January 2011 - The simple joy of hot chocolate

Written by A Southern chocolate lover gone North

In the remote community where I teach in Northern Ontario, there are a lot of good things. I have never had to send a student home for dressing inappropriately. Grandparents and even great-grandparents are active members of the family helping to raise grandchildren. The sense of community is overwhelming. When someone passes away, the schools and businesses close for the day of the funeral. A baby in the hospital is reason enough to cancel a much anticipated community baseball tournament. Christmas and other feasts are eaten together not as a family, but as an entire community.

It is also easy to see what is missing here. There is no fire station, no doctor, and no road to access the outside world. There is no Salvation Army or Goodwill. No church with a soup kitchen. No library. No movie theatre. No YMCA/YWCA. No seniors’ centre. And, perhaps most of all, in a town where half the boys in grade five are named after hockey legends, there is no hockey arena. After school and on weekends can be a cold and boring time for a child here.

For many people, the concept of a one-room school is part of antiquity. Not so for me. Of course, my one room school is filled with computers and students accessing lessons prepared and marked by teachers qualified in the various subject areas. We have all the amenities of the modern high school from microscopes to HD video flip cameras. We also have a few other not-as-common technologies such as a video teleconferencing system which allows my classroom to connect with similar ones throughout Ontario in a network that covers an area the size of France!

 The limited class and community size allow me to develop an intimacy with not only my students, but also their families and the other children. Children here will often come bang on a teacher’s door asking for treats. On the weekends, I give out hot chocolate and cookies from my one-room high school. Throughout the week, children looking forward to the hot chocolate will come up to me asking if it is Friday yet. When asked to draw a visual map of her community, one of my high school students drew the high school building and wrote on it “Hot chocolate, Come and get it!”Along with the hot chocolate, sometimes kids just want to colour or hang out and play in a warm place. By kids, I mean any child from about 4 up to my high school students.

 I don’t know what it is about hot chocolate that people here like so much, but it appeals to all ages. As word spread last year even a few of the adult men have also ventured in for a cup. It is also not unknown for younger children to walk, or toddle as it were, into my classroom. One four year old who I think was looking for hot chocolate came in just last week. He looked at me and then pointed to the cups I use for hot chocolate saying "Coffee?" I looked back at him and said "Aren't you a little young? How old are you?"He then told me his name. I replied "I think what we have here is a failure to communicate." He pointed at the multi-coloured mini-marshmallows I have and demanded "Mushroom!"

Living here, I see some of the difficulties that can be faced by indigenous people in the modern world. I also see great progress. And of course, there are still many bad side effects of residential schools that can be seen here in the community. I don’t want the treats I give out here to be the result of demeaning, degrading, unfair, and sometimes dangerous work environments for other people. I am also aware of how the damage to the environment harms not only the earth we all share, but can also devastate the lives of indigenous peoples. That is why I have made using organic and fair trade products part of my life.

Sometimes I wonder about companies and their dedication to fair trade. Last Thanksgiving, in 2009, I wrote a letter of complaint to a company because I had received bad customer service. Trying to balance things out, I then wrote a letter to a company whose products I really love, Camino. I told them about how I hand out Camino hot chocolate and cookies I bake to the children here. A little later that month, I went to the grocery store/bank/post office looking for a letter from my mom. The cashier told me there were several parcels waiting for me.

I could not believe what was in those parcels. Over a year later, I still tear up. Not only had Camino sent me an overly generous amount of hot chocolate, cocoa powder, and chocolate chips, the employees had gone out and bought me the things, as they said, they used to make nutritious cookies for their families including raisins, hemp protein powder, nuts, dried cranberries, wheat germ. Along with all the supplies was a picture of the employees, including the pet dog. I left that picture up on my fridge until June. Camino’s generosity last year increased the quality of my baking by an amount I could never have done by myself. I have no doubt left in my mind that Camino is a company that practices what it preaches, caring not only about its partners internationally, but also their customers here at home in Canada.

A Southern chocolate lover gone North.

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