One adjustment that has to be made here is coming to terms with the price of food, since everything has to be flown in the stores have to charge more to make up for the freight. We went grocery shopping last night and I roamed around the store in a daze. Makes for hard decisions. Do I really like frozen corn enough to pay $8.00 a bag? If I buy a $10.00 5kg bag of flour, will I be able to make enough bread to make it worth it? Pop is $8.00 for a 2L bottle, and Miguel is rationing himself. We've been drinking iced tea from crystals, but it's not very nice. Our neighbours have told us that Yellowknife Co-op will mail food up here, but it is necessary to collect the food at the airport. So what we could order would be limited by the cargo capacity of the ATV. (It's a red Honda, Miguel bought it before I got up here). I've been doing what I remember my mother doing in England, making dessert with dinner every night so that when I produce the food and there's not that much of it, I can say, "There's brownies too" (or apple crumble, or chocolate chip loaf...) I bought four bananas yesterday, for $2.50, and this morning when I went to get one, all their stalks fell off, so I guess I'll be eating bananas today. Five pounds of potatoes were $9.99, but lettuce was on sale at $2.00 a head. Milk is the worst, $7.00 for 2L. Eggs are $3.99 a dozen, and we've been getting creative with them. Strangely enough, chicken is cheaper than in Nanaimo, so we've had some chicken, and we had stopped buying it in Nanaimo because it was about $5.00 a breast. We've been kind of looking at it all as a game: how can we eat reasonably well without spending all Miguel's paycheque on food?

Today I don't have a whole lot to do. One letter to mail, and a trip to the store to see if I can find more notebooks for Ian, he needs them for school and so far the hunt has been without success. Kids have settled in at school quite nicely so far, even Kirsten has made friends and likes her teacher. In some bizarre way, I think coming here has made her realize that her life is actually very good... in her gym class yesterday, two girls sat out of the activities because they're pregnant. Kirsten said that the teacher talked to them about it very matter-of-factly, asking the girls when they were due. I was glad that I had warned her, based on my own experience in junior high in Northern Quebec, that most of the kids would probably smoke and drink and be very casual about school in general. She said that out of her class of twenty there are four who don't smoke. Which is better than my grade 8 class, we had thirty-some-odd kids and only five of us didn't smoke.

Yesterday there was a funeral for a young man, 19, who committed suicide on the weekend. The service was in the high school gym, and then everyone headed out of town on ATVs and in the back of pick-up trucks to the cemetery, which is situated on a hill near Freshwater Creek. It is one thing to read, as I did in a few classes at SFU that the North has a problem with suicide, and that causes are thought to be deep-rooted in cultural alienation... being here when everyone is mourning, lots of hugging in the stores and downcast eyes, is something else. I feel as if I am intruding, in a way, a representative of those who make it difficult for young Inuit men to get ahead.

I've met the grade 2 teacher at the elementary school, he's a sweet man, and when I sat with Rachel while they formed classes I noticed he had a huge class. I saw him on the street yesterday, and waved. He came over and we were chatting, and I commented on his class size. He told me he was sorting them into groups, but he has a big span of ability levels, some can barely read a word, and so I said, "Well, I used to go volunteer at Rachel's old school, helping the little ones with their reading, so if you need a hand any time, I'm not doing much at the moment" and he took my phone number.