~Andy Leggett~

Last week we had a very interesting guest speaker come in to talk to us about working with the Inuit and Métis communities in Quebec. Andy works as a CYW for children in these tribes. There were two places that he had said that he works in but I could not even begin to know how to spell them!

Andy spoke about the challenges of being a CYW in these communities. One of the challenges is trying to define what they do. Another challenge is for them to make connections with children who struggle to make connections, as he put it. What he meant was that these children do not seem to have a lot of guidance. He finds it a struggle to connect with these children on a personal level because these children may not know themselves well enough. They see the world differently than we do where we live. He finds it hard to try to work with these children because they have different norms and opinions in their society than we do. He said that the longer he has worked with them, the more he has learned about their culture, making it easier to connect to them.

Andy told us about the language there and, on the slideshow, it showed what some of the letters and symbols look like in the signs. It seems like it would be very hard to understand. Regardless of the different ways of communication in this community, Andy seemed very confident in his work and seemed to have a lot of experience in this area.

He said that the safety in their area is way different than our area because there seems to be more alcoholism and other issues. Andy talked about the children gashuffing and he spoke about how the girls seemed to think it was okay to be promiscuous with different boys and men. They seemed to think it was the norm and that this was what they were supposed to be doing. This is way different than here because the most children and adolescents that live here are taught what they should and should not do when it comes to such dangerous hobbies and interests.

Andy had told us that the only way to keep him from burning out in his job is to make sure that you have a passion for what you are doing and that you make sure that you feel fierce. If you have a passion for what you are doing then you will reach your goal easier. If you continue to make yourself feel fierce in what you are doing then you will feel like you have the power to reach whatever goal that you can. Andy said that having passion about being fierce and being fierce about having passion go hand in hand and that they will help you out in your future career. As long as you let yourself be fierce and be passionate about what you are doing then you will lose the worry of a burnout.