Peggy Revell
It may have been a cold winter so far, but Fort Frances has given a warm welcome to an exchange teacher and her family from Australia.
“The people here are lovely,” said Maree Callaway, who arrived in January to teach at Fort High during a year-long exchange program.
“We’re just really impressed by the community of Fort Frances, and the welcoming, the warmth of the people here,” she added.
Meanwhile, Fort High drama teacher Willa Kunkel and her family have headed off to the Callaways’ home in Cairns, Australia for the year-long exchange.
Located in the northern part of Queensland, Cairns also is one of the hottest parts of Australia, with a tropical climate, Callaway explained.
“Someone else I worked with had been and done one in Canada, and said it was brilliant,” Callaway noted of what inspired her and her family to apply for the exchange that is organized through the teachers’ union.
“And our oldest is 14, and so we thought if we don’t do it now, we’re going to waste the opportunity to go and do something different,” she reasoned. “So I applied and before I knew it, we were off to Fort Frances!”
And ending up in a small town was actually what Callaway said they had hoped for as a destination.
“We requested a country town, rather than a big city, because we had lived in a country town before we had had the kids, my husband and I in Australia, about this size of 8,000, and we loved it,” explained Callaway, who teaches drama, English, and dance.
“I loved teaching there, and I loved it!” she enthused. “Everyone was connected and you got to know the community really well.
“Cairns is 120,000 now, population, so it’s big and our kids haven’t got that same experience.
“So we thought, ‘Great opportunity for the kids to live in a small town, experience a whole different culture,’ and jumped at the opportunity really,” she continued. “And they were open to the idea of something new and haven’t really complained or sort of looked back at all.
“They’ve really just taken it all in stride and are really enjoying it.”
Callaway’s three children currently are in Grade 9 at Fort High, as well as Grade 4 and Grade 8 at J.W. Walker School.
Her husband, who owns his own business in Australia and is a marine mechanic, currently has papers to work in Canada, as well.
“Of course, it’s not the best time of year for marine work,” said Callaway. “So he’s looking for work.”
Arriving in January, the weather is something they have never seen before, noted Callaway, adding her kids had never experienced snow before.
Callaway and her husband grew up in Melbourne, in the southern part of Australia, where snow only happened a few hours away upon the mountains.
“We flew into Winnipeg and it was just beautiful,” she said about first arriving in the country back on Jan. 10. “We came in in the morning and it was covered in snow and the sun was shining.
“It was beautiful.”
While the family originally was supposed to stay in Winnipeg overnight, they were met and taken on to Fort Frances the same day, she added.
“The town just looked beautiful covered in snow. When you’re not used to it, it’s very picturesque,” Callaway said of her first impression of the town, noting they arrived when a fresh fall of snow had covered up some of the slush that had been around prior.
And just a few days after arriving, Callaway also began teaching at the high school.
“My first three days here were the days that the buses didn’t run and it’s really strange cold days that you had,” she noted. “Everybody was saying that this is really out of the norm, and I knew it was cold outside, but it was probably quite a nice way to break into it because I only had small classes.”
Callaway added her students are very mature.
“Very friendly, very interested in what I’ve got to offer in my stories, so I’ve been really enjoying my classes,” she remarked.
And while they expected the weather to be the biggest adjustment, it’s been something they’ve embraced.
“The coldest we’ve ever been is probably one, two degrees [Celsius]. The kids have probably never had anything colder than 18, 19,” Callaway explained. “They’ve never felt anything like this before, but they adjusted amazingly.
“Kids are incredible, they’re really resilient. I think the first morning we were here, they were outside playing in the snow. They were just rugged up and they were fine.
“I think we thought we would feel the cold more,” Callaway admitted. “It’s cold, but when we got here, people gave us a lot of the warm gear that they had that they weren’t using, so when we go outside, we’re really well rugged up.
“I think we’ve been outside more than more people here, I say. That really cold weekend, we were out ice skating on the lake, we made an ice-skating rink,” she added. “And people were going, ‘We’re inside by the fire.’
“We’ve been snowshoeing, we’ve been ice skating outside, we’ve done heaps of tobogganing because out where we are there’s lots of tracks.
“We get outside nearly every day in the afternoons, and weekends we’re outside playing in the snow, whereas you guys are all ‘it’s too cold!’”
While they’re having a great deal of outdoor fun, Callaway noted there are some things being missed, including swimming.
“[In Australia] we’d swim three or four times a day in this [season]. We’ve got a big pool and just dive in continually,” she said. “And the birds, too. You don’t have the sounds of the birds here because it’s cold and a lot of them are . . . I don’t know!
“So I’ve been missing the sounds of the birds, as well.”
Callaway also finds she’s missing being in buildings with fresh air. “It’s minus-12 and I’m opening the windows! I just find I’m missing that constant fresh air,” she said.
“So many things are different,” she added, including the obvious things such as what foods are available at the supermarket.
“The school buses, the whole system of the school bus stops and everybody stops,” she explained. “That doesn’t happen in Australia.
“The first time I saw a school bus in the distance on the highway, and I saw these little kids get off and just walk straight across the highway without looking, and I was really freaked out. But then I realized that the traffic on the other side has to stop, which is so sensible!”
Another difference is the level of strictness in schools compared to Australia, where students have to wear uniforms, facial piercings aren’t allowed, hair must be tied up, students aren’t allowed to leave the school, and MP3 players and mobile phones aren’t allowed.
“So I guess I was a bit shocked at the amount of freedom that kids have got here,” she said. “But then the flipside of that is I’d say your year 11, 12 students are a lot more mature than the kids in Australia. So while they’re given all that freedom at an earlier age, from what I’ve seen it means that by the time they get to 11, 12 they handle freedom well.
“I think our kids would hang themselves if we gave them that much freedom. In year 12 . . . so that’s been surprising.”
As well, living in the area has given the Callaways a chance to learn about the culture of Canada’s First Nations.
“We’re really interested with the whole Ojibwe culture. We’ve got Australian aboriginals, and I’ve been talking to a lot of the First Nation kids about our aboriginals and about what conditions are like for them, and what culturally is important for them,” Callaway explained.
“So that’s a nice kind of comparison to make for the kids.
“I think we feel we’re lucky that we’re in a small town in a sense because it makes the driving easier, because we drive on the opposite side of the road and the steering wheel’s in the opposite place, so the driving’s a lot easier,” she added.
“And the people are so friendly, so were just really enjoying the small town,” Callaway said. “And the school’s great, the staff is really nice.
“We feel like we’ve had so many experiences already.”
