain language is something you always keep in mind, but it is especially important when communicating through a translator, and you always wonder what has been lost in translation. I also felt pretty useless, offering someone who speaks Cree English language resources. 

What I found the most important was keeping in mind you should speak directly to the client and not with the translator, and secondly to keep a sense a humour about the situation. It is certainly not something I was trained for, but that’s what makes it fun, it forces you to stretch.