We are now over half-way through our Northern Tour, and what
a fantastic journey so far, complete with one epic road story (to come later)! We arrived in Buffalo Narrows last Sunday,
for most of us the farthest north in Saskatchewan we’ve ever traveled, and set
up in the gym at the Lakeview Recreation Center. When I peered out the hotel window that
night, I kept thinking we had fast-forwarded to January. It was, of course, snowing... again! Apparently winter doesn’t mess around up here.
The plan for Buffalo Narrows was 2
days – Monday and Tuesday, back to back.
Same program. We had girls come
from Ile a la Crosse, Clearwater, Beauval, Pine House, Patuanak, Birch Narrows,
Dillon, Island Lake, and of course, Buffalo Narrows. On a side note, it was really cool and worth
mentioning that for many of the girls who attended over the 2 days, English was
their second language with Dene Suline their primary spoken language.
It was great to see the girls’ focus and determination with the try-a-trade stations. 15 minutes goes by quickly when you’re hard at work! The stations have been a big hit so far, the girls are realizing that the trades can be a lot of fun, working with their hands, putting things together, finding that creativity and even art can be a big part of the trades. I use the expression ‘crafting on a really big scale’ when I’m talking to the girls about my experience of carpentry. When I first started doing carpentry work, it hardly mattered that a lot of the work was new to me because I had so much prior experience working with my hands, paying attention to detail, taking wire and pliers and beads for instance, and turning them into earrings. I found I was able to transfer all kinds of skills from other areas of my life. It’s important for women to understand this, and to know that learning a trade is just like learning anything else, and is certainly not limited to one gender or the other. And in fact, I have worked for employers now who absolutely, hands down want to hire women because they are often times harder working than their male co-workers, and because their work is consistently of such high quality. I had a girl at my table who loves to paint – I asked her if she knew that there’s a trade all about painting. It’s about looking at what you love to do and finding ways to do that at work, so not only are you fulfilled but you’re being paid well at the same time. I don’t think young women realize that there is a whole world of trades just waiting to be discovered!
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| hard at work! |
The Junk Yard Wars continues to be a big hit with the
girls. I love watching the process unfold
– the girls are timid at the beginning and there’s a lot of frustrations, often
including an exasperated “this is impossible” or “I give up” and slowly as the
clock ticks by some ideas start to come to life, the volume in the room starts
to elevate, and all of sudden there’s a team working together on a project, and
there’s excitement as their final products take shape and as they do their first
trial run! Being able to witness this
transformation has been so rewarding for me.
Thanks girls, it was a lot of fun working with you!
“I like how the trades
are all different from one another, and most of all meeting new people and
sharing new ideas.” - participant feedback
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| 1st place! |
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| Valerie Overend, our fearless leader and tour host, giving away some seriously awesome safety equipment! |
At the beginning of this post I promised one ‘epic road
story’, so here it is. What happens when
a road is so icy that your front-wheel drive vehicle, loaded to the max (in the
back of course), can’t actually make it up to the top? Well, if you don’t already have some scene
playing out in your head, let me paint one for you... It looks something like this. Driver tries to back up (down the hill) so as
to have another go at the slope. Vehicle,
powerless under the evil unforgiving influence of ice, betrays driver,
surrenders to ice and slides across the road sideways and into the ditch. Thankfully we were spared in that only the
back end of the vehicle was off the road.
This however, was a double-edged sword as we were jutting out into
oncoming traffic right at a bend in the road on what could have easily doubled
as a skating rink. Luckily, we were
after all 6 tough-as-nails tradeswomen and managed, with a combination of
left-over concrete from the try-a-trade station and a little 'human ingenuity’
to miraculously survive and escape the icy hill of doom!
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| 'human ingenuity' |
We are all safe and sound, back in La Ronge and set up for
our final day of the tour tomorrow. I’m
hiding out in my cozy hotel room from the cold, because go figure, it’s
storming again.
Stay tuned for our final leg of the tour! Who knows what adventure I’ll be sharing
next!
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