June 30=Freedom!

Whoa, okay, so I haven't been posting much in the last few weeks, but I've been busy.

Seriously.

Work has been a bit crazy, It's always crazy this time of the year. Year-end reports... budget crap... strategic planning... All very fun things... Also a couple weeks ago I went to a meeting about the legacy of the Residential school system, hence the last post. That was a pretty emotionally intense meeting.

There's been a lot of personal reflection on my part since that meeting. I heard stories of what happened in these grotesque schools from some of the survivors, I won't repeat what they said on here, but I can tell you that some of the stories were pretty horrific and actually made me feel ashamed to be a human being. It's hard to describe, I knew bad things happened in those schools, but to hear about it first hand... it was different somehow. It was kind of traumatic learning about all that ugly stuff in such a short period of time, it's a very emotionally heavy subject and all the nasty problems that have stemmed from these schools and the monsterous teachers are pretty overwhelming. Big questions were posed and I'm sorry to say that I don't have all the answers to them. There were a lot of moments when I was extremely uncomfortable being at that meeting, the urge to just leave and never look back was very strong. My instincts told me to go, some of the things I heard at that meeting made me want to tear my skin off with my bare hands. I don't like feeling such strong emotions like that, it's just much easier to block that type of thing out. But I couldn't leave. I wouldn't have been able to live with myself if I ran away from that.

Hmmm, I'm getting dangerously close to rambling, but I'm not sure exactly how to express into words all the intensity from that gathering. In some ways, there are things I just didn't want to know, but I think it was important for me to know to better understand all the pain up here.

ANYhoo... The long and short of it was that it was a difficult meeting.

I did manage to go out hunting soon after the meeting was over, one good result of going to that thing was that I met several other Inuit youth who had grown up in similar situations as I did. That actually gave me some comfort. I borrowed a coworker's snow machine and went across the bay and into the mountainous valleys, we were all pretty surprised that the snow on the other side was almost immaculate compared to our side which thawed and re-froze in February causing everything to be icy. It was gorgeous, I was so glad to be out there dispite the fact that the wind picked up late in the afternoon. That dropped the temperature down to -35 from -12 right when we were heading home. That was a bit cold... I got a bit of frostbite on my cheek and nose and my contact lenses even began freezing at a couple points, So I was driving home across the bay with my hand over my face and one eye closed. We didn't see anything the whole day, we did some ice fishing and only caught small ones, but all in all, it was a great day. I would have loved to have taken pictures, but unfortunately my camera doesn't work well in the cold.

Other than that I've pretty much been keeping quiet, back to the whole 'work, eat, sleep, repeat' routine, but it won't be for too much longer. I've given my boss notice, on June 30, 2006 I'm going to be a regular citizen. After that, I'm going to be a free man! I can't wait.