Thursday, January 27, 2005

If I was President

Another week has passed, and I've decided the time has come to make yet another update to my blog. How exciting!?!!???

Monday, another snowed-in day. We slept most of the day and played "10 days in Africa," this really cool board game with our Kenyan host brother, Wycliff (also the name of the man who translated the bible into english in the 16th century my host mom just informed me).

Then Tuesday (after the big storm) our host dad gave us the idea to take the day off work and just go around shoveling people's walks who were snowed in (like the elderly and disabled for example) So we organized our group to come out and help. It was alot of fun being outside for most of the day, and we even made some money (which we won't keep, don't worry) and one team got some tea with a nice old lady. It was alot of snow, let me tell ya! (I can't believe I'm talking about the weather) Sorry Steve, I don't have any pictures yet but I'll take some for you.

Wednesday was work. We went with Mary Joan to a Human Rights presentation to single moms. They were a pretty spunky group, and it was interesting to spend an entire afternoon with them. They're like.. all you need to join our group is to have lots of kids, be between 19-35 and hate men. By the end of the presentation, they figured out that their rights have been violated over and over again because they 1. are women 2. have lots of babies 3. are poor 4. are un-educated. I learned why people always rambling stay-in-school-wear-a-condom-look-both-ways-before-crossing-the-street-drink-milk-don't-take-no-for-an-answer..

It's illegal in PEI to refuse someone housing becaue they have kids, unless your building is a registered seniors home.. but it's impossible for the majority of these women to find places to live. Okay, I admit, kids can be messy and loud and obnoxious, but last time I checked, so can adults, but their messiness, loudness and obnoxiousness is on a much larger scale.
And where would our society be without kids? People need to accept the reality that "childhood" and all the frightening things related to it cannot be avoided. Buy earplugs and stop making the lives of those less fortunate than you a living hell. Or not. Whatever.

Thursday I don't remember.. probably not that great I guess..
Oh wait, I went to Baba's Lounge, which is a quaint little pub with a live band. The place feels kinda like a house party.. It was fun. Met an interesting guy who works with "YEN" the Youth Environmental Network or something. I'm just wondering why decided to point out that the acronym for their name is actually the japanese currency. Secret link?

Friday was EAD on Health. I learned to floss my teeth more and that the Canadian Health care System is in need of some renovations. We had an amazing guest speaker. He's an AIDS activist/comedian/ person living with AIDS in PEI. He talked about the Healthcare system in PEI and was really really bitter for many many reasons, but he was absolutely hilarious. In his opinion, people with AIDS are put on the back burner because.. well.. they're gonna die anyways..(this man has been HIV positive for 14 years and looks fit and healthy) the sooner the better..(too bad the amount of people with aids is increasing in most parts of the world) it's better that all the gays especially die anyways..so they won't reproduce (gay mean won't necessarily produce GAY CHILDREN)
I wanted to laugh and hug the guy and cry and leave the room all within the course of an hour. He went in a few years ago to talk to the Health Minister and the minister said "aren't you dead yet?" Imagine how you'd feel after that. And this guy thought about responding.."OH NO I'M STILL ALIVE. And your son says hi" which some people might not find funny, but I found absolutely hilarioius.

Saturday, menu committee (which probably due to some bad-karma mix-up I managed to be a part of) had to plan the meals for our Mid-project. 3 days. 14 people. $280. It's the first time I've spend 4 hours in a grocery store. So how many loaves of bread do you think we need?

We just got back from skating and toboganning with the YEN dude. It was -3 out, so it was perfect weather for frolicking in the snow. Mid-Project is this week. We're staying at a boy scout camp for the e next 3 days (sans boyscouts I'm assuming) Maybe I'll have less venting about social issues in my next post. Only time will tell I guess.

Friday, January 21, 2005

Bad Root Canal

OK so Galia is standing here and isn't helping give me any ideas on what to write about.
But she does have a cool shirt that says "Good girls go nowhere and bad girls go to Toronto" which makes up for it. (Lena, what do you think?) I walked in Galia READING yesterday..A NOVEL! I just had to make fun of her for that. Her reply was "maybe I will kill somebody?" in a very innocent tone. I'm not sure who she wanted to kill, but presumably it wasn't me.

Tonight I'm going to Masha's birthday. It's a Russian pot-luck. Which is a new thing.. because Russian's don't do the whole pot-luck thing, it's kind of a Canadian thing. But we've just created something very new and very exciting that will change the face of social gatherings forever.. The Russian Pot-Luck.

We went to the Conferation Centre yesterday for a tour, which was AWESOME! This building is where Canada BECAME A COUNTRY!!! Isn't that exciting? Johnny A. McD and some other dudes from upper and lower canada got together and drank alot of brandy and ate alot of lobsters and decided how to build a country. They had a picture of Queen Victoria and one of Prince Albert. Seeing Prince Albert made me think about why a Prince Albert was named a Prince Albert. Maybe this ugly british monarch was the first to get it done? I definately saw some rebeliousness under all that unfashionable clothing.

We had a guest speaker to our presentation yesterday which was about history. The speaker dude was supposed to talk about the history of PEI. how fascinating!(sarcasm font) He kind of (not really kind of but, more really really alot) went off on a tangent about the biases in history and history is just story from one perspective telling tiny tiny piece of the truth (which doesn't exist anyways apparantly). So basically history is a big bag full of lies. LIES LIES LIES. He pointd out that HISTORY Is like the word HIS and STORY.. coincidence?

He also talked about how religion is outdated, and depending on what religion is, I guess I can agree with that. But to say such a bold statement about the entire planet is a little much for me to wrap my head around. He said love is natural and hate is taught. He claims that hate is driven by fear..fear of everything pretty much.

It's not very often that you hear somebody with such non-mainstream views of everything and anything but with the ability to speak about them so well. He encouraged everybody to throw out history books and go into the forest to learn about nature. THen he showed us some history books he wrote that were for sale. If you ask me (which you probably wouldn't) he kind of shot himself in the foot. But maybe that was part of his plan..




Sunday, January 16, 2005

Nobody seems to know who Prince Edward or Charlotte is. I find this somewhat distressing

Thanks grandpa for the birthday card!!

cheeky lou fortnight zany severe robust gobsmacked

Why have these words been filtered out of daily use in Canadian english? (except for a few people who make a point to use a few of these, Lena? they are not especially common) The majority of Canada is unilingual, and seeing how most people use only one language on a day to day basis, you might think that they would keep their one language with as many words as possible, so things wouldn't get too dull. It seems the opposite has happened. Although young people do contribute a large amount of descriptive slang words, which replace a few, there's still remains the lost english words.. slowly forgotten. And why do the quebecois take english verbs and make them french when the french way far away in europe take english nouns and make them french?
English is influencing french everywhere, but why in such different ways. Probably for the same reason they eat souper in Quebec and dinner in France. To confuse the hell out of me.

There's apparantly a warning out for a storm to take place tonight. I've heard stories of past storms on the island, and now I'm quite excited. For one thing, work would likely be cancelled.
Just to clarify, I like my job, and (unlike in Russia) we have a coffee maker in the office, and toilet paper, soap and hot water in the bathrooms which makes it a much more comfortable place to spend the day. Plus I work 9-4 with an hour lunch, which are reasonable hours for me. People have to come and say "it's 4 o'clock!" (but the expression on their face means "time to leave, I'm the last one here and I want to get home and lock up and why on earth haven't you gotten the heck out of here already? You're a volunteer for crying out loud. We don't even pay you, and you still won't leave") To me, this is an indication that I kind of like my job. I like working with Galia, and I like our supervisor, Mary Joan. She's young enough to be hip but old enough to be responsible and experienced. Despite my current
job-satisfaction I:
a) think the term "job-satisfaction" is an oxymoron
b) like the idea of not going to work because you're on a little island which is the victim of freak storms and snow up to your waist and 0 visibility and winds gusting up to 400km/hr. Except for the wind part. That's a huge lie. I'm not actually sure how fast it will go, but it's pretty darn fast.

I better knock on wood. Probably because I've bragged about the possibility that we will be snowed in and work will be cancelled, the storm will skip over PEI and hit only New Brunswick or something. I hear Edmonton is like -49 or something crazy like that. Is work there cancelled?





Saturday, January 08, 2005

Serious, who the heck is Prince Edward? And who is Charlotte?

I overslept today, and I'm feeling a big brain-dead.. like I'm groggy and tired even though I slept for 9 hrs so I have no reason to feel tired. I guess this is what it's like to be old. I understand why old people are up so early.

I found out where I'm working, and it will be at the Human Rights Commission. First day is tomorrow. I'm working with Galia, so that's good. I hope, anyways. I'll be seeing her aaaaallll the time, which maybe isn't good. And it's near the water and right downtown, which is good. (so basically, I'm deviding up everything into categories.. good vs. not good. Who says you can't use simple words to describe complex ideas??)
I use the term "downtown" very losely, mostly because this place is only 40 000 people so downtown is about 2 streets. THe best part is that despite the fact that there's only like 10 people in the city, I still manage to get lost.

Today we're going out to one of the host families house to maybe do some snowpeople building/pot luck supper/music playing. It seems that people here are really good at entertaining themselves/eachother. Lots of people are into guitar playing and snowshoeing and that sort of thing. I think there's a strong music tradition, which is pretty cool.

My address is:
Amy Mireault
1 Churchill Ave
Charlottetown PEI
C1A 1Y6
CANADA

One other way that people here entertain themselves is something called "Community Schools" Pretty much every school opens up in the evening and offers courses on everything and anything. I've narrowed my choice down to Cake Decorating or Swedish Weaving. Most people that hear my choices think that I'm joking and that I really will enroll in something honourable and educational like Japanese or Yoga. Little do they know I'm serious. I figure I'll make alot of cakes in my lifetime, and having them well decorated might just make the world a better place. And I'm curious as to what the heck Swedish weaving actually is. If it's as good as Pippy Longstocking, Ikea, ABBA and Swedish Berries, then I'm in.



Thursday, January 06, 2005

True tales from someone who is halfway to 42

Well, it's about 11pm on my 21st birthday and I've returned from all birthday festivities and decided now is a good time to make a decent update on this blog. (Maybe 22nd birthday the focus will be on staying up late)
I know Steve needs something to make fun of me for (like long posts for example), and I have some questions I need some opinions on.. which I will bring up a bit later on in this post.

I'm pretty much settled into Charlottetown. They are great folks. By "they" I mean everybody. Tim Hortons workers, librarians, people in cars who actually stop for pedestrians. Great.
When we leave our house in the morning, Kate, my host mom says "Be good! And if you can't be good, at least try to be nice." She's constantly making super sarcastic comments and keeping a very straight face. I start laughing hysterically, and others (especially the Russians!!) look blankly at her or laugh awkwardly.
She said, after making fun of our Russian supervisor for having very long legs and therefore awkward looking knees that "Many truths come out of jest" or something along those lines meaning that the truth is usually found in humor. He had a kiniption fit when he found out that the first thing she noticed about him was his knees, and not his trendy hairstyle, expensive clothes or modelish good looks. (I'm talking about Cheslav, aka Chessmate, for the Swedes who were lucky enough to meet him..)

I've also discovered the local library. You get a free library card, and you don't even have to wear a ratty touque and beg for it. I took out about 7 books, and Galia keeps telling me that I'm crazy for having taken out so many books. Her observations about my apparant mental instability has started a very intense debate about whether or not reading is a good passtime. So I'm asking anybody who has any opinion on this to please come forward and let me know what they think.

Galia prefers singing and dancing to reading. I also love to dance, but the singing I find kind of ridiculous. Mostly because I'm a terrible singer, and singing can be done while doing other activities, so it's not fair to consider it a hobby on its on (in my case anyways)

Galia also claimed in her argument that reading "makes people fat" and "is sooo boring"

So, please let me know. Is reading good or bad??

I started reading "Why I hate Canadians" by WIll Ferguson, and apparantly Will Ferguson did Canada World YOuth about 20 years ago. He wrote a chapter about his experience and I was up all night laughing about it. He describes it to a "T" I've been carrying around the book reading parts of the chapter to my fellow CAnada World Youthers.

And describing the entire program: "In the Third World, North America is either glorified or vilified. We are either glamorous millionaires or capitalist vampires. In the same way, in North America, the suffering of the Third World is written off as something on the periphery; an object of charity and pity. Canada World Youth brings the two sides face to face, and few myths survive the contact. Consider it a principle of human interaction: it is very hard to hate- or idolize- someone with whom you have made moose-shit necklaces" (he made moose-shit necklaces with his host family in Canada and his Ecuadorian counterpart. apparantly it's odour free and handy for making decorate jewellery)

Monday, January 03, 2005

So we're leaving Tatamagouche Centre right now. That's where we've been in Nova Scotia for the last few days. It's a beautiful centre and we've been doing some interesting activities preparing ourselves for the second half of the program.
We were just introduced to our host families and ours looks pretty cool. They're the only ones living in downtown Charlottetown (everybody else is out of the city) and our dad is a professor of International Development and apparantly famous for his "in-depth" discussions, whatever that means. Sounds like the kiddies just left to University and the parents are experiencing some empty nest syndrome, and, well, Galia and I are about to cure that! I'm pretty excited, both for meeting my new family and the drive to PEI, which will mean crossing one of the long free-standing bridges in the world. LIke 50km or something crazy.

Over and out. Peace and love.