uvanga, inuusira: October 2010

Funny poem I made. I say it's funny because I have no frikken clue how to write poems and I am forced to write one by my class. I really love that class because the teacher is entertaining and all and for the first half of the course, we got to write stories and hear other stories by our classmates which was a total fun. However, the other half is poetry which I really do not like. I love to hear good poems, but I hate analyzing them and writing them, period.

Anyway, here is my 'funny' poem. It's a first draft, so it might not be good...

Goose Hunting

A fox stalks a rabbit out in the open.

The sky was clear and blue;

with the sun shinin'

we sat waiting in our igloo.

Outside was our goose hunting blind

with those hand made decoys;

we hid with our guns behind

the moment we heard the noise.

It was like an adrenaline rush;

the geese on auto alert,

my dad told me to shush.

With hunting, he was like the expert.

With patience, I finally got my first shot to fulfil,

A proud Inuk I was, to get my first kill.

There were only four hours left to yell Happy New Year. I hoped the weather would not get worse than it already was. Fireworks were cancelled due to the blizzard. The wind blew hard and the snow storm made it impossible to see the school that was just about a hundred meters away from our house. We lived near the mountain. Nobody was concerned about how dangerous it could be during the winter. Maybe we lived a little too close to the mountain.

We used the school gym to celebrate the Christmas holidays. We feast on the 25th of December and on the first day of January. All through the holidays, we square danced, played games and won prizes at the gym. The Christmas celebration starts on Christmas Eve and usually ended five days after the New Year's Day. However, on New Year's Eve 1999, the celebrations ended.

It was New Year's Eve. To pass the time, games were played, people square danced. I was nine at the time which placed me with other kids fooling around in the gym. Everyone celebrated this holiday like there was no tomorrow. People had smiling faces and they danced with such joy. Nobody wanted to stop dancing, to stop celebrating.

It was just half an hour ago we shouted Happy New Year. We shook hands with everyone in the gym. It's a tradition that we shake hands and repeat Happy New Year to each person. After going around the gym to shake everyone's hands, a prayer was held and the hymn of New Year was sung by the choir. I like the song to this day. I felt and still feel respectful to those who don't get to commemorate with us. After the hymn, the gym went quiet for a minute to remember those who had died in the year 1998. I never understood why these things were done, but I found it sad. I was a kid then, but now I understand. Nothing made sense at the time, but I've grown up to realize the importance of commemorating the past.

The gym was filled with everyone I could name. The building was filled with the noise of people who were having the time of their lives. The children were running around playing with their toys they got for Christmas. A man was calling out numbers of some raffle tickets. Somebody was going to win a grand prize. During that draw, a fire alarm went off. People got suspicious, but someone reported the alarm as false.. Maybe it was to warn us that something was coming, but nobody was really that concerned.

I was going to my seat with treats I got from my mother. She got them at the canteen. I was as pleased as any child who got chocolate from their parents. I was innocent at the time. I looked around and jolly faces were to be spotted. Not one soul showed a sad face until the moment. Until the moment I heard a huge thunderous boom. The sound of that boom scared me. It got everyone's attention. For three seconds, the whole gym was silent. You could hear the wind blowing in the gym. It was so quiet that you could hear the hum of the electric lights.

I was puzzled. Once everyone had acknowledged the scene, every voice filled the gym with fear. I was confused. All I could realize was that a mass amount of snow had beaten the walls of the west side of the gym. All I could do was to come up with the word 'white' and stare at it. Up until I started to hear my mother's horrified voice yelling my name. She found me, took me and started to yell for my little sister. I was horrified by the whole scene. People were rushing around yelling and crying like it was the end of the world. I watched a lady crying hysterically searching for her son in the snow. Then, I saw her. My little sister with a red dress covered in snow. She was six at the time. She raced to us with terror in her eyes. I started to cry with her while my mother brought four of us to a classroom far from the gym.

The classroom was already filled with people, mainly children. Everyone was going mad. I was going crazy. Adults were yelling at each other. Children were crying, confused by the chaos around them. Someone brought a kid my age to the room. He was shaking and wet. The lady was taking his clothes off. While the other lady gave him a blanket. How did they get blankets in the school, I wondered. The blankets were pink with purple flowers on it.

My grandmother ordered her daughters to go home. I was scared of the thought of going home. We lived near the school, near the mountain. My grandmother told us to go to her place because she thought our house could be hit, too. We got dressed and got out of the main entrance of the school. It was dark out and incredibly windy. We had to walk while the snowmobiles were buried in the snow. I looked back at the school. I was worried about my shoes that sat on my school desk. I hoped they weren't gone in the snow, too.

Everyone in our family went to our grandmother's house. It was late; past midnight. The adults were still going crazy while us children were crying with confusion. We all shared one emotion and that was terror. My grandfather's niece was in the house with us. She called a guy in Kuujjuaq, the nearest village. She informed the guy about the tragedy. By the sounds of it, he didn't believe her. She cried and yelled at the phone telling it that everything she had said was true. She was asking him for help. I heard my grandfather saying that he was going back to the gym to help. My grandmother told him to be careful. She was worried. I heard a man's voice from the porch yelling, panik, panik! He was calling for his daughter. It was my cousin's father checking to see if she was safe. They both cried to each other.

The next day, the news of the avalanche was heard all across Quebec. Nine people lost their lives and 25 people were injured. Countless people came to our town to support us. We were just a community of about 600 people at the time. We stayed at our grandmother's house with every member of the Snowball family. The house was packed along with the people from out of town who came to help. It was a five bedroom household with two floors. Probably ten people squeezed in each room.

After weeks of staying at our grandmother's. We had to move to back to our house. Every night, we would walk there and I would stare at the mountain with fear. I was scared of it. I remembered that we went to our house and I noticed that there were no more Christmas decorations. I asked my daddy why and he told me that Christmas was over. I was sad by the looks of his face.

After ten years, people finally spoke about that tragic night. It was January 1, 2009 and people started going on the radio to talk about their memories. Hearing those stories from other people made me re-visit that moment. They had such sad voices, they each had their own story. It wasn't just one avalanche, but 600 avalanches. I will never forget about what happened that day. How it made every one of us today. Most importantly, I will not forget those who lost their lives that night.

(Silas, Joshua, Charlie, Louisa, Jessie, Bobby, Betty, Sivanau and Susana.)