Reality check

I think to live in the north you need to have a certain amount of humor.
Oh look it's a leg of a rabbit laying in the road, how nice.
I like that headless seal you have on your porch.
It's rush hour, waiting to cross the road after four snowmobiles, three ATV's and a truck go by.
The kids next door, knocking on the kitchen window yelling 'hockey'? while you are eating dinner.
Random loose dogs following you home because whatever you have in your grocery bags smells like something they would like to eat for dinner.
The neighbors running their snowmobile into your house in the middle of the night because the throttle got stuck.

Sadly with the humor also comes the tragedies of the north, the things that people just don't talk about. Rape is a common occurrence here. And with such a small number of people in the community the raper and the rapist as bound to run into one another at some point after the assault. Unlike the south, the majority of the time nothing is ever said or done about it. It's accepted as something that just happens. It's a shocking reality of life in an isolated community.
I had heard about the drug and alcohol abuse and the suicides that plague life for the natives of northern Canada but not of the other equally disheartening issues that make up life here. Domestic violence is also a common occurrence here as well, more so of women beating up men instead of the other way around.

Life here is not for the faint of heart.

There are not many opportunities here for young people, as an outsider looking in I will admit that I have no clue what it must be like to grow up here. I see bright young people that don't finish high school because they need to work to help feed their brothers and sisters. Or young girls with two or three children in tow and no possibility of any future other than to have more children and remain on social assistance. 
Getting pregnant and having children while still a teenager is also common place and again something that just happens. While I am in awe of how the community gathers these girls up and helps them make the best of the situation, I am bothered at how pointless it all is. I may be old fashioned in thinking that to have a child so young is destroying any future that you might have had, but here that really is what happens. I get a sense that with the amount of pregnancies here there is also high rates of adoption. It is normal to hear someone say, I have had five children but some were adopted out or my parents adopted them so they became my sibling instead of my child.

My hope, our hope while here is to influence a few young people to, as cheesy as it sounds, reach for the moon. Post secondary education is free for the native peoples here. I want to encourage someone(s) to take advantage of it.
Education opens up so many doors. Although I have a spotty post secondary record, I have been, I have expanded my brain. I wish I could go back and tell myself not to take the opportunity of school for granted. I like to learn, I should have applied myself more. But I can't live in the past, I must take what I have in this brain of mine and move forward.

Life is like a map, there will always be many roads to take to get to happiness.