Category Archives: education

96. A novel sleeping partner

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In November 2007, I headed south on a Ken Borrack Air Twin Otter. I’d been waiting all day, with the flight twice delayed owing to bad weather. Both times, I’d been sent home and, each time, got a call a couple of hours later telling me to get myself back to the airport. On the third try, the weather cleared long enough to allow the plane to take off.

Loading the Twin Otter at Arviat airport

The moment had come to fly the sixty miles south of Arviat to the hunting camp, and I boarded the stripped out plane that now only had three passenger seats. The only other human passengers were Nadine, the French-Canadian cook, and Reverend Jimmy Muckpah, minister at Arviat’s Anglican Church. The other passengers were two wooden boxes containing Jimmy’s sled dogs, packed securely for their own safety for the short low altitude flight. What little remaining space was packed to the rafters with a skidoo and some of the boxes of food and other items we’d need.

Lovely, kind Jimmy Muckpah, who knew more about polar bears than anyone I’ve known
Jimmy’s sled dogs, who seemed quite content with their travel arrangements

We flew south along the coast to our camp. The others had flown in on an earlier flight and we all helped to unload the plane before it took off again. It would return for us in two weeks. I was to live for those two weeks with five big game trophy hunters from the US, their five Inuit guides, all from Arviat (including Jimmy), and Nadine. The guides, Nadine and I all knew each other, but the trophy hunters were new to me and, indeed, to all of us. I was here for research. I was studying the relationship between humans and polar bears; specifically, seeking to understand the changing role of polar bears in Inuit culture and economy, as international laws about polar bear hunting was rapidly evolving.

Ryan, the camp outfitter, had generously invited me to the camp. What I learned in those two weeks hugely enriched my anthropological understanding of the role of polar bears in Inuit life and I published my findings in various academic journals and books in the subsequent years. My findings were even presented as evidence at US Congress hearings in 2008 that sought to amend US Fish and Wildlife laws concerning the importation of ‘trophy’ polar bears from other countries.

The camp comprised four cabins. The trophy hunters slept in two of the cabins, the guides all bunked together in another, and the fourth cabin – which was also the camp kitchen and eating quarters – was shared by Nadine and me. Each cabin had a ‘toilet,’ consisting of a ‘honey bucket’ – basically a bucket with a seat and a bin liner that we changed every few days. At those temperatures, anything you did into the honey bucket froze almost immediately. Nadine and I had a small room off the far end of the kitchen that contained a bunkbed. She slept on the top bunk and I on the bottom.

Our little huddle of humanity on the west coast of Hudson Bay

Ryan had built his outfitting camp here because it was situated along the polar bear migration route. Indeed, during the two weeks I was there, more than seventy individual polar bears passed through on their winter migration out onto the sea ice. Many of them came close, attracted by the smells of the camp, and snuffled around. We were under strict orders that no-one was to leave the cabins, or go between cabins, without a rifle and to never go alone. The trophy hunters rarely listened to that advice and took stupid risks by walking from the kitchen cabin to their own in the dark. The local guides, well aware of the realities of living in such close proximity with the world’s largest carnivores, were extremely annoyed by the idiocy of the trophy hunters.

I had various roles during those two weeks. I helped Nadine in the kitchen. I went out on hunting trips with the guides and the hunters in their charge. And I helped with skinning and preparing two of the three bears that were killed. (According to international and local law at the time, each hunter could take one trophy bear (they paid tens of thousands of dollars for the ‘privilege,’ some of which found its way back into the Inuit subsistence economy)). During those two weeks, three of the five hunters got their trophy. The other two went home empty handed.

I remember helping one of the guides, Donald, one day as he skinned a bear that had been shot by the trophy hunter in his care. The hunter was back in the warmth of the cabin, enjoying a hot coffee and some freshly baked cinnamon rolls. I held the bear’s huge heavy legs while Donald did what he had to do. It was cold and he wanted to get the work done quickly. So that he could keep his head down and concentrate on the work, he asked me to keep my eyes on the two polar bears that were circling close by and to let him know if either of them started to move closer. They didn’t, but I was shit scared and so was he.

Polar bears came close to and into the camp every day.

The plywood cabins were reinforced with corrugated metal. They had windows that were too small for a polar bear to get through, and the doors were covered with six inch nails, sharp side out, to discourage any bear that might try to break in. Even so, it was pretty scary at times. One particular day, when the hunters and guides had all left camp to go hunting, and Nadine and I were alone in the cabin, a bear came snuffling around. He stood on his hind legs, making him probably 8 feet tall. He looked in the window into our kitchen (imagine, a polar bear looking in at you!), and repeatedly hit against the side of the cabin with his front paws. He was trying to get in. Nadine and I were terrified. We had a rifle, but I’d only ever used it for target practice. Would I know what to do in a real life-or-death situation? Eventually, he gave up with trying to open the sardine tin that was our cabin and started to play around with the big cylinder of propane gas that was our only source of heat and cooking fuel. One slap with his paw, and he knocked the cylinder loose. Before we knew it, he was rolling it around on the ground, playing with it, and now was 20 or 30 metres away. While we were delighted that he seemed to have lost interest in us, we now had a new problem – it was about -15C and a polar bear was using our only heat source as a toy. Luckily, the hunters and guides came back about an hour later and all was well.

Every night when I went to bed, I could hear snuffling outside the cabin. Sometimes, I’d shine my flash light out the small window and see a pair of eyes reflected back. Lying in my bunk, I’d hear snuffling on the other side of the flimsy wall. Imagine my surprise the first morning I went out and saw a very clear indentation in the snow the size and shaped of a curled up polar bear. It was exactly on the other side of the wall from my bunkbed. The indentation was there every morning; sometimes, like in the photo below, accompanied by claw marks.

I didn’t sleep well for those two weeks, let me tell you, knowing that I was sleeping beside a polar bear, with only a strip of plywood and corrugated metal separating us. But when I looked back on it, I understood what a privilege those two weeks were.

It hard to see the indent of the bear’s body in this one, but the claw-mark is right in the centre.

95. Morning stars

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I thought the early starts last week would be much tougher. In fact, they weren’t too bad at all. After almost three months, during which I only occasionally set an alarm and most days didn’t get up until at least 8am, I wasn’t looking forward to not only returning to the Monday to Friday school routine, but also having to get up an hour earlier because of Lily starting a new school.

Like I said before, getting up in the dark is not one of my favourite things. But, as I’ve discovered this week, getting up at 6am has its merits. This week, while Lily got ready for school, I wrote my morning pages, did ten minutes of yoga, and prepped breakfasts and school snacks.

Lily leaving the house at 7:05 to walk to the bus is the perfect opportunity for me to take Lady for her first walk of the day – just a short one, which works out better for me and for her and for the timing of our later, big walk of the morning.

And what did Lily and I (and maybe Lady) discover? Stars! So many stars in the sky at that hour. And the moon. And planets. And the occasional shooting star. What a way to start the day, with a few moments of star gazing.

By the time Lady and I get home after our brief walk, Katie is up and getting ready to catch her bus, forty minutes later.

It’s a new approach to the morning. I doubt I’ll be feeling this positive when the mornings are no longer a pleasant temperature and I have to drag myself out from under my winter duvet.

P.S. One slight fly in the ointment occurred on the second day of school, when the bus simply didn’t turn up. Lily waited and waited and eventually came home again. She’s the only student from Sanlúcar going to that school and she’s the first one to go to that school in at least three years. The bus driver came the first day. A different bus driver, the second day, forgot to drive to Sanlúcar out of habit. So she got the day off school (I wasn’t about to undertake an 80 minute round trip to drive her there.) I phoned the principal, who phoned the bus company, and the bus has arrived promptly every day since.

89. Back to school

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The girls have been on summer holidays now for about one-fifth of the year. It’s been a glorious summer. Despite some loss – or perhaps because of it, making us realise how fleeting and precious life is – we have had an amazing summer, during which we got to do some incredible things. Twelve hours from now, the new school year starts.

They’re both a little nervous – a new school for Lily, a new class for Katie. They will both have new classmates and new teachers and, in the case of Lily, new subjects that she’s never studied before.

I’m a little nervous too, as I always am at the start of the school year, hoping they will have positive experiences and will enjoy themselves.

They’ve got their bags packed, their clothes ready, and we’re in bed early tonight. The house is going to be very quiet tomorrow!

85. The real New Year

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The start of September has always felt more like the real New Year. What is the 1st of January other than a dark miserable arbitrary day in the wake of the bacchanal of Christmas, everyone over-fed, over-watered, over-socialised, with not a penny to their names after splurging on presents and outfits and goodness knows what else, and nothing to look forward to but two or more months of cold and dark. New Year’s resolutions at that time of year are born more out of guilt than optimism.

How different is September. The start of autumn, the season of plenty, of apples and wheat, of (in Ireland) bringing home the turf to heat the house in winter. It’s back to school time too. Whether you have children or not, the return to school at this time of year is so ingrained in our culture. All but a few know exactly what it’s like to go back to school. It’s all about newness – a new class, new books, new teachers, maybe a new uniform. It’s a time for moving up and moving on, from one year or level to the next. This is the time of year when many teenagers move away from home for the first time.

This year, like all others, early September feels like the start of a new year. Lily and Katie have (of their own volition) spent the past two days declutterring and deep cleaning their bedroom. Lily has decided to try her hand at selling some clothes she no longer wears on Vinted. She’s sold three items today alone!

With school about to start in a few days, the girls and I have been talking about eating more healthily for ourselves and the planet and so I’m planning some very different meals over the coming weeks.

At this time of year, the weather is still warm enough and the days long enough to put New Year’s resolutions and promises made to ourselves into action. There’s a welcome return to routine after the more free-form and chaotic summer holidays – especially for people with school-age kids.

So, if you’re thinking of making positive changes in your life, don’t hold off until dreary January. Embrace the possibilities for change at this, the real, New Year.

66. The A Book

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At Christmas 1989, I was 16 years old and in my final year of secondary school. In February, I would have to complete my application for university – a centralized system in which I would have to list my choice of institutions and courses from one to ten. In June 1990, I would sit the state Leaving Certificate exam and, in August, I would be offered the highest ranked of the ten courses for which I had gained sufficient accumulated points in my Leaving Cert.

Geography and English were my favourite subjects and I imagined I would do a degree in those two subjects, become a teacher, and then come home to Edenderry and teach for the rest of my life. I didn’t know any better. My teachers were my role models for what could be done with a university degree. I loved Geography, ergo, I would become a geography teacher.

But, while at 16, I couldn’t imagine a life for myself outside of Edenderry, in my mind, I was a citizen of the world. From the age of 11, I’d had pen-pals in Singapore, Australia, Malawi, Egypt, Hong Kong, Spain, Greece (by the way, to this day I’m still friends with Aileen in Singapore and Haitham in Egypt), and spent vast amounts of time – and pocket money on stationary and stamps – telling them all about my life and learning all about their lives. And, shortly after I’d turned 16, I made the difficult decision to stop buying Smash Hits every fortnight and instead save up my pocket money and birthday and Christmas money to subscribe to National Geographic. I’d sit at the kitchen table or lie on my bed here in Ballygibbon, and read National Geographic from cover to cover, even the ads, as the words and photos took me on journeys to places and peoples in lands far from my little corner of Co. Kildare.

That Christmas of 1989, my aunt Marian and uncle Jim came up from west Cork to stay at Nana’s house in Gilroy. We saw them two or three times a year, but this time was a little different. Jim was a primary school headmaster and my parents had asked if he could help me with Maths. The Leaving Cert was only six months away and Maths was, by some measure, my worst subject. Poor Jim, he did his best but, he was fighting a losing battle from the start. Not only was I bad at Maths, I refused to even try to be good. My stubborn mental block took years to shift and it is residually still with me today.

Jim, in his spare time, was also a door-to-door encyclopaedia salesman. On the day they arrived at Nana’s house that Christmas, Mammy and I popped in to visit. ‘Come out to the car,’ Jim said to me. ‘I’ve something for you.’ Out we went. He opened the boot of the car and fished out the A book of the World Book encyclopaedia. I was delighted with this and spent the remainder of the visit at Nana’s house browsing through the pages.

At home that evening, I sat on my bed, a mug of tea on the bedside table, and poured over the A book, page by page. It was filled with all sorts of interesting A things – from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to Alexander I, from Antarctica to Austria, from Airplane to Audio-visual Materials. And then I came to page 509: Anthropology.

What on earth? There’s this field of study that I’ve never heard of before, that’s combines some of the bits I like best about geography, and that’s all about learning about people who live far away in other parts of the world. Could I do that? It seemed highly unlikely.

I read and re-read the four and half pages about Anthropology. Among the most renowned were a handful of women – notably Ruth Benedict, Margaret Mead, Elsie Parsons.

And I read that anthropologists did their research by immersing themselves in the lives and cultures of the peoples they studied, learning skills and languages, and then theorized and wrote about what they had learned from those experiences. Surely there were no anthropologists in Ireland! This was far too exotic and exciting!

I thought about anthropology all through the Christmas holidays and, as soon as I the January term started, I made a bee-line for the school career guidance counsellor, convinced that she would tell me she had never heard of this subject or that the nearest place I could do it was somewhere in England. Imagine my surprise when she told me that the only Anthropology department in the Republic of Ireland was in Maynooth – my nearest university! How could this be? How did I not know?

In February, I filled in my university application form, still erring on the side of Geography and English in UCD, but with Arts in Maynooth as my second choice. When I received my Leaving Cert results in August 1990, I knew I had enough points to do Anthropology and Geography at Maynooth.

And did I get my degree and return to Edenderry to become a Geography teacher? Well, I got my degree. And I followed that with a Masters degree in Anthropology. Then I went to live in Japan for three years. Then I moved to the Canadian Arctic. Then I did a PhD in Anthropology, immersing myself for long periods of time in an Inuit community on the west coast of Hudson Bay. Then I worked as an Anthropologist-Geographer in geography departments in Cambridge, Reading and Exeter universities. All thanks to my uncle Jim handing me the A book out of the boot of his car two months before I applied for university.

I was sitting at the kitchen table here in Ballygibbon earlier today. I glanced up towards the bookcase and saw the A book, still sitting there. Coincidentally, today is also the day when tens of thousands of students across Ireland receive their Leaving Cert results. I hope their lives are as unexpected and serendipitous as mine has proven to be up to now.

59. Discovering Ireland

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If you love board games, may I recommend Discovering Ireland or its cousin, Discovering Europe. I’ve been playing this with my friend Niamh since we were both in university. It was as much fun more than 30 years ago as it is now, playing it with our kids.

The object of the game is for each player to get to five towns and then exit by a port, while each player tries to block everyone else from reaching their destination and getting rid of all of their cards.

We’ve played it three times this summer so far. It generally leads to great outbursts of laughter, occasional spilled drinks, impromptu song compositions. And the kids learn a little geography into the bargain!

I really need to add it to our board game collection at home in Sanlúcar.

51. Alma Mater

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Around this time 35 years ago, I was accepted into St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, now Maynooth University. I still remember the nervous and shy 17 year old I was on that early October day in 1990 when Daddy drove me the 25 miles up to Maynooth for registration and to drop me off in my student accommodation.

This morning I took Lily and Katie to Maynooth, Lily now only a year younger than I was then. So much has changed and, yet, so much remains the same. I took them into Rhetoric House, home of the Geography Department and scene of my encounter with kind John Sweeney. I showed them the swimming pool. They asked if was creepier than the pool in Edenderry. Definitely. The tiny post office remains unchanged, as does Pugin Hall, where we used to pretend we were theology students to avail of the free tea and coffee. The Beatle is still outside the library (a statue of Pope John Paul II blessing two children – George and Ringo). The library itself was full of students preparing for repeat exams, but we quietly strolled around – until I got us lost and we ended up in the fire escape. In my defence, it was the main stair in my day!

The new campus is unrecognisable, but the Arts Block remains the same – so tiny compared to how I remembered it. Even the lecture theatres, which seemed huge, now look tiny. From there to the canteen and sports centre and then the Student’s Union – scene of so much divilment over the years!!

Many of the friends I made in those years remain my great friends to this day. The courses I studied set the trajectory for my professional and personal life, leading me to where I am today. It was a glorious trip down memory lane, as I recounted various things my friends and I got up to. The girls thought I’d gone slightly mad and all we’d gotten up to 30 and more years ago was all rather quaint!

47. Ukaliq

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In late 2000, I’d already been working as a volunteer teacher at Levi Angmak Elementary School in Arviat, Nunavut, for some months. Kip Gibbons, one of the teachers who had befriended me, offered to show me how to sew my own mittens. She sent me to the Northern Store to buy ukaliq (arctic hare) fur. I duly went a couple of evenings later and bought two ukaliq skins. On Saturday, I went around to Kip’s house and we sat on her floor, where she helped me to cut the pattern and showed me how to stitch the parts together.

I’ve never been much of a crafts person, so I was delighted to be making my own mittens. It was probably -20C or -25C as I walked the snow-covered streets back to my house a few hours later, proudly wearing my new mittens. I would wear them for years, and still have them today, although there isn’t much call for them in southern Spain.

On the Monday after I sewed the mitts, I wore them to school. In the school foyer, I met Peter 2 Aulajoot, an older teacher, who was always friendly and jokey with me. He chuckled when he saw my mitts. I hadn’t cut them badly or sewed them poorly. But Peter 2 noticed something that I hadn’t. While the fur on my left mitt was mostly white with a little smattering of black, the fur on my right mitt was mostly black with a little smattering of white. They looked completely mismatched. How could I not have seen this?

From that day on, Peter 2 always called me Ukaliq – arctic hare. A few other people picked it up too, but it wasn’t a name I was commonly called. But I liked that name for myself. I’d always loved hares, always got a thrill when I’d see them in Ireland. Now that I was in Nunavut, I saw them more often – including one that lived out past the reservoir and seemed as tame as a pet bunny.

I’ve carried that name – Ukaliq – with me ever since, making the frisson of excitement I feel whenever I see a hare all the sharper. So, yesterday when Michael said, ‘There’s the hare,’ I immediately turned to the window. And there she was. At the base of a granite outcrop beside the house, ears up, alert. She paused, nibbled at a hind paw with her teeth, hopped along and then sat, ears back, looking out over the sea.

I was in a state of awe and nostalgia and joy all mingled together, remembering Peter 2 and Kip and that ukaliq by the reservoir and the person I was twenty-five years ago.

37. Summer reading challenge

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The library has become noticeably busier this week, now that schools in England have finally closed for the summer. The girls and I have been feeling very sorry for all these English kids who are still at school six weeks after Spanish summer holidays started. (Irish holidays aren’t much shorter than Spanish holidays. How I relished those long holidays as a child).

With so much going on in the library, I’ve had to move to a different table, this time near the front. I sit at one of two round tables; the other is reserved for signing children up for the Summer Reading Challenge.

All morning, mothers arrive with their kids, mostly in the 5 to 7 age range. There are laid back chilled out mums, frazzled harried mums, mums who’ve been bringing their kids to the library since they were born, mums who’ve only stepped into this library for the first time today.

The young member of staff assigned to the task of signing kids up is great. She focuses on the kids, asks their name and how to spell it, asks if they know their birthday. She finds a point of interest in almost every kid – catches something they say or some object they have – and lets them know she’s their ally. For one kid, it’s Pokémon – asks the kid which is their favourite and then says she likes that one too. For another kid, it’s their favourite colour (green), for another, a book they like. Did I already mention how great libraries and librarians are?

All of this takes me back more than a decade, when we still lived in England and the girls signed up for the Summer Reading Challenge, two years running, if I’m not mistaken. They had to set a goal for how many books they’d read (one six year old this morning said he was going to read six hundred billion million). I can’t remember what the goal was now – five maybe? Or maybe that’s too low. I can’t remember.

Anyway, the point is, Lily was the reader. She’d picked up reading early, read her first Harry Potter book at five. (Looking back now, even I can’t believe that’s true, but it is). So the ‘challenge’ part of the Summer Reading Challenge didn’t really exist for her. But for Katie, it really was a challenge – for her and for me. I despaired of her ever reading. She refused. She wailed. She simply would not read. By the time she was nine, I was resigned to the fact that she was never going to read. I don’t mean she was illiterate, but she was so halting and uncomfortable with reading that I had decided that maybe it just wasn’t for her.

She turned 10, then 11, then 12. Two summers ago, just before she turned 13, she discovered the joy of reading. It started with a graphic novel and then reading a novel by the same author. Once she got going, there was as no stopping her. She now puts Lily and me in the ha’penny place. This year so far, she’s read more than 20 novels. The first place she wanted to go to when we arrived in the UK was a bookshop. Here are her books just for the few weeks we’re here:

The summer reading challenge now? Figuring out how we’ll stay under our luggage limit, thanks to all of Katie’s books!

22. Lovely libraries

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“I’m off to the library,” I say to my father-in-law on our first day here in the UK. “The library?” he asks, looking at me like I have two heads. “There are no libraries any more,” he says. “Yes, there are,” I say. “I’m going to Warwick County library, in Shire Hall.” He used to work at Shire Hall and it’s one of his favourite topics of conversation. But he’s convinced there is no library there, that all the libraries in the country have closed down due to lack of interest, lack of funding and, his pet hate, technology. I try to convince him that the library is still there. I know because of…erm…technology. I’ve already done my research online and I know its daily opening hours (extensive) and I even know where I plan to sit when I go there every day to work. He remains perplexed and unbelieving. “Who uses libraries these days?” he asks.

I go to the library that afternoon and have been coming here for a few hours every morning since on those days when we are in Leamington Spa. Who uses the library, indeed? There are old people and young people, babies in strollers and grannies on mobility scooters. There are young frazzled parents and teenagers straight from school still in their uniforms. There are able-bodied people and disabled people. There are school groups and people in residential care. There are people here for parent and child story time and rhyme time and teenagers here for book club. There are people browsing the shelves and people consulting the librarians for help finding specific books. There are people in to renew their library card or to get one for the first time. There are people seeking assistance on matters that have nothing to do with books. And there are people like me, who have come in to use the space to work. A young women is at the table behind me a couple of days a week, writing away on her laptop. One day, a man about my age arrives in, in a business suit and dragging a suitcase behind him. He sits for a couple of hours and works on his laptop as he waits for his train or plane or whatever mode of transport he needs to get to where he’s going.

The library is small. But it’s bright and colourful. There are bright and inviting displays about gardening and, for the children, there’s a summer treasure hunt of herbs, that they have to guess from their scent. There are special displays – of gardening books, LGBTQ+ books, Black history books, summer reading recommendations. The librarians are, to a person, kind and smiling and give the appearance of people who love their jobs. This is not some stern library where people are forced to be silent. Those days, I hope, are long gone for public libraries. I hear the librarians quietly chatting amongst themselves and being friendly to everyone who comes in the door.

I choose to sit at the work/study space towards the back, next to the children’s library, with its snug spaces for kids to get lost in books. Nearer to the front, and I would be distracted by the conversations taking place at the front desk. But here, I am generally not distracted by the sounds of children, or of their mothers reading books to them (except when a mum reads a book that I read to my girls; then, I get a little nostalgic). I was distracted yesterday, however, when the soft-voiced man leading story time read a book to a group of toddlers and their parents about a trip to the zoo. One toddler, clearly not enjoying herself, spent the entire story saying “It’s so boring, it’s so boring.” That made me chuckle.

So, despite lack of funding and the digital world we live in, this small library is bursting at the seams with liveliness and activity. So, here’s to libraries everywhere, and to the librarians who take care of them and to the people who use them and to the taxpayers who fund them and to the civil servants and politicians who budget to keep them open. I wish I could convince my father-in-law to come here and see for himself, but alas, he’s a non-believer.