This post is inspired by a girl I met at school and her blog. Her name is Alysha Li (Ironically, same name as my little sister) and her blog can be seen HERE.

She sent me a message on Facebook telling me about her most recent adventures and that she had started a blog. She is running summer camps for kids on reserves in Northern Ontario with Frontier College. The only thing I have to say is … Cool, and that I wish I could have that opportunity!

I read her blog and it was an interesting read. She wrote a post on the cost of certain items on the reserve. That post on her blog is titled “Day 9 Preparation.” Some of these item in her list included:

Medium block of cheese – $15
2L milk – $9
4 pieces of chicken breasts – $16
Bag of grapes – $10
1 Apple – $1
3 bell peppers – $8
Bottle of shampoo – $12

I thought to myself, “Where’s the klik or the spam?” Yeah, if you are First Nations and you grew up on a reserve you might know what I am talking about. If you don’t know, you are lucky. Trust me, Natives knew about spam before email was ever invented. Joking 😉 It’s not the same kind of spam!

Anyways, there is another post titled “Day 10: Canada Day.” In this post she describes how people are willing to do good things for anyone regardless of who they are and that reminded me of how much I miss home. If you ever want a true sense of community, go to any First Nations community. Yes, some First Nations are more divided than others and some more close-knit than others, but in the end when something needs to be done to help one another–it gets done.

In this same post, she talks about how the one task they were assigned to do. Then when time came to actually complete the activity, she knew the importance of her minute task of blowing up balloons.

Alysha writes

“It was really magical to see how just a few hours of blowing up balloons can bring so much happiness to the whole community.”

It reminded me of my sisters and the games we used to play. Literally, we would make toys out of anything and make entire games from just brown paper bags. I believe we even have pictures of us playing this said-game with brown paper bags–trust me, best game ever and I would still play it today.

Some of the games we used to play didn’t even require us to gather anything or make anything–just pick a color and wait for that color of car to drive.

These memories made miss home and reading what this one person had to write about while working on these summer camps for kids on reserves just made me realize that much more how lucky I am to have had the childhood I did and the memories I am able to remember–especially the ones with my family.