2004 Travel Scholarship - Sophie Livsey

My Canadian Gap ProjectBetty Kenyon, Sophie Livsey & Pam Brown

One year ago I was preparing myself to go to Canada for 7 months.  Nothing to me was as scary as saying goodbye to my friends and family for so long.  I arrived at the airport on the 23rd of January to meet up with 2 other English ‘gappers' Mike and Dave. The whole plane journey was a blur as the three of us attempted to get know each other, after all we would be spending the next seven months of our lives living, working and socialising together.  It was a strange feeling to think that I had a completely clean slate and a brand new stage of my life was beginning.

I got the placement with an organisation called ‘GAP' who arranged for me to work for a YMCA camp in Alberta. I'd had to save for the flight and GAP fee and live off a minimal wage, so the money I received from winning the Travel Scholarship was much appreciated. The camp was right at the edge of the Rocky Mountains and the views around the camp were amazing. No matter where you stood there was always a mountain in sight.  

For the first three months I was living in a chalet with four other gappers.   Three of us were English (me, Mike and Dave) and the other two were Australians (Lizzie and Sam.)  We immediately formed a strong bond as we were all in the same boat and were a bit isolated from the other side of the camp.  We had a great three months living together and, because the winter season has such a small staff team of about twenty people and the drinking age in Alberta (unlike British Columbia unfortunately!) is 18 like at home, alcohol was permitted on site during our time off at weekends.  We had some great parties that always seemed to end up with someone running around in the snow... 

The winter season was probably my favourite time at camp.  The programme we were running was called ‘Eco-School' where different school groups would come out from Tuesday morning to Friday morning.  We each got a group of around 12 kids aged from 9 to 12 years old and had to teach them about different aspects of the Canadian environment. We also had to teach them how to work in a group and how to respect each other.  The kids all stayed in lodges two kilometres away from our ‘gapper house' and it was our job to wake them up in the morning and be with them till we put them to bed at night. A full time job! I loved being in charge of reading the bedtime stories but wasn't so good at being tough with them when they just would not be quiet! The bike ride home in the pitch black swerving through the snow was always fun!

Some of the schools were in underprivileged areas of Calgary so the kids sometimes came very ill equipped.  We had to take our groups on a day hike where you would show them different animal footprints in the snow, bear scratchings in the trees and what all the different trees were.  It all sounds very simple and easy looking back but trying to keep 12 kids interested when it's -20 outside was no picnic!  It also didn't help when a teacher decided to watch you stumble over your words because, to be honest, I didn't know all that much about the Canadian trees when I'd never really known much about British ones. Some moments were very interesting...

We got a week off in the middle of the winter season so the four other gappers and I went skiing in Banff. Skiing among the dramatic Rocky Mountains was awe-inspiring. We had a great time, except when Lizzie lost her snowboard down the slope on her first run. Also I'd never skied before so when the guys took me to the top of a mountain and left me, that wasn't too amusing either; but other than that it was a very much appreciated (and needed) week off.

I loved the winter because it was all I expected of Canada and more.  The views were incredible with the snow-capped mountains and the staff team was amazingly close because we did everything together. Then springtime came and about 100 members of staff moved onto camp.  Three more gappers joined our ‘gapper crew', two from Australia and one more from good old England! We had a tight rivalry between the Brits and the Ozzys the whole time we were there and it was always fun telling our kids that Australia was where we used to send all the convicts!

The spring season wasn't much different from winter except we all had to move out of our cosy homes to live in... Tipis!  They were huge tent like structures made from wooden poles with canvas outside them and had big fire pits in the middle.  This is what I lived in for four months so I never complain about my uni flat now.   The other difference from winter was that instead of a nice, small staff team a whole bunch of people moved in.  It felt a bit like my home had been intruded on and that took a bit of getting used to.  Also, we five gappers who had been living together for three months were now split up into our own separate tipis. Prising us apart was a difficult feat! 

Different schools came for four school days like in the winter and the programme was pretty much the same except on a much wider scale.  We filled the main lodge at meal times and it seemed a lot more hectic somehow.  We also slept in the tipis with our group of kids (except now we had smaller groups of only eight children per tipi) so our time away from them was minimal.  All would have run pretty smoothly if the rain hadn't come.  I'm pretty used to the rain, after living in Manchester all my life, but when it rains constantly for about a month and you're living outside, morale soon starts to falter (especially with a group of ten year-olds).  Sitting by a fire desperately trying to dry kids' soaking shoes every night meant we spent the rest of our time trying to keep everyone as dry as possible. Then the tipis started leaking...

When the end of the spring season came we were all ready for our two weeks' off; except it wasn't really two weeks because one week was taken up with wilderness first aid training.  We had to know how to make a leg splint out of a branch and a bit of handy string, what to do when a mother bear and her cub get in your way (or you're in their way!) or how to fend off an angry Australian when you've just explained why the British are fundamentally superior to them! In our second week off the five of us Gap Girls (our name to the entire camp!) got on the bus and went to Vancouver, in British Columbia; the nicest place in the world to live, apparently.  We spent a day or two seeing Vancouver city then hopped on a ferry to Vancouver Island and travelled on a bus to Tofino, the Canadian surfing capital. We decided to buy a cheap tent and camp out to save on money but realised shortly afterwards that we didn't have sleeping bags or mats.  Those nights were not the most comfortable of nights, but it was great fun sleeping by the beach and relaxing during the day.  We were not looking forward to the 20 hour bus journey back until we found a much more fun alternative.  The five of us chipped in the money and bought an 18-year old Toyota Tercel with a broken window.  The three of us with driving licences took it in turns to drive back to camp, stopping at Whistler and Jasper on the way.  I will never forget the looks on everyone's faces back at camp when we got out of the car.

When we got back it was straight into a week's training for summer camp.  Instead of having to look after your group on your own you got assigned a partner to take the pressure off a little, because now you had a group for two weeks at a time, with only one full day off in between each session. It was very exhausting.  We lead fun activities such as horse riding, rock climbing, overnight hikes, swimming in the lake and any other spontaneous activities you could think of, and, trust me, with those kinds of attention spans you had to be quick on your feet.  At the end of every two weeks the whole camp had a night off and the hundreds of staff would all pile into one bar in the nearest town, and, through exhaustion and lack of socialisation, just take over!  The summer flew by very quickly and we all got more and more tired (more tired in fact than I had previously thought it possible to be without actually being asleep).

I couldn't believe it when it was time for me to pack up my belongings and say goodbye to people who I had spent the last seven months with.  The thought of going back to England was frightening in itself.  I wasn't quite sure how I would slot back into life with my old friends and family again.  Waving goodbye to a phase of my life which could never be repeated and to people who I probably would never see again was very upsetting.  But here I am, writing this report and looking back at photos not quite believing what I achieved.  My Canada experience already seems very far away and now I'm thinking about when I can get to Australia for my next big adventure.

Sophie Livsey, December 2005

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