KICKBALL 4 KIDS FOUNDER CHRIS THOMPSON NEEDED TO BE FLOWN TO BLOODVEIN RIVER TO HAND OVER A $2000 WORTH PACKAGE OF SPORT EQUIPMENT

A GRANT FROM PEPSI HE RECEIVED AND WANT TO FIT 5 SCHOOLS IN NORTHERN FIRST NATION COMMUNITIES 


Here his experience coming to Bloodvein:


If Rock Throwing and Streching the Neck Hole of Your Shirt ever become Olympic sports, Canada has a lock on the Gold, Silver and Bronze medals for years to come.


For the tiny remote community of Bloodvein, there lies a veritable wealth of raw, untapped talent.


Thanks to our failed attempt to get to Bloodvein by ferry last week, I had the honour of being flown up by a wonderful new friend, Edgar Schreiber.  I don’t have any fear of flying and even if I did, those fears would have been put easily to rest when Edgar told me that the his plane’s engine was basically the same as a lawnmower motor.   Very reassuring.  Edgar was an excellent pilot.  And since I have to talk a lot in my regular job, I welcomed the opportunity to rest my voice while in his plane…  Not because it isn’t possible to speak over the sound of the lawnmower motor, but because Edgar is a very gifted story teller and is a fountain of information about everything aeronautical!!


But back to the rock throwing and neck hole stretching.  As I saw in the first two communities, Bloodvein’s youth are starved for things to do.  Unfortunately, you can only break a window once and then the fun is gone.  The window gets boarded up and you must move on.  It isn’t often that you find an LCD TV in a garbage pile but, once again, once you smash it down into its component parts, you must move on.  

You can only pester the town dogs for so long before they play dead so that you will leave them alone and move on!
Many of the buildings in this town are made of sheet metal. This serves a couple purposes.  1) Metal walls are somewhat fireproof, 2) When the white folks are inside these buildings setting up a clothing sale and you bombard the building with rock, it makes an AWESOME racket!  We were hit from all side, including the roof.  And when anyone would go check to see if the sky was, in fact falling, all the kids wanted was to come inside.  

When the clothes were laid out and the residents were allowed in, the sale was a huge success.  At $0.25 per article, there were some great buys and many happy faces!  But after the clothes were purchased, the kids were bored once again.  


And I know that I look EXACTLY like a jungle gym, but I have never had so many kids trying to climb me!  We needed to start the gym night!

First, we packed the gym with equipment and then we packed it with kids.  It was basically 2 straight hours of (somewhat) organized chaos.  FAS plus ADHD times about 90% of the children equals total mayhem!  I tip my cap to Matt, Dylan, Rick and Eliz.  They did a fantastic job of organizing the games for these uberhyperactive youngsters.  Definition of uberhyperactive?  


See the photos of Mitch in the black shirt.  Those pictures were taken at the end of the night and he clearly still had energy left to burn.  Mitch was, by far the athlete of the day.  

Half the size of most other kids, it seemed as though he was on a mission to shake the nickname that his friends had given him (a nickname that rhymes perfectly with his given name).


My day was long, but not nearly as long as that of Matt, Dylan, Rick and Eliz.  Still, I had to go home and party.  (Oh, I should probably explain that.  After the gym night at the school on the Jackhead Reserve, a young fella asked me if I wanted to “party”.  I told him that I was definitely interested in “partying” but that my idea of a party involved a nice long soak in a bathtub with some Epsom salts and possibly a crossword puzzle.  Suddenly, he didn’t seem to interested in partying with me anymore).

Maybe I should have taken a cue from the dogs and just played dead halfway through the day.

And if the gift to me from the last school was the beautiful black rock from the shy little girl, the gift to me on this day, was the most beautiful Northern Lights show that I have ever seen.