La Ronge to Delhi

It’s been a busy few weeks – from villages in northern Saskatchewan as small as fifty people to seventeen million people in Delhi. From all pandemic to no pandemic at all – I ask my uncle if he’s heard much about H1N1 in the news – he shakes his head. “No, not really – oh, there was a story when some kids at the Doon school [elite school for children from wealthy families] got sick. And I’ve heard there might be a vaccine sometime.”

There was likely more news than what reached my uncle, but an article in Frontline, “India’s National Magazine,” summarized the many other infectious diseases (HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, others) that have been far greater worries for a much longer period of time. Perspective…a pandemic of a potentially deadly disease in a country where mass death from infections is largely unknown (except for the relative, tragic excess in some communities, including Aboriginal ones) compared to the daily epidemics in most Global South countries…

Now India is my focus – the cluttered, polluted, loud, chaotic, vibrant, beautiful streets, the poverty that assaults with every child wandering barefoot through trash, the farm I will be travelling to tomorrow where biodiversity, sustainability, and local farming infrastructure are being created, lived. (http://www.navdanya.org/)

So far I have stayed at a $10/night hotel ensconced in a Delhi market that sells electronics to chickens, made a random visit to the Indian Women’s Press Corps office and had tea with several welcoming journalists, spent seven hours in a vehicle with a scarily aggressive driver who passed rounding turns on a dark road at high speeds, gone for runs through a military cantonment where soldiers in full gear run past me, lost (and found) my credit card, sweater, wallet, and backpack. And managed to think that I was one day ahead of where I really was for four days, causing me to miss several events, hotel bookings, and meeting my parents at the airport.

The initial overwhelming sensation is lessening and I am trying to be a visitor, not a tourist, someone who joins India rather than observes it. Canada has been my home for 32 years, with frequent, impacting visits to India and other parts of the world. There is something in the way people here say “You are Indian, right?,” that makes me need to say yes. I have some pieces – the broken Bengali, the clothes, the willingness, the skin colour (strangely usually irrelevant in Canada, but comforting here)…the belonging will take more time, but it will happen.

Having a voice

My article has been bumped for a second week – understandable – there’s a lot going on in the north. Municipal elections just finished (La Ronge now has a 21-year-old mayor), the Olympic Torch is arriving next week, H1N1 is starting to hit our communities, we just held a Northern Food Security conference.

I was asked to speak at the conference, and I presented to a group of grocers, hunters, university professors, friendship centre workers, nutritionists, gardeners, mayors, and others. My part was short, as it should be – I am still joining the north. I gave an overview, others provided the lived experience. How a good food box program can be created through bulk trucking of fruits and vegetables when local gardening is challenged by weather – 125 out of 1200 community residents order the box. How the hunting bylaws can curtail sustenance hunting and sharing of food. How pandemic planning in a remote community includes the shortage of food that will occur when transportation lines are disrupted.

These issues were also reflected in the debate for La Ronge mayoral candidates – other topics were housing, economic development, and the water treatment plant built in the waterfront park. These discussions prompted me to write the article below – its publishing will occur after the municipal election…perhaps it will be in time for the next federal election.

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I stand at the doorway to the elementary school gym, my eyes moving over the multiple wooden tables lined along the walls. At each table sits a waiting volunteer, ready to verify my identity and hand me a piece of paper with each candidate’s name neatly typed in alphabetical order.

Along with billions of other global voters, I have engaged in this ritual for years by visiting gyms, office, buildings, and community centres in Ontario and now Saskatchewan. The first votes I made were based on my parents’ prompting, but slowly my allegiances were formed based on research, experience, knowledge, involvement, and personal philosophy.

As I sit behind the designated cardboard shield to contemplate my choices, I am struck by the simplicity of the gym setting and the ease of the process. There are daily news stories of fervent, desperate, even blood-soaked attempts to achieve the ability to do what I am doing, without fear and without intimidation. If not for Canada’s acceptance of my parents’ immigration applications, I could be struggling to vote in my father’s often-violent eastern Indian state or living under a military dictatorship in Burma where my mother grew up.

I am both incredulous and somewhat understanding of friends’ frustrations with our voting process – their reasons include absence of inspiration, the distorted way votes are counted, and their sense of one vote being inconsequential. In some communities there are added layers of alienation – feeling included in the election of a once-colonizing and often discriminatory government requires a difficult feat of forgiveness.

Yet voting is equivalent to a societal partnership, a commitment to weigh the positions and actions of individuals and parties at local, provincial, federal and band levels. It indicates a belief in the sincerity of a politician as someone who articulates and fights for a common good – responsible economic development, a regional recycling program, a provincial housing strategy, a national climate change policy.

If faith wavers – in the system, the politicians, the issues – then there are ways to act, rather than contributing to a low voter turnout and then decrying eventual representatives and their decisions.

In the gym I am staring down at the X I have marked beside my preferred candidate. I slip my piece of paper into the box with the confidence of knowing that it will be accurately counted and that there are no security guards outside the building needed to protect this democratic institution. I also have confidence that despite my occasional disillusionment with the flaws of our system, there is a necessary purpose to what I am doing.

Uranium City

The doorknob lies rusting on the ground, the hands that once turned it long moved-on, leaving behind a dilapidated, forgotten town. Street after street of abandoned homes, townhouses, apartments, schools, stores. Seen from an aerial view it almost looks like a living town. From the ground it is desolate, overgrown and empty.

This is Uranium City.

The town was established in 1952 to service nearby uranium mines. It grew through the decades, surpassing five thousand people, and had banks, grocery stores, an arena. Local people I meet recount the suddenness of the mine closures, the people who showed up for work, unaware that there would not be another shift. There is a high school, Candu High School (of nuclear reactor fame), which was used for one year and now deteriorates with the rest of the town.

Except for the houses of the 104 people who live in the town, or U City, as it is called with familiarity. There is a teacher, his wife, and two daughters who have lived in U City for twenty years. He teaches in one room of a once-busy school where there is at least one child in each grade from Kindergarten to Grade 8.

There is a post office, a tiny store, a three-person town council. There is a health centre with a nurse. There was a busy hospital once, now demolished and “decommissioned” (to eliminate the asbestos). Somehow the town (or technically now a “settelement”) perseveres, jobs existing simply to keep the town functioning, with some who work in mines in other parts of northern Saskatchewan.

The teacher’s wife describes her husband’s work with pride, the way he orchestrates the work of children in various grades, the way graduates go on to do well in high schools in the south. She describes the closeness of the tiny community, the one her young daughters know as home. She is one of the fifteen people who come to a meeting about the H1N1 pandemic, concerned about how their small numbers and isolated geography would cope with widespread infection.

She almost convinces me that I could live in this town where there is a wall of signs indicating the businesses that once were, a weatherbeaten Uranium City fastball scoreboard, and lakes that people carefully warn me not to swim in when I suggest heading into the water.

Flying home and staring out at the rows of collapsing houses, I realize that I wasn’t completely convinced.

Article #2 turned Letter to the Editor

My article didn’t appear on schedule this month – “we have a huge amount of stuff to put in” the editor tells me. I browse the edition when it is published – an article on stopping for school bus signs, a note from a local church leader, the winner of the draw for a Hummer golf cart, ways for “professional” women to relive their stress. I try not to doubt my writing skills.

I almost miss my piece in this week’s paper until someone tells me that they enjoyed reading it – it’s been put in the Letters to the Editor section, with the heading: Dear Editor. I let the compliment override my questioning of editorial decisions.

Dear Editor:

A letter from my grandmother is waiting in my box at the post office. It is half-covered with faded stamps, scattered sticks of cinnamon on one beside Ghandi’s smiling, slightly tilted head on another, the ink across them indicating the distance traveled from Dehradun, India to La Ronge, Canada. To visit my grandmother, I would need to fly to Saskatoon then Toronto, followed by a twenty-hour flight to Delhi, arriving to the stifling and familiar chaos of immense numbers of people whose skin colour matches mine.

Then I’d board an overnight train, with its simple metal bunks, thin white sheets, single glaring nightlight; the enclosing warmth of the car tempered slightly by the breeze through the barred window, restless children’s overlapping whispers heard over the creak and roll of the train. A man would arrive with dal and rice in the evening and chai in the morning, each bite and sip bringing a feeling of belonging countered by a discomforting sense of tourism.

At times, traveling through northern Saskatchewan seems as much of a commitment as reaching Dehradun from La Ronge. Roads curving for hours, layered with pavement transitioning to gravel, trees alternating in colour between the green of growth and black of fire, bridges over rivers, sometimes with hesitant wooden guardrails. At various times the road may or may not exist, depending on the season, there may or may not be a ferry across a body of water, and there may or may not be a plane into or out of the community that day.

The distance can seem less at times, when multiple vehicles pull over to help a lone driver change a tire or when a tired hitchhiker finally gets picked up or when a side-of-the-road nap is interrupted by a worried passerby. During one trip north I unsettlingly felt my wheels sink into a soft gravel shoulder, spinning without meaning. Within minutes an unsteady red truck filled with five men in the cab and three sitting in the rear stopped to offer a tow. As they drove away they waved from their sprawled positions, dust settling on their faces.

The northern distance between security and insecurity returns with a discussion about a school breakfast program that is stalled because the community only receives one shipment of food a week with nowhere to store food – and when the school is broken into and all that is stolen are snacks from the cupboard, the garbage carefully disposed of by the hungry thieves. And when medical clinics are cancelled because dark heavy clouds obscure the runway, preventing the doctor’s plane from landing. And when teenagers have to leave their communities to obtain education beyond high school. And when a new bus route allowing daily transportation for an end-of-the-road community is a celebratory event, yet it still remains a day-long journey to somewhere larger than a village.

These distances exist because of choice, history, politics, roots, race, necessity. They lessen choices, they can isolate. They are binding, they create community, they stimulate creativity, they motivate partnerships, they can be overcome. They shape the north.

Johns Hopkins Alumni website

There is now a link to my blog from the Johns Hopkins Alunmi website!
www.jhsph.edu/alumni

northern windchimes

The trees are angled, their leaves reverberating, the white caps on the lake melding over and through each other. Crossing the road is difficult – struggling to tighten the ties on my hood while firmly gripping my coffee mug, forgetting to look up for cars as I focus on staying upright. It is not a cold wind – that will come soon enough. This wind is cool, comforting, crackling. The sun has set and gray clouds cover the sky behind the wavering trees.

Ecstatic. A friend uses this word to describe my voice when I call him while walking. He also says that being a “Burlington suburbanite” I have never experienced winds that are not impeded by buildings after building, where trees and water can’t be seen in one glance. The sounds, sight and feel of a prairie province. Winds that I listen to as I go to sleep, the windchime the children downstairs have hung by their door adding music to the invisible flow.

I am disappointed the next day when the trees stand calmly, tired after the days of constant movement. I close my eyes to recapture the ecstasy, the wind against my face.

First of series of monthly articles in the La Ronge Northerner

The snapping shoes along the wooden boards lead to dark blue button-down shirts and skirts swinging from turning hips. The calls from the crowd on the uncomfortable bleachers engage with the dancers as the music accelerates

…the fingers of a young fiddler move rapidly over his instrument, shades of browns and black in the wood fitting easily against his chest as he plays a tune familiar to the audience

…the pelicans rest on the water, staying in place as the water flows around them, at least thirty in the group. A sudden stretching of wings, a few rise to circle the water, flowing back into an easy water landing

…a teenager on a skidoo pulls a small girl whose head is lost in her toque as she lies on her belly on her sled, her gleeful abandon carried along the cold wind, eliciting both my fear as well as admiration

…a river flows through a valley, a town at its northern edge, the site of the once-existing residential school across the river standing empty. Rocks from what was the school are enmeshed in the base for a plaque celebrating the community’s history, an ironic symbol.

Glimpses of the north, evidence that I no longer regularly see the CN Tower, or fit myself into a crowded subway, or walk down to the Skydome to catch a baseball game. A relatively easy trade – homeruns happen daily, but thirty pelican on a quiet lake as the sun rises with the light coming through the arc of a distant bridge? That is special.

I have felt similar connections to communities across northern Canada and in other countries. As a medical trainee and family physician, I traveled throughout the Northwest Territories, northern Ontario and BC, and Nunavut. Landing in the midst of the Arctic tundra, I’ve sensed the cohesion of common experience and the obliviousness of the world to the lives of a few hundred people drawn by need and force into flimsy prefabricated houses.

I’ve seen immense will and desperation in an HIV/AIDS clinic in Uganda where belongings are sold for a few more months of treatment for a child who acquired HIV inadvertently simply by being born. I inhaled the sights and sounds of a dusty, noisy Calcutta street where my mother grew up and sugar-soaked sweets are arranged in store displays while some children watch others who can pay the few dollars to enjoy them.

As a public health physician, the challenge is to look beyond the immediate health problems to why they exist in the first place. There are inequities in health in every community, every country. Health inequities are due to social, economic and political factors – in other words, people who have a decent income, access to good food, a suitable home, and a clean environment, are healthier.

This column is meant to be a dialogue, a combination of story, fact, and conversation as I explore health in its broadest sense. A small contribution to our shared, ongoing work, yours and mine, to improve our communities.

Bluegrass and Old Tyme Music

Bluegrass? Old Time music? Do I really know what either of those are? Well, no…but I had a vague feeling that since they both could involve fiddling and dancing and had a connection to Elvis Presley (the bluegrass), I would like them – and it was an excuse to visit a new part of Saskatchewan. So I headed out on Saturday morning for the Northern Lights Bluegrass and Old Tyme Music Festival. My destination was Ness Creek, near Big River, Saskatchewan, about 350 kilometres southwest from La Ronge across gravel and dirt roads.

http://www.northernlightsbluegrass.ca/

Who knew that I would decide I loved the sound of a banjo? And mandolin? Along with the fiddle, guitar, and other instruments I had to ask the names of. Under a gray sky with an occasional sprinkling of rain, hundreds of people shared a musical experience I would never have known had I not jumped in the car that morning.

As I huddled under the edge of a tented wooden structure trying to eat a piece of Saskatoon Berry pie away from the rain, I was invited under the tent by the sound technicians who were soon to become my friends for the festival. Through them I had my questions about the music and instruments answered and they introduced me to the workings of their equipment and to the musicians. At one point I was sitting on stage with one of them – he left just as the band turned to thank him. I was an unintentional recipient of a round of applause from the appreciative audience.

I saw bands from across Canada – The Spinney Brothers, Headwater, Viper Central and others – and a band from the US – teenager Sierra Hull and Highway 111.  Sierra’s fingers moved across her mandolin in a blur and she conversed with the audience like the seasoned musician she was, even yelling “Go Riders” with her Tennessee accent. There was a 16-year old fiddler who played every fiddle tune I’ve tried to play and would ever want to learn and a 76-year old yodeler who had the crowd stamping and whistling.

I was given a tour of the grounds by a Saskatoon native who spends half the year teaching in South Korea and the other half in the Ness Creek area – he showed me the spectacular disorganized beauty of the creek and the small house and studio built by once artists-in-residence. All the while we could hear the music from the stage weaving over the acres of land.

Why didn’t I have weekends like this in Ontario? It wasn’t from lack of things to do in Toronto…but Saskatchewan has somehow seemed intrinsically conducive to discovery. And the frigid cold of winter seems to highlight the need to enjoy summer – Batoche Days to Buffalo Narrows Summer Fest to the John Arcand Fiddle Fest to this weekend’s music festival – crowds of different backgrounds and reasons for attending – conversations filled with welcomes and new perspectives.

And music you can jig, reel, seven-step or waltz to.

Buffalo Narrows Summer Fest

Beach at the Buffalo Narrows Sand Dunes Park

Sometimes I convince myself that La Ronge is in the north – then I look at a map and realize I’m only halfway into the province, with the true north spanning far above me (Not to mention the true, true north extending far beyond that). I’ve been hired to work for the entire north, but I spend most of my time in La Ronge – I’d like that to change. So I spent the long weekend in Buffalo Narrows, a village on the northwest side of Saskatchewan.

Buffalo Narrows has a population of about 1300 people, a mix of Métis, Dene, Cree, and others. The name comes from its location on the narrows between two lakes on the Churchill River – Peter Pond Lake and Churchill Lake.

My favourite place to stay is the Waterfront Inn. As I write this, I am the only occupant of the inn – the two men who came to fish who were in the room next door left yesterday. The Churchill river lies ten steps beyond my room, and yesterday I swam from the dock, out between the pelicans, and over to the Buffalo Bridge and back.

Summer Fest was this weekend, a collage of outdoor and indoor activities, a talent show and an air band competition, relay races and a dance, a fishing derby and a scavenger hunt. And mud bogging – which I soon learned involves souped up trucks and quads trawling through an enormous pit of mud and water as fast as possible – or not. Reluctant vehicles becoming lodged in the sludge were pulled out by a waiting crane.

The talent show was last night – a collection of kids, teenagers, and adults, raising money for the those who had won a competition to perform in Prince Albert in the Northern Spirits showcase in October. The main band was from Ile-a-la-Crosse, a nearby community, and was composed of a father and his son, daughter, and nephew. They belted out familiar cover tunes and accompanied each teenager who came up to perform. The first girl nervously stammered into the microphone, “I’ve never sung with a band before.” Her nervousness was quelled by the three friendly men with instruments who surrounded her and the auditorium of villagers who knew her by name.

After a swim…