Northern Outreach

The hamlet of Resolute, in Nunavut, is the second-northernmost community in Canada, the northernmost being Grise Fiord. Resolute sits on the southern coast of Cornwallis Island, about 700 kilometers (435 miles) south of the magnetic North Pole. The average annual temperature is -16C (3F) and the record low is -52C (-62F) – and that's before factoring in the windchill! During the summer, there are 24 hours of daylight and endless vistas of snowcapped hills, and during the winter, there is long darkness and an occasional polar bear marauding through town. All in all, "resolute" seems like an apt adjective for the 215 residents who call this place home.

Landscape

Queen's Medical Outreach

During the summer of 2006, Melissa Horan and Marco Lo volunteered to teach public health topics to the students of Resolute. At the time, they were both life science undergraduate students at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, and members of a student organization called Queen's Medical Outreach (QMO). The aim of QMO is to "improve individual and community health both locally and abroad." Every summer, volunteers travel around the world to teach local students about health issues that are relevant to their lives. This year was QMO's first time in Resolute, and part of the organization's larger initiative to increase the number of outreach projects in the Aboriginal communities of Northern Canada.

"People in the south don't realize how big and expansive Canada is and how difficult it can be to provide care to remote communities," Lo said during an interview. Resolute has a health clinic with two nurses and state-of-the-art equipment. However, a visit to a doctor or dentist requires a six-hour plane trip to Iqaluit, the territorial capital. Patients who need to see a specialist must fly to Ottawa, Ontario, which is more than nine hours south by air.

When the doctor is so far away, it's crucial to prevent health problems before they start. Lo found that many of the health problems of the residents, such as poor eating habits, smoking, and drinking, are common and preventable. However, the remoteness of the community makes healthy eating a big challenge. For example, getting your recommended daily amount of vegetables becomes much harder when a head of lettuce costs $6 – and is often spoiled by the time it arrives!

With the help of other QMO volunteers, Horan and Lo spent months creating a curriculum that would be both relevant and culturally appropriate. This was a very intensive process that involved researching everything from regional health issues to how to capture the attention of hyperactive six-year-olds.

Qarmartalik School

Teaching

Lo and Horan flew into Resolute on May 8, 2006. As soon as the jetlag wore off, the pair headed for their first day at Qarmartalik School. This is the only school in the hamlet, and has 76 students ranging from kindergarten to grade 11.

Over the following month, Horan and Lo taught on a variety of topics, including nutrition and fitness, general health, drugs and substance abuse, sexual education, relationship skills, and conflict resolution. (Along the way, the team relied on help from local teachers, nurses, and community members.) Although the curriculum that the team had prepared was an excellent starting point, the pair had to keep changing the material to suit their students' needs and interests. "Once you're there," Lo said, "you get a sense of what the community needs versus what you thought they should learn."

Since the students varied widely in age, and each class usually contained two different grades, every topic had to be adapted so that it could be presented in an age-appropriate way. Using everything from puppet shows to art projects, the pair worked hard to present subjects in an entertaining and interactive way. Big hits included Horan's baking lessons and low-fat bannock (a type of traditional bread that's usually deep-fried), and a giant model of a cigarette that listed all of the toxins it contains.

Since this was QMO's first time in Resolute, Horan and Lo were also busy laying the groundwork for possible future projects. In order to assess the health needs of the community and the role that QMO might play, the pair conducted interviews with many local residents, and also distributed surveys to both adults and students.

Arctic Flowers

Empowerment Week

For their final week in Resolute, the team came up with the idea of creating an "Empowerment Week." According to Horan's blog entry, the goal was to "[work] with the kids on projects that they care about and that will benefit the community."

As part of Empowerment Week, the grade 9-11 class researched and produced a pamphlet on the topic of their choice. The grade 5 class created artwork related to fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, which were submitted for a calendar contest held by the Nunavut Department of Health and Social Services. The grade fives also wrote and read aloud statements about how alcohol has affected people they know, which was a moving and powerful experience. The grade 3-4 class created a puppet show on nutrition, and performed it at the Elders' Tea Ceremony. The grade 6-8 class also focused on nutrition. The highlight of their week was a food label scavenger hunt, during which the kids dashed around the grocery store in search of items that fit specific nutritional criteria. In addition to providing fun, the team hoped that the week would leave a lasting impression on their students. "We wanted the kids to see the fruits of their labor," Lo said, "to show students that they had the power to take their health into their own hands."

A few days before their departure, the mayor named Lo and Horan honorary citizens of Resolute. On June 7, Lo and Horan taught their last classes and said their farewells. "I'm pretty sentimental right now," Horan wrote in her blog entry, "I will think about these kids for the rest of my life."

Melissa on Snowmobile

Two Way Learning

While their students were busy learning about food groups and puberty, Horan and Lo were equally busy learning about Inuit culture and life in the Arctic. During their stay, the pair was welcomed into the social life of Resolute, and attended community events including a Hamlet Council meeting, a funeral, and the relay of the Canada Games Torch.

Lo notes that the Resolute outreach project is an experience where "you learn a lot about yourself." For Horan and Lo, those lessons ranged from classroom management to cultural acceptance, from personal insights to how to make caribou stew.

Five months after the project, Marco Lo is in his first year of medical school at the Albany Medical Center in Albany, New York. Melissa Horan is the co-director for QMO-North, and QMO has been welcomed back for another year in Resolute.

Read the Resolute Blog for a first-hand account of Melissa Horan and Marco Lo's experiences.

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