The Tales that Bind: A Narrative Model for Living and Helping in Rural Communities 9781442621916

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
THE TALES THAT BIND. A Narrative Model for Living and Helping in Rural Communities
Part I – The Context
1. The Story of the Project
2. The New Brunswick Story
3. The Researchers’ Stories
Part II – The Stories
4. Tales from the Front: An Introduction
5. Rural Policing as Real Policing: An Officer’s Tale
6. Born and Bred: A Teacher’s Tale
7. Places, Programs, and People: A Nurse’s Tale
8. Developing the Community: An Activist’s Tale
9. The Passing of Reverend Bob: A Minister’s Tale
10. Becoming a Helper: A Social Work Student’s Tale
11. Working in Another Language: A Doctor’s Tale
12. Taking Care of Business: A Social Work Director’s Tale
13. Fish out of Water: A Volunteer’s Tale
Part III – The Lessons
14. A Narrative Curriculum for Rural Helping
15. Recurring Themes
16. The Need to Know the Story
17. Strategies and Exercises
18. Questions for Consideration
19. Curriculum and Conversation
Appendix. An Annotated Bibliography
References
Index

Citation preview

THE TALES THAT BIND A Narrative Model for Living and Helping in Rural Communities

Every year, thousands of new practitioners in professions such as social work, education, medicine, and religious ministries leave the large urban centres where they received their training and go to work in small towns, remote hamlets, and other rural settings. Often they find themselves unprepared for professional life in these communities. Drawing on in-depth interviews conducted with more than forty practitioners working in a range of professions and communities throughout rural New Brunswick, The Tales That Bind presents a narrative approach to facing these challenges. Using fictionalized vignettes and autobiographical sketches, William Lowell Randall, Rosemary Clews, and Dolores Furlong argue that success as rural practitioners requires “knowing the story” – whether that is personal, communal, or regional. An accessible, practical guide to using narrative techniques in practice, The Tales That Bind is a unique resource for students, teachers, and professionals working in rural settings. william lowell randall is a professor in the Department of Gerontology at St Thomas University. rosemary clews was a professor in the Department of Social Work and Assistant Vice President (Research) at St Thomas University. dolores furlong is a professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of New Brunswick.

This page intentionally left blank

The Tales That Bind A Narrative Model for Living and Helping in Rural Communities

WILLIAM LOWELL RANDALL, ROSEMARY CLEWS, AND DOLORES FURLONG

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2015 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in the U.S.A. ISBN 978-1-4426-4997-2 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4426-2765-9 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Randall, William, 1950–, author The tales that bind : a narrative model for living and helping in rural communities / William Randall, Rosemary Clews, and Dolores Furlong. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4997-2 (bound).  ISBN 978-1-4426-2765-9 (pbk.) 1.  Human services personnel–New Brunswick–Social conditions.  2.  Medical personnel–New Brunswick–Social conditions.  3.  Police, Rural–New Brunswick–Social conditions.  4.  Social service, Rural–New Brunswick.  5.  Rural health services–New Brunswick.  6.  Rural conditions–New Brunswick.  I.  Furlong, Dolores, author  II.  Clews, Rosemary A., author  III.  Title. HV109.N34R35 2015  361.9715'1  C2014-907132-9

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Preface  ix Part I – The Context   1  The Story of the Project  5   2  The New Brunswick Story  18   3  The Researchers’ Stories  36 Part II – The Stories   4  Tales from the Front: An Introduction  65  5  Rural Policing as Real Policing: An Officer’s Tale  68   6  Born and Bred: A Teacher’s Tale  80   7  Places, Programs, and People: A Nurse’s Tale  88   8  Developing the Community: An Activist’s Tale  99   9  The Passing of Reverend Bob: A Minister’s Tale  107 10  Becoming a Helper: A Social Work Student’s Tale  116 11  Working in Another Language: A ’s Tale  122 12  Taking Care of Business: A Social Work Director’s Tale  134 13  Fish out of Water: A Volunteer’s Tale  142 Part III – The Lessons 14  A Narrative Curriculum for Rural Helping  153 15  Recurring Themes  156

vi Contents

16  The Need to Know the Story  172 17  Strategies and Exercises  184 18  Questions for Consideration  192 19  Curriculum and Conversation  198 Appendix: An Annotated Bibliography  201 References  215 Index  223

For Rosemary ...

This page intentionally left blank

Preface

Every year, graduates of programs in fields such as teaching, nursing, social work, and ministry set forth from their specialized training and commence their respective careers. Sooner or later, however, those careers will lead many of them to small towns and villages that are markedly different from the large urban centres where, more than likely, they received their formal preparation. In turn, that preparation will have groomed them in approaches to professional practice that can reflect rather poorly the realities of rural life. Either they are too clinical, too discipline-specific, too policy-bound, or too one-size-fits-all to implement easily in rural settings, each with its own distinct heritage and culture, its own unique story. Our goal in the research that informs this book has been to address this fundamental problem, namely, that urban models of practice are seldom really relevant in rural settings. Not only that, but also in many ways rural helping itself remains an invisible field. In an age where, more than ever, people live in cities, rural helping, says our colleague Brian Cheers (2004), exists “on the fringes ... geographically, politically, administratively, theoretically, and empirically” (p. 9). Given this goal, we decided to take an in-depth look at the experiences of over 40 rural helpers – formal and informal, paid and unpaid – who work (and in some cases, also live) in a variety of small communities in the province where the three of us are based: New Brunswick, Canada. We asked them to share with us stories of experiences that have focused for them the qualities, the knowledge, and the skills that are pivotal to effective rural practice. Those whom we trust will find our research helpful are both novice and veteran practitioners who – much

x Preface

like ourselves, and like the people with whom we spoke – have faced the special sorts of challenges and opportunities that rural helping poses. We use terms like “rural” and “helping” rather cautiously, however, for each such word invites a range of understandings. “Rural,” for example, overlaps with a set of other concepts along what Kim Zapf (2001) calls the “urban-rural continuum” – concepts such as “suburban,” “semi-rural,” or “remote,” or like “small town,” “village,” or “hamlet.” Depending on the source one cites, rural can mean a community of fewer than 500 population, fewer than 1,000, fewer than 5,000, or simply “not urban.” The term “helping” is no less problematic, not least because it embraces vocations as diverse as nursing, policing, daycare, and community development, not to mention the many unpaid modes of helping that rural people undertake as volunteers. But it is also problematic because of the paternalistic connotations of the word itself, its not-sosubtle implication that I know more than you do or that You’re incompetent to manage your own life and need me to fix it for you. In small communities, such one-up attitudes can be tempting to adopt for freshly minted professionals who see themselves as “doing time” in some out-of-the-way location until they can land more satisfying employment in larger, more stimulating centres. Those for whom these communities are home, however, may feel (justifiably) short-changed, receiving less effective “help” than they deserve. Of course, the other sorts of terms our participants employed – “serving” or “advising,” “counselling” or “caring,” “leading” or “facilitating” – carry baggage no less paternalistic. Since no term, then, can capture the complicated process whereby one person offers herself or himself to others to assist in their development, it is “helping” with which we will be working. Limiting though it be, it encompasses a range of vital roles that rural helpers tend to fill. Besides rural and helping, the third key concept around which our thinking revolves is “narrative,” or to use the more familiar term, “story.” Yet this, too, is hardly the straightforward concept it might seem. A story is often viewed as something made up and therefore less than true – oh, that’s just a story! As we hope to show here, however, human life is storied through and through, which is to say that we deal far more in terms of stories (perceptions, interpretations) than of facts. In small communities, storytelling can be pivotal to daily life – for better or worse, given both the compassion and the gossip that can link their members together. Thus, the double entendre in our title: The Tales that Bind.

Preface xi

As several scholars have suggested, narrative is much more than “just stories.” It is a paradigm for thinking about a host of elements that lie at the heart of human experience, from memory to emotion, identity to development, cognition to community, and politics to religion (see Polkinghorne, 1988; Hinchman & Hinchman, 1997). Not only that, but also, as we discovered repeatedly in our research, a narrative perspective connects our other two concepts – rural and helping – by opening up an avenue for honouring the complexity of rural communities and the heart of helping within them. It also helps to bridge a gap that, sadly, can be all too real: between the sciences, on the one hand – including psychology, sociology, and medicine – and the humanities, on the other: history and theology, ethics, and the arts. It is these two broad ways of knowing that “helping” and “narrative” invariably transcend. But if any context requires that cultures be straddled and boundaries blurred, it is a rural one. With both “interdisciplinarity” and “narrativity” on our minds, therefore, we have sought at every turn to let stories and not theories take the lead throughout this book. Listening to stories and learning from stories, we believe, lies at the core of effective rural practice; this has been our conviction from the start. Articulating a narrative model of rural helping and offering strategies for carrying it out (with novice helpers particularly in mind) was our conviction going into this project in the first place and that conviction was continually reinforced. With stories in the lead instead of theories (except for theories about stories), we have organized the book not around particular professions but around the kinds of issues rural helpers generally – regardless of their calling – tend to deal with every day. Part I, entitled “The Context,” begins by tracing the story of the project itself: how we got into it in the first place and how it unfolded. Next, we outline the cultural and economic background – the story, if you will – of the area in which we carried it out: New Brunswick, one of four essentially rural provinces that comprise Atlantic Canada. This is critical to do, we feel, because in our experience, helping is a highly contextual endeavour, its style and substance depending intensely on where it is done. Lastly, we offer a glimpse into our own stories as persons and professionals alike, specifically of how concepts such as “rural,” “helping,” and “narrative” have each become important to us. Our purpose in sketching these stories, though, is not to draw attention to ourselves, but simply to acknowledge that our own experiences of rural helping have, inescapably, been a factor in the interviews we

xii Preface

conducted and in our reflections on the “data” gathered. In short, we have been participants in our own research. Part II, entitled “The Stories,” is in many ways the heart of the book. It centres on ten composite narratives that, in the tradition of ethnographers such as Laurel Richardson (1990) and Carolyn Ellis (2004), illustrate in fictionalized form the numerous challenges and possibilities that rural helpers, regardless of their profession or involvement, encounter in their work. The inclusion of these “likely stories,” if you will, constitutes our strategy for conveying the findings of our research in a manner that reflects the complexities of rural helping yet conceals the identity of our participants themselves and the communities where they live and work. In Part III, entitled “The Lessons,” we step back from the stories told in Part II to distil what we can learn from them about effective rural practice. In particular, we outline a narrative curriculum for rural helping, which is to say a curriculum for “narrative practice” in rural settings, regardless of the field in which one works. (Indeed, this is what is unique about this book, for few texts exist that explicitly apply a narrative perspective to a range of helping roles.) Such a curriculum is rooted in the conviction that at the core of meaningful practice in any setting, be it urban or rural, is an awareness of the role that stories play in human life, and of the interplay among them at almost every level: that of our own stories, as persons and professionals alike; the stories of the individuals and communities that we serve; and the larger stories of the region and the world by which our communities are shaped. While this conviction in itself is not especially new, what is novel, we believe, is the concept of curriculum designed intentionally around it. We need to say a word about what this book is not. First of all, it is not a handy-dandy recipe with ten easy steps to successful rural helping, regardless of the community: it is stories, not steps, that are the key; and ultimately each story – each community – is different. While we outline certain ingredients we see as central to narrative helping, we have refrained from arranging them in the step-by-step manner many readers might expect. In effect, we have tried to model a way of learning about what rural helping itself entails, which means that the book as a whole is meant less as a recipe than as a metaphor: as showing (more than telling) how, by being sensitive to stories on every level, effective rural helping can be carried out. Nor is it a “textbook” per se – in the sense of having tables and statistics, glossaries of concepts, questions for discussion, and extensive

Preface xiii

quotes from external sources. Although many such sources have informed our approach, several of which we mention in the annotated bibliography that appears in the Appendix, our participants’ own wisdom, rooted in first-hand experience, takes precedence over established academic perspectives. As such, the book provides a realistic orientation for students who are training to be rural helpers, whatever their profession, as well as for those already labouring in the field who are open to fresh perspectives on what their work entails. Naturally, we hope that our thoughts will contribute to the development of models of practice that take seriously the narrative complexity of human life. Our greater hope, though, is that the book will serve as a companion to fellow travellers on the journey of living and helping in rural settings. And what is it that fellow travellers tend to do? They trade stories about what they’ve experienced along the way, and those stories render lessons – living lessons – that teach as they are shared. In the same vein, we trust the book will be an invitation to deeper reflection. In fact, our study has been fuelled by reflection from the start, as we spiralled our way from one understanding of a given issue our participants raised to broader and more nuanced insights into rural life and rural helping. Overall, the book evolved in what has been very much an organic manner, which means that it has taken much longer to complete it than the three of us expected at the start. While three heads are no doubt better than one, it has meant three sets of insights (themselves forever changing, just like stories and experiences do!) to factor in at every point. In the end, this befits the organic quality of life itself in small communities, where “history,” for example, is not something one knows in one’s head so much as feels in one’s bones, passed along by word-of-mouth from generation to generation through story-laden chats around the kitchen table. As we set out on our journey into the complexities of rural helping, we need to be clear: this book could not have come together without the input of a good many others. In addition to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), whose generous three-year grant made this project possible in the first place, we are grateful to Heather Richmond, Sarah McCauley, and Kathy Holtmann who were members of our team at different stages, each of whom conducted one or two interviews themselves. Early in the project, Jim Christopher and Betty Baines led a group of fellow students in searching out a variety of resources that have been valuable to our inquiries, many of which we summarize in the Appendix. In addition, Lehanne

xiv Preface

Knowlton and Tanya Poitras went well beyond the call of duty in organizing the mountain of materials we assembled in the course of our research. Tanya, in particular, poured untold hours into identifying the many metaphors and themes that ran through our participants’ accounts, pulling out excerpts that seemed especially revealing. Marianne Skarborn went through a number of our transcripts as well, highlighting for us passages in which particular themes appear. As we neared completion of the project, Rosemary taught a course on rural helping to social workers based in rural and remote communities in Labrador and Newfoundland. She wanted to see how our ideas might or might not work within such settings. To her students, we are deeply grateful for their comments on the role of narrative in isolated contexts. To all of those who have aided us en route, we say a heartfelt “thanks” – above all, to Rosemary herself, who died all too suddenly in the spring of 2012. An inveterate adventurer throughout your life, plus a passionate contributor to this project from the start, Rosemary, may you be happy with the final product of our efforts as a team ... wherever you have journeyed next.

THE TALES THAT BIND A Narrative Model for Living and Helping in Rural Communities

This page intentionally left blank

PART I The Context

This page intentionally left blank

1  The Story of the Project

We dream in narrative, daydream in narrative, remember, anticipate, hope, despair, believe, doubt, plan, revise, criticize, construct, gossip, learn, hate, and love in narrative. – Barbara Hardy (1968) The truth about stories is that that’s all we are. – Thomas King (2003)

In the Beginning Just as many projects do, this one unfolded in the course of countless conversations. Among these were the conversations we had each been having inside of our own minds, long before the project began: conversations about “rural” and “helping” and “story” (see “The Researchers’ Stories”). But there are other conversations we wish to outline here, and all of them connect. Among the earliest are those between Rosemary and Bill. Arriving in the same year (1995) as new faculty at St Thomas University, our offices were just across the hall from one another, despite being based in different departments: social work for Rosemary and gerontology for Bill. As rookie colleagues often do, we soon began comparing notes about our backgrounds and interests. Since Rosemary was, at that point, racing to complete her PhD dissertation, many of our chats began with Bill asking, “Finished that chapter yet?” With her focus being antiracist social work education in small New Brunswick communities

6  Part I – The Context

(Clews, 2000) and Bill, himself, New Brunswick-born and -bred, we had no lack of things to talk about. Among these was our common experience of living in rural Saskatchewan, where years before both of us had served in helping roles – again, social work for Rosemary, though this time, ministry for Bill. In one of our chats, Bill recounted his experience of leaving the multipoint parish that he’d been serving for three years, the first of his pastoral career. As he drove away from town, he recalled thinking to himself that perhaps, just as he was leaving, he had finally acquired enough of a sense of his parishioners’ worlds that he could actually be of some real help to them (see Randall, 2004). Given the chance to start all over, one thing he confessed he would do differently is to be more attuned to the stories of his parishioners’ lives, and not just their stories as individuals but the stories of their families, their community, their province. As often happens in conversation, our chats expanded from rural communities in particular to story in general, and to how it may well be that story is the key to rural helping. This led to us collaborating on an article for the journal Rural Social Work, in which we sketched our ideas for “a narrative model of rural helping” (Randall & Clews, 2001). One of these ideas was that rural people themselves, not to mention urban people, too, tend to entertain one or the other of two broad “meta-narratives” concerning small communities, seeing them as places to either escape to or escape from. Following this, we hired a small group of students to search through the literature in a range of disciplines for resources of relevance to the model we were beginning to envision. We called this “the drawing board stage,” and at a conference on Qualitative Analysis in 2001, with the students themselves, we presented a paper on our thinking up till then (Clews, Randall, Baines, Christopher, & Cougle, 2000). Around the time that Rosemary and Bill were talking about a narrative model of rural helping, Bill reconnected with Dolores. The two of them had first crossed paths during doctoral studies 10 years earlier in a course on “Narrative Ways of Knowing” taught by Professor Michael Connelly of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto. Connelly, along with Jean Clandinin of the University of Alberta, is well known in education circles for bringing a narrative perspective to the process of knowing and learning, especially that of learning to be a teacher. When Bill learned that Dolores had come to Fredericton to join the faculty of a new interdisciplinary

The Story of the Project  7

program in leadership offered by the University of New Brunswick through Renaissance College, the two got together once again. Meeting 10 years later and exchanging stories about our adventures with narrative ideas in the interim, we began chatting about hosting a conference that would assemble narrativists from disciplines other than our own. The result was Narrative Matters, a first-ever, interdisciplinary conference, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, that brought together over 200 delegates from nearly 15 countries and as many different fields for a three-day conversation on the use of narrative approaches and perspectives across the humanities and social sciences. Naturally, in composing our committee to plan it, we urged Rosemary to join. Narrative Matters was such a success that not only has it spawned a series of – now seven! – biennial conferences, but it inspired Rosemary to organize another event in 2003: an International Conference on Rural Human Services. Given the synergy among us, Rosemary invited Bill and Dolores to help plan it. The choice of Dolores was particularly fortuitous since, at the time, both women were providing in-home care for their 90-year-old mothers. Indeed, our meetings frequently began with swapping anecdotes about the challenges and joys they had in common! The conference brought together over 100 delegates with detailed knowledge of rural practice in at least 25 countries where they lived or worked. Among other things, it resulted in a special issue of Rural Social Work (Cheers, Clews, Powers, & Carawan, 2004). Particularly significant was a roundtable discussion that Bill and Rosemary facilitated in which some 20 delegates from contexts as diverse as Chile, Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada shared stories of their experiences in rural helping (Clews, Randall, & Furlong, 2004). In fact, many of the insights that surfaced in this session have found their way into the fictionalized vignettes that are featured here in Part II. Participants, Interviews, and Reflections The core of our research – our methodology, if you will – consists of our conversations with more than 40 people whom we interviewed from a variety of involvements and communities. As with many qualitative studies, our choice of whom to talk with evolved in what was very much an organic manner. We chose many of our participants, that is, not simply because we were aware of them already through our

8  Part I – The Context

respective networks, but because we wanted to get as representative a sense of rural helping as was possible in terms of gender, ethnicity, and profession. To assist us, we even sketched a map of New Brunswick on the board in front of us to track the regions of the province where our participants were based and the kinds of communities where they lived or worked, plus their gender and profession. As we pondered what each one told us about what “helping” meant to her or him, we came to realize, for instance, that we needed to talk with yet another social worker, say, one brought up in the region where he practises; or with one more minister, a Protestant this time; or with a community volunteer; or with someone from a fishing village, a mining town, and the like. Eventually, as we began hearing the same basic themes from each new participant, we felt that we had reached a state of “theoretical sufficiency” (Charmaz, 2006), and that further interviews were apt to add little to our research that was truly different. By the time we finished, besides the several helpers whose experiences we heard about in focus groups we convened or conferences we attended, the list of those we interviewed included two doctors, four ministers (one a Roman Catholic priest), four nurses (one in extra-­ mural nursing and two in public health: one in management, the other in practice), two teachers, one community college principal, a police officer, a community activist, a multicultural organizer, a town mayor and ambulance attendant, a potato farmer, and various social workers and social work students in a range of areas such as child protection, family counselling, elder care, acute care, and administration. As well, at least half of them were women, four were of First Nations origin, four were francophones, and one was originally from the Middle East. The interviews themselves ranged from 1 to 4 hours in length and typically took place in participants’ offices or homes. They took the form of loosely structured, open-ended conversations in which basically we asked: “What is your experience of rural communities and what is your experience of rural helping?” As Part II will illustrate more clearly, the themes these conversations touched upon were numerous and intertwined. This has made it impossible for us to lay them out in sequence, as per the familiar formula of Method-Findings-DiscussionConclusion – as if they could be abstracted from the particular individuals who articulated them, situated within particular communities with particular historical and economic circumstances. We will elaborate on this shortly, for as hinted in the Preface, we had assumed at the outset

The Story of the Project  9

that we would be writing a more conventional kind of text, in which salient themes are pulled from the data for more detailed explication and spelled out one by one, with excerpts from participants’ stories as supporting evidence: a book that outlines in confident fashion a set of “best practices” for rural helping. Instead, what we ended up writing is a book that sketches (as our participants sketched for us) a novel understanding of what rural helping is; a book in which direct experience – as told through stories! – takes the lead. After the interviews were transcribed, we would sit with the transcripts around the table in the room on campus where we usually met, a home-made map of New Brunswick in front of us, our only equipment two hand-held tape recorders, a pair of blank cassettes, and a set of markers for brainstorming any insights on the board. Typically, one of us would bring coffee from Tim Horton’s, while another brought homebaked cookies or muffins. As we listened to the conversation between interviewer and participant, and as we followed along in the transcribed text, a thought would soon get sparked for one or the other of us by what we were hearing and reading. That person would then stop the first recorder, switch on the second, and record some comment like, “What she just said there reminds me of when I was working in ...” or “That makes me think about what so-and-so said in the interview we listened to last week.” The tape running all the while, we soon became immersed in a rambling three-way chat as we reflected on the implications of our participant’s story – a chat that could continue for half an hour before we turned back to the interview itself, and a chat through which our collective understanding of the narrative complexity of rural helping grew progressively deeper, broader, and thicker. On such occasions, Dolores would often remind us of how “curriculum” happens, not in discussions of “the facts” or “the lesson plan,” but in conversation, and in the reflective spaces that open up in the silences between the lines. These reflections on our interviews, which we also had transcribed, became a data source that proved as rich almost as the interviews themselves. Frequently, they took our thinking in unforeseen directions, opening up further themes and issues to be alert for in the other interviews we listened to. The process also helped us clarify what other sorts of helpers we ought to interview or what would need including in our story of New Brunswick in the section that ensues. More than once, we wished we could insert whole sections of these reflections straight into this book!

10  Part I – The Context

In addition to the interviews themselves, our reflections on them afterward, and very often, our reflections upon these reflections, yet another layer of conversation has proven vital to the project, especially as concerns our thoughts on curriculum in Part III. After we conducted all the interviews we felt were needed to round out our picture of rural helping in New Brunswick, we decided to host a one-day focus group consisting of eight participants from different professions and regions of the province whose transcripts we kept returning to more frequently than others. As a number of these people held multiple roles in their respective communities, we felt that they would have particularly perceptive things to say if we could get them around the table all at once. We invited them to share with us their responses – as we did ours – to three broad questions: (1) What is your experience of rural life? (2) What is your experience of rural helping? (3) What do people need to learn in order to be effective helpers in rural communities? The resulting exchanges, which were also recorded so that we could reflect on them in turn, were powerfully insightful. Indeed, many of their insights have worked their way into the sketches that appear in Part II. Before we move to the story of New Brunswick, which is where our study was conducted, we need to say more about “story” per se. If there were one topic around which our thinking has orbited from the start, it is narrative. While we shall be saying more on that topic when we sketch our own experiences under “The Researchers’ Stories,” it is central enough to the book’s main objective to warrant some discussion now. The Narrative Complexity of Ordinary Life In recent decades, not just throughout the social sciences but in several helping fields, too, awareness has been spreading about the role of stories in our day-to-day experience. Narrative educators, for example, examine personal experience as “tacit knowing” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1997) by drawing on Dewey’s (1938) Experience as Education, Polanyi’s (1958) Personal Knowledge, and Crites’ (1971) “narrative quality of experience,” while psychologists explore the storied complexity of memory, behaviour, and cognition (see, e.g., Sarbin, 1986; Bruner, 1990, 2002). These authors write about “narrative thought” (Bruner, 1987), “narrative knowing” (Polkinghorne, 1988), “narrative reasoning” (Mattingly, 1991), and “narrative intelligence” (Randall, 1999) as integral to how we navigate the events of every day. And they

The Story of the Project  11

view the development of personality itself as narrative ­development (Bamberg, 1997; Freeman, 1993): development in the complex web of stories – big and small – by which we understand our self or envision our identity (McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006). Narratively speaking, this identity can be more or less open or closed. In “narrative foreclosure,” for example, our life itself continues on while, in our hearts, our story feels all but over, with no new chapters or ­subplots deemed apt to open up (Bohlmeijer, Westerhof, Randall, Tromp, & Kenyon, 2011; Freeman, 2011). Older adults, in particular, can succumb to such a state – upon retirement, for instance – but so can people of any age, as can a whole community, a possibility we will look at later in the book. Narrative educators work with learners’ stories of experience to bring out the implicit knowledge and wisdom embedded within the continuities and discontinuities of their lives in order to make visible the meaning-making that is accumulated over time and practised daily. For their part, “narrative therapists” view therapy itself as a complex enterprise of storytelling, storylistening, and re-storying which unfolds amid the conversations between client and clinician, or helpee and helper (White & Epston, 1990; Freedman & Combs, 1996). These conversations constitute positive “narrative environments” (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 50–57) in which the client’s “contaminated plots” (McAdams, 2006, p. 215) can be brought to light, their “narrative knots” untangled, and their “problem-saturated” stories de-constructed and replaced with more forward-looking ones instead: a process that can be referred to as “narrative repair” (Nelson, 2001) or simply “narrative care” (Noonan, 2011). Some practitioners have, in fact, adapted the strategies of narrative therapy for use in whole communities, to assist them in making sense of tragedies or disasters that disrupt life within them (e.g., the closure of the local mill, the devastation caused by a storm or flood), in addressing the conflicts that contaminate relationships within them, and in constructing a more positive community story with which to move forward into the future (Banks & Mangan, 1999) – in short, to experience “narrative reconstruction” or simply “restorying” (Kenyon & Randall, 1997). Whatever form it takes or field it touches (psychology or theology, ethics or education), at the heart of the so-called narrative turn is the insight that human beings are hermeneutical beings. We are interpreting beings, meaning-making beings. And our main means of making meaning is by spinning stories. A significant event occurs and our first

12  Part I – The Context

impulse is to tell another person: “You’ll never guess what happened!” We tell stories to each other every day of life; it constitutes the core of “conversation” as we know it. And we tell stories to ourselves as well. In fact, some scholars are proposing that the impulse to weave “small stories” (Turner, 1996) around our perceptions and experiences is wired into our brains themselves (see Damasio, 1999; Bickle, 2003). At bottom, narrative is rooted in neurology. Not surprisingly, then, we experience our memories, our dreams, and indeed our very selves in terms of stories. Even our beliefs, whichever philosophies or faiths may feed them, assume the form of storylines that swirl around inside us and inform our values and behaviours (Crites, 1971; Cupitt, 1991; Hauerwas & Jones, 1989; Goldberg, 1991). They are rooted in master narratives about our world as a whole: where we have come from, where we are going, and what we should be doing in the interim. Put another way, we hardly story our lives within some sort of social vacuum but within a set of larger stories still, each one with its own remembered past and its anticipated future – i.e., the families and communities, cultures and creeds, in which our identities and values are invariably shaped in countless ways. In effect, our individual stories are nested within them: personal story within family story, family story within community story, community story within culture story, and so on. By the same token, each such larger story will have its own distinct narrative environment, positive or negative, open or restrictive, varied or impoverished. Amid these environments, our stories are coauthored in complex ways (for better or worse) through our connections with others – parents, siblings, partners, friends, and colleagues – to the point where the line between “my story” and “your story” becomes impossible to draw. On every level, our lives-as-stories are interwoven with those of others, something that’s especially obvious in small communities. What is more, whether obvious or not, dramatic or not, intentional or not, our lives are forever being re-storied, too (Kenyon & Randall, 1997). Due to developments in our relationships, our commitments, our views on life in general, the narratives by which we understand ourselves are never really static but forever thickening, widening, changing; forever being “rewritten” (Freeman, 1993) or “retold” (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990). An excellent example of the centrality of narrative to human life is the fact that our participants spoke to us, not in abstract propositions nor in neat nuggets of practical advice, but primarily in narrative. Or, at least, they set their nuggets in a narrative base. In other words, our

The Story of the Project  13

participants told us stories: about how they got into their line of work in the first place; about amusing or instructive things that happened to them in the course of that work; about the people they have served and the communities where they live; stories they have heard or read that have affected their own values and beliefs. For this reason, we present our “findings” in the manner that we do. Rather than a catalogue of themes that our “data” consistently displayed, though we give some sense of that in Part III, we opted for a series of fictional, first-person, narrative vignettes that weave such themes together and show how intertwined they are in rural practice – as themes in stories always are! While a novel such as Tolstoy’s War and Peace may be about, well, war and peace, it deals with several other themes as well – love, betrayal, culture, ethics, faith – more or less at once. Each is bound up inseparably with the others. A more pragmatic and, in fact, more ethical reason for presenting our findings in this manner is that, by Canadian standards, New Brunswick has a small population, which makes the network of helpers in a given profession all that much smaller still. If true that “everyone knows everyone’s business” in rural communities, then the same can be said about the community of one’s profession. For instance, we interviewed a rural mayor, a rural police officer, a rural doctor. Had we discussed their stories directly in this book, then sooner or later one reader or another would identify them, given the limited network of rural mayors, rural policemen, and rural doctors that there are. What we looked for, then, was a way of capturing the experiences our participants shared with us without giving away their identities as individuals or the places where they worked. At the same time, since each of us chose which vignettes we composed, what we wanted was a forum for weaving together insights we ourselves had gleaned from our respective experiences of rural helping. For in hearing what our participants were saying, memories of those experiences were repeatedly triggered. Fuelling our creative energies, you could say, were our own autobiographical agendas. As such, these vignettes represent the interplay of two levels of autobiography: both our own and that of our fictional helpers. However “objective” we thought we were being when analysing our participants’ stories, we interpreted them inevitably through the lenses of our own. Narrative is additionally important because of what we had intuited before we even started and what, in this case, was alluded to repeatedly by our participants, namely, the storied complexity of rural life

14  Part I – The Context

itself, with its intricate weave of genealogy and gossip that, in one way or another, underlie everyone’s interactions. Unfortunately, such complexity can tempt some urbanites to subscribe unwittingly to “storyotypes” (Randall, 1995, p. 57) of rural people generally: as living simplistic, uncomplicated, close-knit, idyllic lives or as country bumpkins who gather at the general store, telling stories on their neighbours and outdoing one another with tales about how things used to be. In a sense, such a perception was confirmed by a number of our participants themselves, as they spoke about the challenges of setting boundaries between their own lives and those of the people they serve. In other words, in small communities, whose cultures are arguably more oral than literate in nature (Sample, 1994), everyone does tend to know everyone’s business. Or they assume they do if they don’t; or feel they have a right to know – compared, that is, with urban settings where one might prefer not to know at all, in fact. This is the darker side of narrative, and it can’t be ignored. As one source says, “Stories are not innocent” (Rosen, 1986, p. 236). A similar complexity can be the case, of course, in all smaller groupings, wherever they are – families, companies, neighbourhoods. Within them, tales told out of school about skeletons in people’s closets or secret things they’ve done behind the scenes can play a real role in the economy of daily life. In small communities, people can be not merely co-authored by their neighbours but storyotyped as well: written into scripts that pre-judge their actions without their even knowing it, their identities as distinct individuals with distinct stories pegged unfairly in advance. “Oh, so you’re Mary Smith – Jack and Sheila’s daughter” – the subtext being, “We know all about those Smiths!!” This kind of narrative foreclosure, where the back story that lurks behind us or the rumour that precedes us, has a life of its own, characterizes the murkier side of rural relationships which can radically restrict the options others make available to us for our development, significantly curtailing our “narrative agency.” Certainly, we encountered ample evidence in our interviews that narrative foreclosure can complicate the work of rural helpers. By the same token, rural people can foreclose upon themselves as well, internalizing the meta-narratives that others entertain about them and putting themselves down accordingly as “just a hick.” Indeed, rural helpers themselves are susceptible to parallel lines of thinking: “I’m just a village priest” or “just a teacher in a country school.” But this is by no means the whole story about living and working in small communities, for there is a positive side to gossip as well. Just as

The Story of the Project  15

negative stories about us in other people’s minds can follow us wherever we go, so too can positive ones. As helpers, for example, though our reputation can precede us, it can actually facilitate our efforts, can open up opportunities and not just close them down. “Although gossip can be destructive, it isn’t always,” writes linguistics scholar Deborah Tannen (1990): “it can serve a crucial function in establishing intimacy – especially if it is not ‘talking against’ but ‘talking about’ ” (p. 96). In a similar vein, social work scholar Emilia Martinez-Brawley (2000) views gossip in small communities as a way of sharing vital information about the welfare of one’s neighbours, and fostering a climate of concern in which, more instinctively than in cities, people are always looking out for one another. Illustrating this sort of informal “Neighbourhood Watch” is an example from a small community that Rosemary was familiar with in Prince Edward Island. Neighbours are in the habit of looking out their windows every evening to check whether or not the lights are on in the house of the widow living down the road. If not, then maybe she has fallen and broken her hip and is lying helpless on the kitchen floor. Another example concerns the positive function that funerals can perform in repairing the fabric of communal life following someone’s death, be it at the hand of an illness, an accident, or some other regional disaster. As friends and family console each other over coffee, their conversations turn inevitably to stories about the deceased. Indeed, such storytelling can continue for days, for as long as that person’s memory remains in people’s minds and their passing is a topic of discussion. In this respect, their stories are honoured and their legacy less easily forgotten, their lives or talents or unique ways of saying things still valued and remembered. Overall, the role of gossip, both in human life in general and rural life in particular, is a complicated topic, to be sure, and one we will be returning to repeatedly throughout. Listening for Stories Among the insights that came clear in our research and that we will be talking about more extensively in Part III is that, whatever else rural helping entails, it involves listening for stories – those that are spoken, those that are silent, those told in metaphors, and those that resist being put into words. In terms of stories, rural helpers are at the nexus of many different narratives that overlap continually in intricate, dynamic ways.

16  Part I – The Context

First, there is the level of one’s personal narrative: the story of the family one grew up in, of one’s formative experiences as an individual, and of how one came to work within the profession one is in. Then there is the broader narrative of that profession itself: how it got started, its guiding ethos, its implicit assumptions about the world, and the institutions through which its mandate is expressed and to which the helper must report – not to mention the assumptions held about that profession by members of the community itself. And each of these in turn, of course, has its own history to be mindful of – a particular denomination in the case of ministry, a particular agency in the case of social work, a particular school board in the case of teaching, and so on. In the case of community volunteers, while they may have no “professional story” as such, there is the story of the organization they volunteer for (the Lions Club, the Legion, the Women’s Institute, etc.), plus the storyline they have internalized since childhood about what “being a good citizen” entails. Then there are the narratives of the individuals and families with whom the helper works: who they are, where they have come from, and what issues they are wrestling with that the helper can address. Embracing this level, there is the narrative of the community as a whole: its guiding themes, recurring conflicts, and enduring tensions; its public versions and its private ones; its competing plot lines or “counterstories” (Nelson, 2001); its understanding of the past and its vision for the future, official and unofficial, stated and lived. Beyond this level is that of the larger stories still – the meta-narratives – by which life in that community is sure to be affected: the provincial story, regional story, national story; and the overarching economy, culture, and heritage that shape each of these in turn (e.g., that of the Acadians, the Loyalists, the Aboriginals, the Irish); the story not just of New Brunswick, that is, but of the Maritimes in general, of Canada, and of the world beyond our borders. To cite but one example (and several can be found in this province alone!), the closure of a local plant due to a decision taken in a boardroom in some city far away because of some ripple in the economy of the globe as a whole can affect the fate of an entire town, and thus the stories of the families and individuals who make that town their home. Effective helping in rural communities, then, requires developing our skills at listening for stories on several levels at once. In addition to being mindful of our own stories, too, it requires listening for the stories behind the stories that the people in front of us are telling or living. It

The Story of the Project  17

means listening for what that storyteller is implying, for the metaphors that “say it all” and hint at a story not yet recounted. It requires being mindful that there are always different sides to any story we may hear, that each family and each community has a different underlying myth, a different storying style, a different narrative environment, a different set of metaphors and meanings that have influenced how people make sense of their experiences and have evolved over generations of ups and downs, struggles and gains. And it requires seeking out those who are the storykeepers in the community. Not the storytellers necessarily, not its gossipers or rumour-mills, but its storycatchers (Baldwin, 2005), those who hold the community’s deeper stories in their hearts, who host a broader sense of what that community is about and what it means to be a member of it. Lastly, effective helping requires not only listening for the community’s story, but also being open to opportunities to serve as agents of re-storying for those who live within it, if not for the community as a whole, as they reconstruct the narrative by which life in the community has tacitly been guided to date and its progress quietly impeded. Effective helping requires deepening our appreciation for the lives that rural citizens have lived: the hardships they have endured, the celebrations they have earned, the hopes and dreams they have embraced.

2  The New Brunswick Story

This book is based on a study of rural helping that we conducted during a particular period in a particular province: New Brunswick, one of the three Maritime Provinces on Canada’s Atlantic coast. Besides being a mainly rural province, it is also where those whom we interviewed live and work, as do we ourselves. It’s our home. To most Maritimers, a sense of “home” and “place” borders on the sacred – a sacred story as Crites (1971) would say, and “Where are you from?” is rarely an idle question. For Bill, New Brunswick is where he was born, and for Rosemary and Dolores, even though technically “from away” (Rosemary from Saskatchewan and Dolores from Newfoundland), it has been home to them, as well, for many years. On top of this, the majority of our students are New Brunswick-born and -raised, hailing from the very sorts of small communities that are the focus of this book, communities where more than a few of them hope someday to find employment, settle down, and bring up families of their own. Overall, then, our roots in New Brunswick run rather deep, making our research meaningful to us on not just an academic level but on a personal one as well. In effect, our study is a case study of one region of one country, although the themes we have unearthed in the course of conducting it are relevant, we feel, for other regions and other countries, too, and what we have learned about rural helping in the context of New Brunswick can shed light on work in other contexts as well. Especially in the fictional vignettes that appear in Part II, helpers in such contexts (despite obvious differences) are bound to recognize dimensions of their own experience. That said, and in keeping with the theme of contextuality that is implicit in this book, the experiences of helpers in New

The New Brunswick Story  19

Brunswick in particular are the lens through which we look at rural helping in general. Given that helping never happens in a vacuum, understanding the context in which it is carried out is pivotal to doing so effectively. What, then, is the New Brunswick context? Put another way, what is the New Brunswick story: its past, its present, and its future? Some Basic Facts As with any story, there is always more than one way to tell it, not to mention several substories and counterstories that lie within it. A common way of telling the story of a particular place, of course, is in terms of basic facts. Within such a version, at approximately 73,000 square kilometres in area, New Brunswick ranks as the third smallest province in Canada – roughly the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined (and roughly 1/30th their population!) – and is nestled between the State of Maine to the west and the provinces of Quebec, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island to the north, south, and east, respectively. Fully 85% of it is carpeted in forest. Indeed, followed by fishing and farming, the forest industry has typically dominated its economy (Walls, 2006, p. 45f). Trees of one sort or another cover vast portions of the south-central regions of the province and virtually all of the northern half, which leaves the lion’s share of its population spread rather thinly and unevenly along its major rivers or its coasts. Indeed, as the map here depicts, well over half of New Brunswick’s boundary consists of coastline: La Baie des Chaleurs, the Gulf of St Lawrence, the Northumberland Strait, and the Bay of Fundy. As of 2006, New Brunswick had a population of just over 750,000. A significant portion of this number lives in or near its five most populous cities. Though hardly “cities” alongside of places like New York or Toronto (which have whole suburbs that size!), these include: Bathurst (pop. 16,427), Miramichi (pop. 18,508), Moncton (pop. 90,359), Saint John (pop. 90,762), and Fredericton, the provincial capital (pop. 54,068) (Walls, 2006, p. 23). Over 75% of those who live beyond the borders of these centres reside in communities that range from 5,000 to fewer than 500 in population size. All of this makes New Brunswick one of Canada’s most rural provinces overall; thus, an excellent location – an ideal laboratory – to undertake a study of rural helping. Culturally, the picture can be broken down still further. Nearly 4% of the population are Mi’kmaq, Maliseet, or Metis in origin, many of

20  Part I – The Context Map 1.  Map of New Brunswick (Rainer Lesniewski / Shutterstock.com).

whom reside in or near the 15 First Nations communities that are dotted around the province (6 Maliseet, 9 Mi’kmaq). Approximately 60% of New Brunswickers have anglophone roots (i.e., in England, Scotland, Ireland, or Wales), while 30% are francophone in origin, a division that’s significant, since New Brunswick is the only Canadian province to be officially bilingual (French-English). In addition, some 6% of its population are of European descent – e.g., Germany, Holland, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo. More recently, those of non-European origin – e.g., China, the Philippines, Vietnam, Pakistan, India – make up a further 1%. Breaking this picture down along religious lines, 96% of New Brunswickers

The New Brunswick Story  21

identify their background as Christian; specifically, 53.4% as Roman Catholic and 35.7% as Protestant (Walls, 2006). The View from History Statistics tell one type of story, to be sure, but it’s not the only type that can be told. During the time that we’ve been working on this book – a time when, globally, economies (and ecologies) have been changing at a scarily rapid pace – the New Brunswick story could also be construed as one of a province that’s under pressure simply to survive. At the very least, and to put the point more optimistically, it is the story of a province in transition. To cite the title of a report produced by the New Brunswick Self-Sufficiency Task Force (2007), commissioned to assess New Brunswick’s situation from a range of perspectives, it is a province on The Road to Self-Sufficiency. In the words of the report, it is a road “we must follow to create a more self-sufficient and sustainable province,” specifically, by “creating a long-term plan that will significantly boost economic growth through the development of businesses, services, and talents that complement and enhance what already exists in New Brunswick” (p. 5). Ironically, self-sufficiency has been the ethic that New Brunswickers have embodied from the start (see Boudreau, Toner, & Tremblay, 2009). As background to what follows, then, and as our own unique reading of New Brunswick’s story, let’s consider the origins of this ethic. One of four jurisdictions that in 1867 formed the confederation now known as Canada (making it, in fact, the second oldest province), New Brunswick was inhabited from the outset by a variety of hardy peoples. Its story begins with the Mi’kmaq and Maliseet, whose traditions epitomize self-sufficiency, having survived for centuries in intimate relationship with nature through hunting and gathering, fishing, and trapping: the Mi’kmaq living mostly on the coast and the Maliseet along the rivers. Indeed, there are numerous instances in history where, aided by the practical knowledge that their relationship with nature instilled in them, they assisted their newcomer (non-Native) neighbours in surviving the extreme conditions that New Brunswick’s climate can bring. Across the years, however, discriminatory policies and apartheid attitudes have virtually extinguished their nomadic way of life, obliging them to live on designated “reserves,” typically in remoter areas, where poverty, unemployment, and substandard housing are unfortunately the norm. While (to be fair) Natives and non-Natives live beside one

22  Part I – The Context

another, for the most part, in comparative harmony, long-simmering tensions can sometimes flare up; when disputes are sparked around logging rights on Crown land, for example, or on permission to fish freely for lobster or salmon. The first non-Native peoples to come to what ultimately became “New Brunswick” were explorers, eager to claim a portion of the New World for their king or queen back home across the sea. This part of the New Brunswick story begins as early as 1604, with the French, and with the establishment by the legendary Samuel de Champlain (prior to landing in Quebec) of a trading post cum fortress on Dochet’s Island at the mouth of the St Croix River, almost half of whose inhabitants, however, died of malnutrition in that first, harsh winter (Chaisson, 2009). Even more sadly, the history of the French within the Maritimes at large has been blackened by the “expulsion of the Acadians,” a version of ethnic cleansing imposed by the British in the mid-1700s, with its sting still felt by those descendants who, in 2007, celebrated four proud centuries of Acadian heritage (Chaisson, 2009). Settling mostly on the coast, particularly on La Baie des Chaleurs, the Gulf of St Lawrence, and Northumberland Strait, the French made their living largely from the sea. To this day, many of their communities are clustered around the majestic Roman Catholic churches whose steeples still dominate the skyline and whose traditions, in multiple respects, have shaped their culture, their politics, and their economy. As with the French-speaking peoples, so with the English. Following the explorers came the settlers: waves of immigrants from the poorer classes of England and Scotland. Many of them “Loyalists” to the monarchy who made their way here in the wake of the American Revolution (7,000 landing in present-day Saint John in 1783), the majority of them Protestant (Anglican, Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist), they too established their distinct communities. Commonly, these were situated at strategic points along rivers like the Nashwaak, the Miramichi, the Restigouche, the St Croix, or the St John – “The Rhine of North America,” as it has been dubbed, which snakes its way from northwest to southeast, slicing the province more or less in half. Installed in such locations, they took pains to clear the land for farming, as well as to harness the water itself in order to power the mills that would turn logs into lumber for their houses and barns. Except for its Aboriginal inhabitants, one could say, then, that New Brunswick was founded by “pioneers,” by “imperialist settlers,” by “survivors,” or by “escapees” – either way, by people who, in one way

The New Brunswick Story  23

or another, have come from away (thus were “CFAs”) to forge freer and fairer lives for their families and themselves. Included here are immigrants from Ireland, some driven from their homeland by the great potato famine of the 1850s. In addition, small groups of African Americans made their way on the legendary Underground Railway to flee enslavement south of the border and to set up hamlets in isolated areas, one of which continues to this day, within 50 kilometres of the provincial capital. In the early 1900s, Danish settlers made their way to the northwest corner of the province to carve out the settlement now known as New Denmark. Following the Second World War, others arrived from the Netherlands, many of them settling along the fertile banks of the St John River just below Fredericton, where their agricultural savvy yielded market-garden farms that (despite periodic flooding) continue to thrive. In the late 1950s, immigrants from Hungary, escaping the Soviet invasion of their country, began arriving as well. Following conflicts in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia, and the dissolution of the USSR, people from Kosovo, Croatia, Russia, and other Eastern Bloc territories have also made New Brunswick their new home, albeit in small numbers still and with most of them clustered in the cities. Culturally, racially, and religiously, then, the history of New Brunswick, although fraught with its share of prejudice and tension, reflects significant diversity. A core component of that diversity relates to economics. The economy of New Brunswick, like that of Canada as a whole, has historically been resource-based in nature, with fishing, forestry, and farming, and to a lesser extent mining, the primary endeavours around which it has revolved. Whatever their racial/cultural roots might be, New Brunswickers in general have historically been self-sufficient, living on the family farm and therefore off the land: raising their own chickens, cows, and pigs; growing their own potatoes, corn, and turnips; planting their own orchards of apples and cherries; harvesting their own woodlots for firewood and lumber – and for maple sugar in the spring. In time, however, this self-sufficiency has been gradually eroded, as the scene has shifted from small-scale farming and fishing to large-scale industry and commerce, due to a number of critical developments. Among these were the building of the cross-country railways (Canadian National and Canadian Pacific) that would link New Brunswick to the rest of Canada and to the United States; expansions to its network of roads; the advent of steam technology for powering river boats and ocean-going vessels;

24  Part I – The Context

and the construction of port facilities, especially in Saint John, for building and repairing ships and for exporting and importing a broad range of products, resources, and raw materials. Such advancements helped to spawn countless family businesses in small towns and villages around the province, manufacturing everything from canoes to shoes and from chocolates to wool – e.g., Chestnut, Hartt, Ganong, and Briggs & Little, respectively, to list just a few of the names associated with them. Reflecting such diversity to this day, every weekend, especially in the summers, farmers’ markets thrive throughout the province, providing a place where farmers, craftsmen, and other vendors from the region can sell their wares, and where local people congregate in a manner reminiscent of days gone by. Over time, however, more and more small communities have become monopolized by one company in particular (often a family business initially, only on a larger scale), whether the industry at issue be pulp and paper, mining and smelting, the refining of oil, or the processing of potatoes or fish. Included among such companies are Connors Brothers, Frasers, McCains, and, above all, Irving – whose reach in particular extends into virtually all corners of New Brunswick’s economy, from forestry to the media (see Walker, 2010). Such names are now household names for the numerous New Brunswickers in single-industry settings whose fortunes hinge on the fluctuating global markets that affect the firms involved. Indeed, periodic lay-offs (often seasonal in nature) are not at all uncommon, and the fate of entire towns – Nackawic, Dalhousie, and Miramichi, to cite the most recent examples – can hang in the balance as the stroke of a pen on Bay Street or Wall Street triggers a chain of circumstances that leads, sooner or later, to the closure of the mill or the mine that, for decades often, has been their principal employer (see Tremblay & Rose, 2011). Among the indicators are a significant decline in the number of small, family-owned businesses that were common not long ago, and, instead, a profusion of dollar stores, second-hand clothing stores, and, relative to its total workforce, an undue proportion of “call centres” as sources of short-term (lowpaying) employment. Ironically, all of these developments have come about despite the much-touted IT (information technology) revolution launched by the provincial government under the premiership of Frank McKenna in the 1990s that promised to position New Brunswick at the forefront of the Information Age (see Bruce, 2013). Another player not to be ignored in the economy – and story – of New Brunswick is the military. Having had erected on its soil from earliest

The New Brunswick Story  25

days an assortment of defensive installations, New Brunswick became home in the mid-1950s to the largest army camp in Canada: Base Gagetown. Its establishment, however, meant the closing down of some 20 small settlements (including two First Nations ones), the relocation of 750 families, and the transformation of 500 square miles of territory into training grounds for various forms of land-based battles (Base Gagetown Community History Association, retrieved 2013). Not only is the Base the main employer in Oromocto, a so-called model town of 5,000 (largely transient) people created by the federal government more or less from scratch, but the military presence is very much in evidence every fall in nearby Fredericton, from the parade of soldiers, veterans, and cadets who march past Officers’ Square in the well-attended ceremonies that mark Remembrance Day, 11 November. All in all, it is this complicated cultural-economic context, with its intricate history of diversity yet vulnerability, resilience yet dependence, amid which rural New Brunswickers live today (and rural helpers help), and in which the call to self-sufficiency has been sounded. Where, then, is New Brunswick headed? What problems and potentials do New Brunswickers find before them? Inevitably, our responses to such questions reflect our respective backgrounds and disciplines, and our familiarity with New Brunswick life in general. That said, certain topics need noting that are especially pertinent to rural helping – topics which, like everything else we have discovered in our research, are tightly intertwined, as will be obvious in the sections and parts to come. We can begin with the topic of transportation, then move to those of tourism, education, and health care. Transportation In the settlement of any region, a system of roads is clearly key. For centuries, New Brunswick’s rivers and coastal waters were, effectively, its highways. But with travel by ox and cart, horse and carriage, roadways in the conventional sense needed to be constructed, evolving over time from cowpaths to divided throughways. A network of bridges and causeways obviously needed building as well. Eventually came travel by rail and, most recently, by air, with each successive mode of movement inevitably affecting the form and flow of rural life, though by no means in an even manner. Focusing on the present, a vastly improved four-lane Trans-Canada Highway (TCH) now traverses the province from northwest to

26  Part I – The Context

southeast, from the border with Quebec to that with Nova Scotia. In addition, an extension of it east of Moncton connects New Brunswick with Prince Edward Island, access to which has been made that much faster with the completion in 1997 of Confederation Bridge. In many ways, this impressive roadway has thrust New Brunswick into the twenty-first century, putting it well on the way to “self-sufficiency” by facilitating the freer movement of transports and tourists to a host of New Brunswick destinations – and beyond. Just as often, in other words, it facilitates movement out of New Brunswick altogether. Storyteller Stuart McLean, known nationwide for his weekly broadcast on CBC Radio, The Vinyl Cafe, once articulated the down side of this situation at a live performance in Fredericton. For many who make the trek “down east” from other parts of Canada, he said, New Brunswick – lacking perhaps in its own distinct identity – is essentially “the drive-through province”: the place you have to get through on the TCH to reach more celebrated, or at least better advertised, vacation destinations like Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, or Prince Edward Island. Unfortunately, such a perception is reinforced by the dearth of signs by which travellers are greeted. As an example, if you are driving through New Brunswick “from away,” whether west or east, and you happen to miss one of the only two signs that announce the turnoff to Fredericton, the provincial capital, you could pass it by entirely, ending up 50 kilometres further down the road before you get the chance to change direction. It is often said by visitors that a person has to live in New Brunswick to know where the roads go, since the signage doesn’t always effectively guide the unfamiliar traveller. Rather than having the main cities or towns along the route, often only the next town or city is identified, leaving the visitor who is without a GPS to wonder how far down the highway is their destination. A few years back, a young physician from Quebec was visiting northern New Brunswick for Christmas holidays, but even her GPS led her to an abandoned sideroad where there was no cell coverage and she was stranded for three days while her family had local authorities searching the countryside for her whereabouts. Visitors say that GPS service for the province is not always updated. For the various villages that the old TCH would (literally) take one through – an arrangement which, albeit modestly, benefited local businesses: service stations, restaurants, and family-owned stores – the new TCH renders most of them more isolated than ever, making it necessary for those who call them home to drive to larger centres to do their

The New Brunswick Story  27

shopping – in much the same selection of chain stores that appear in every mall across the country. An improvement that may be marvellous for trade and tourism in the province at large, in other words, can be hard on the livelihood of its rural residents. It further isolates people. While such a blessing-curse comes with “progress” everywhere, rural New Brunswickers are perhaps especially vulnerable in that maintaining the upkeep of smaller roads is a perpetual challenge and thus, not uncommonly, assigned a lower priority when it comes to determining the annual provincial budget. More than this, train service to all but Moncton and Saint John, for passengers and freight alike, has been downsized to the point of disappearing. Branch lines have been abandoned, tracks torn up, and (in the larger centres) railbeds transformed into trails for walking, jogging, and biking – to say nothing of the loss of many train-related jobs on which numerous New Brunswickers, both rural and urban, for a long time relied. Meanwhile, kilometres upon kilometres of railbed in outlying areas serve as unofficial speedways for the all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) that run up and down them three seasons out of four, and for the snowmobiles that cruise them in the winter. In a few communities (the village of McAdam as a case in point), the grand old station houses whose ornate architecture once dignified the hotels and restaurants that catered to passengers en route to Halifax or Montreal, are little more than museums for the odd railway buff who wanders through: uncomfortable reminders to the locals that the glory days are gone, and with them, an entire way of life. As for other means of conveyance available to New Brunswickers in small communities, travel by bus in a manner that is both convenient and affordable is extremely limited. Indeed, in the past year alone, Acadien Bus Lines has discontinued its intraprovincial service. Even from the larger of these communities to Fredericton or Saint John, Bathurst or Miramichi (e.g., for those who commute to and from them for work), travel by automobile remains the sole viable option (Hanson, 2012). As for taxi service in communities of fewer than 5,000, it too is largely unavailable – or if available, then hardly in a way that makes it worthwhile for the drivers themselves. For its part, travel by air is limited to the three largest centres (Saint John, Moncton, and Fredericton). But even at that, given New Brunswick’s location vis-à-vis the rest of North America, the fares charged, routes offered, and flights available make travel by air far less than feasible – let alone affordable – for average New Brunswickers, wherever they may live. Overall, then, the concept

28  Part I – The Context

of public transportation is a distant ideal for residents of New Brunswick’s small communities. And as far as availing themselves of services for health care, banking, or shopping is concerned, such a situation inevitably places the poor, the elderly, the young, or anyone lacking access to a vehicle at a decided disadvantage (Hanson, 2012). Tourism Browsing through a tourist brochure or noting the signs while driving through it (on the way to somewhere else), one might conclude that New Brunswick is a land where only superlatives apply: Take this exit for ... the world’s longest covered bridge ... the world’s largest axe ... the world’s highest tides ... the world-famous Reversing Falls or Magnetic Hill. Of course, every region has its special attractions, man-made or natural, that inject the economies of local communities with the money spent by those who are attracted by everything from museums to motels to meals. New Brunswick is no exception. On average, depending on variables like the weather, the price of fuel, the strength of the Canadian dollar, or restrictions at the US-Canada border, the tourist trade generates a significant portion of provincial revenues every year. According to the New Brunswick Tourism Indicators Report (April 2012), for example, the amount of tourist-related spending in 2011 by visitors from inside and outside the province alike totalled 1.1 billion dollars. A liberal distribution of lakes and rivers throughout the province, plus an extensive coastline with various inviting beaches and islands, including Grand Manan and Campobello, make water sports of different sorts – canoeing, sailing, kayaking, water-skiing, whitewater rafting – enjoyable activities for many. In more than a few communities, moreover, the tradition persists of local people hiring themselves out as licensed guides to out-of-province sportsmen in quest (depending on the season) of game like salmon, moose, or bear. As well, many small communities are home-away-from-home from spring through fall for countless cottagers, who help to boost the local economy in several ways. A downside to catering to cottagers, however, is that while a community’s population may swell significantly during peak vacation periods, the number of people on hand to assist in case of crisis all year long – for instance, with the ambulance service or the volunteer fire department – does not expand accordingly. Not only does this strain the community’s resources, but also it can drive a wedge between its year-round inhabitants and its more fair

The New Brunswick Story  29

weather visitors, on whom the fortunes of the former can in many ways depend. As fuel costs fluctuate and awareness grows of global warming, greener innovations in eco-tourism tend to draw more visitors to the province every year, for kayaking and canoeing, hiking and cycling, snowshoeing and skiing – even pond hockey as well. Many of these activities are aided by the increase in tracks that have been turned into trails throughout the province; some of these are now part of the CrossCanada Trail System. Worth noting in this connection is “edVentures,” a unique initiative of the City of Fredericton, in partnership with the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, and UNB’s program of extended learning. During the summer months, people can take courses in one or another of the various crafts that are taught by college staff – weaving, quilting, drawing, basketry, pottery, and photography, to name just a few (http://www.edventures. ca/en/). Notwithstanding its wealth of tourist attractions, however, New Brunswick tends generally to undersell itself. “Self-sufficient,” it may or may not be, in other words, but self-effacing it, in many ways, remains. Other provinces and states may boast of the celebrities, great or small, they claim as native sons or daughters, for example, yet beyond the borders of New Brunwick, and often enough within them, too, few may be aware of the number of notable figures for which New Brunswick has either been their birthplace or at one time or another their home. Among them are John Humphreys, drafter of the United Nations Charter of Rights along with Eleanor Roosevelt; Noel Kinsella, the current speaker of the Canadian Senate; Canadian labour leader Buzz Hargreaves; actor Donald Sutherland; movie mogul Louis B. Mayer; literary theorist Northrup Frye; poets Sir Charles G.D. Roberts, Bliss Carmen, and Alden Nowlan; North America’s first female ship captain and master mariner, Molly Kool; world champion rowers – the famous Paris Crew – from Saint John; Hollywood actor, Walter Pigeon; rock star Roch Voisin; Canadian country music legend Stompin’ Tom Connors; and Edward A. McDonald, who patented the game of Scrabble – the list goes on (Walls, 2006). For whatever reasons, however – cultural, political, historical – a “drive-through” mentality persists in many New Brunswickers’ minds. One way to put this situation is to say that, compared with its counterparts close at hand – Nova Scotia, PEI, and Newfoundland – New Brunswick lacks “a good, strong story” of itself (Randall, 2012).

30  Part I – The Context

An exception can be found in francophone communities, places like Edmundston in the north, for instance, or Shediac in the south. Intensified, no doubt, by a history of disenfranchisement and minority status, a keen sense of cultural identity and a corresponding sense of solidarity has fostered an impressive commitment to the arts – music, poetry, comedy, dance, and drama – and to celebrating the heritage of the past. Indeed, historical tourism is a core component of the province’s tourist industry, with hundreds of people every year visiting one or other of the two historical settlements that have been authentically restored: Le Village Acadien, outside of Caraquet in the northeast, and King’s Landing, a typical English enclave, not far from Fredericton. Education Concerning education, New Brunswick has much of which to be proud. Founded in 1785, the University of New Brunswick (Fredericton) was the first university in Canada as a whole. Between it and the province’s five other accredited universities (Mount Allison, St Thomas, L’Université de Moncton, Crandall University, and UNB-Saint John), 15,559 individuals in 2011–12 were enrolled in pursuing a degree, of which up to 13% were foreign students (Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission, 2013). A further 4,000 are studying each year in programs at one or another of the 11 campuses of New Brunswick Community College, while still others are enrolled in an assortment of private colleges and universities, many of which have sprung up in the past 10 years alone. Finally, according to a report commissioned by New Brunswick’s Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (March 2012), in 2011 nearly 103,000 students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 were enrolled in New Brunswick’s 317 public schools, 223 of which are anglophone and 94 are francophone. Indeed, the province’s commitment to offering education to its younger citizens in both official languages has grown steadily stronger, even if the sustainability of its “immersion program” is regularly debated – inevitably inviting French-English tensions (never fully extinguished) to reignite. On the whole, however, the New Brunswick education system is under enormous pressure at present due to certain fundamental demographic shifts, not to mention the cost-cutting strategies imposed by successive provincial governments intent on addressing its runaway deficit at any cost. Falling birth rates; the outmigration of high

The New Brunswick Story  31

school–leaving students, skilled workers, and young families to greener economic pastures elsewhere in the country (e.g., to Alberta); low rates of immigration from other provinces and other countries; difficulty attracting teachers in certain subjects; plus a population that, overall, is both declining and aging (Passaris, 2012) – are all factors contributing to decreased enrolments across the board. Smaller communities are typically the most affected, to the point where the number of students in some has shrunk so much so that it becomes more feasible to bus the ones that remain to schools in larger centres. An excellent example is the English elementary school on Miscou Island, at the province’s most northeastern tip, which at one stage between 2003 and 2008 had but one student, taught by one teacher. Not only has that school now been closed, but the much larger francophone school on the island has been closed as well for lack of school-age children to warrant keeping it open and its staff employed. Those still on the island are bused instead to the neighbouring island of Lameque, over 20 kilometres away. With fewer Grade 12 graduates every year, competition has accordingly intensified for incoming students among New Brunswick universities, and indeed across the Maritimes in general. Representatives of admissions departments are kept busy, therefore, travelling to other parts of Canada, not to mention internationally, to recruit fresh consumers of our academic offerings. Meanwhile, key thrusts of a report a few years ago by the Commission on Post-Secondary Education in New Brunswick (2007) are to provide the first two years of university education tuition-free; to set up a single-entry admission process to the province’s universities; to forge partnerships with industries and institutions in other countries; to increase the range of articulated programs between universities and community colleges; and to increase the number of places in the colleges for training in trades deemed vital to a labour force sufficiently skilled for the province’s own industries to survive and thrive in a competitive world. Along with this, the self-sufficiency report, which we referred to earlier, called for immediate improvements in the K–12 system to raise basic levels of numeracy and literacy to acceptable standards. Such levels are currently the lowest in Canada, with youth in smaller communities scoring lowest of all. It has been estimated that rates of functional illiteracy in New Brunswick run at more than 50% of those 16 years of age and older, or nearly 300,000 people! The changes called for by both reports amount, therefore, to a major shift in emphasis, a shift that is,

32  Part I – The Context

at bottom, philosophical. In effect, “education” is defined in instrumental terms – i.e., as job training, skill-oriented, outcome-focused – not in terms of liberal education, which has to do with developing skills in the critical analysis of societal issues and which views “learning” as both an end in itself and lifelong in nature: a more generalist model, in other words, in which – coincidentally – the sorts of helpers whom we interviewed are trained. Health Care Like education, New Brunswick’s health care sector is also undergoing stress and change. Once more, however, there are things of which to be proud. Most notable is its Extra-Mural Program (EMP): its “hospital without walls.” Established in the 1980s along the lines of a program implemented with remarkable success in New Zealand, the EMP is unique in Canada for its provision of essential services to patients throughout the province, including in outlying regions. This includes those who have been discharged from hospital to their own homes yet require continued supervision of an acute-care nature, as well as those not hospitalized to date but who would need to be if it were not for regular monitoring – at home – by an array of medical professionals, including nurses, nutritionists, occupational therapists, respiratory therapists, physiotherapists, and social workers. Many users of EMP are, of course, elderly, which points to a recurring theme in the New Brunswick story in general and that of its rural communities in particular: an aging population – a population aging at a faster rate than in most of Canada as a whole, in fact, and with higher than national averages in terms of incidence of things like obesity, diabetes, and dementia. In the coming decade, for example, one out of every five New Brunswickers is predicted to be over 65. Given that as much as 45% of the province’s health care budget is spent on care administered in the final few years or months of a person’s life, the implications of such trends are sobering to consider. Compared with its cities, New Brunswick’s rural regions are even more at risk in this regard, since (with the outmigration of many of their youth, and of middle-aged adults heading West for work) an evergrowing proportion of communities under 5,000 population is over 65 years of age. Not only does this situation strain such communities’ ability to meet their needs for volunteers for a spectrum of activities and projects (volunteers typically coming from the 65+ sector), but, given

The New Brunswick Story  33

the state of public transportation noted earlier, access to the range of health care services that seniors tend to need (including ambulance services) and that can be taken for granted in more urban settings, is severely restricted. At the same time, the cost of providing state-of-theart services in a province whose population is spread out as much as New Brunswick’s is has precipitated a significant “restructuring” – i.e., downsizing and centralization – in how such services are administered and delivered. This has issued in certain shifts in policy that have not been made without sharp public reaction. Included in the list are the closure of hospitals in places like Caraquet, on the Acadian Peninsula, or their reconfiguration into scaleddown facilities called Community Health Centres, which typically are not set up to take emergencies. As well, there has been a reduction in the past five years from seven provincial health care districts to just two (French and English), with the accompanying reduction in staff (and thus employment opportunities) in which such shifts result. It has also meant the construction of new hospital facilities in what are widely regarded as “middle-of-nowhere” locations, such that a person might well have to travel as much as 75 kilometres to reach an Emergency Room in the event of an accident or some other condition requiring immediate attention. Such situations are among the reasons why a growing number of older adults – in possession of sufficient means – are opting to move from the villages in which they’ve resided for much of their lives to larger centres where apartment complexes billed as “senior-friendly” – i.e., with wide hallways, grab bars in bathrooms, and the like – are being constructed at an ever-growing rate. In the background to such large-scale changes is the chronic challenge of recruiting and retaining doctors – especially family doctors – to serve (let alone live) in New Brunswick’s smaller, more remote communities. The establishment of two satellite medical schools (one francophone and the other anglophone) was intended to meet these rural provincial needs – an urgent intent not yet realized. While the province’s population is around 750,000, nearly 30,000 are on a waiting list for a family doctor. Some have been on this list for many years and rely solely on local clinics for medical care. Nurses, too, are in keen demand in such localities, yet the number of places in the province’s nursing programs and in courses appropriate for the care of seniors with complex health issues (at the University of New Brunswick and L’Université de Moncton) is far from keeping pace with the increase in its aging population and the illnesses and predisposing health risks that they present.

34  Part I – The Context

Meanwhile, New Brunswick nurses, though many would prefer to stay in the province, have fewer jobs available to them once they graduate and remain among the lowest paid in Canada. Yet they pay one of the highest fees in the country each year for professional certification. Not surprisingly, a growing number are relocating to better conditions in other parts of Canada, or even in the United States. The long-term care sector, which includes special care homes and nursing homes as such, is also under tremendous stress at present. Even though infusions of provincial dollars in recent years are funding renovations or expansions of the 61 publicly funded nursing homes that currently exist across the province (many of them in communities of fewer than 5,000), waiting lists grow steadily longer, and the new beds such renovations are providing will still be insufficient to accommodate the mushrooming numbers of 65+ citizens expected in the not too distant future. As a result, the government department responsible for long-term care has recently given the green light to private-sector companies such as Shannex to construct a number of new nursing homes, a step in the direction of a two-tiered health care system for older adults which, understandably, has many New Brunswickers feeling increasingly uneasy. The Broad Picture In an age when globalization in industry and commerce is altering the fundamental nature of rural life across the country and, indeed, changing our very concept of “rural” itself, New Brunswick’s story is not exceptional. Rural communities in Saskatchewan, and the prairies in general, for instance, are undergoing similar changes, as they are in other jurisdictions in Canada as well. But whereas rural regions adjacent to major cities like Toronto or Montreal are having their identities destroyed – or de-storied – as prime agricultural land is “developed” into suburbs with hundreds of look-alike homes, New Brunswick’s rural regions are undergoing a different sort of transformation. While certain unincorporated areas close to centres like Moncton, Saint John, and Fredericton are succumbing to suburbanization, many of the province’s smaller towns and villages are having their identities not so much paved over as simply scooped out. The reasons for this are numerous and intertwined: highways passing them by; public transportation available to only a limited degree; youth moving away for better opportunities; a population aging at more dramatic rates than in

The New Brunswick Story  35

the province as a whole; hospitals, schools, and increasingly churches being centralized in larger locations according to a one-size-fits-all philosophy; mills cutting back and plants closing down because of decisions taken somewhere else, with devastating impact on the businesses and services that depend on them; and so on and so forth (see Tremblay & Rose, 2011). Yet despite the less than rosy picture this version of its story paints, New Brunswick’s rural people remain resilient and resourceful, with a proud sense of “place,” a strong sense of community, and a keen commitment to retaining and improving the quality of life their communities allow. Perhaps the province as a whole does not have a “strong story,” but maybe its rural towns and villages do. Resilient, too, are those who serve them in a variety of capacities and who have deepened our understanding of what rural helping is. It is the stories of such helpers that we’ll be laying out in Part II. The “whole story” of New Brunswick clearly needs many more pages – let alone books – to properly recount, not least because it’s still unfolding. Our aim in this chapter has merely been to sketch its broad outlines as we see it from our own perspectives – or, if you like, from inside our own stories as New Brunswickers ourselves. In doing so, our aim has simply been to make the case that effective helping in small communities requires serious and sustained attempts at understanding the context – social, cultural, geographical, political, and economic – in which it is carried out, however incomplete that understanding will be; a context that is ever-changing and that involves not merely the community itself but the province, the nation, and the world.

3  The Researchers’ Stories

Important to effective rural helping is knowing the stories of the communities we serve. Yet equally important is knowing our own stories, too. Besides informing how we practise rural helping, they influence how we research it as well. Much research in the social sciences is autobiographical at base, insofar as the questions we choose to study are not merely interesting for us from an academic standpoint but, all too often, important to us as persons – because of our own unique life stories. Any story that we tell about ourselves, however, is a particular version that is recounted to a particular audience for a particular aim. Concerning the versions that we offer here, our aim is to provide a bit of background to our fascination with the three core concepts that are central to this project: rural, helping, and story (narrative). Including brief biographies near the beginning of the book is our way, therefore, of acknowledging the experiences and assumptions that have informed our views on each of them; of showing how, often unbeknownst to us, they have been recurring themes for us for many years. When we first decided to sketch our stories, though, we assumed it would be a straightforward assignment. Yet the more we reflected – together and on our own – on why rural, helping, and narrative were so important to us, the more challenging and intriguing the assignment became. As we thought back over our pasts, all sorts of unexpected insights, stories, and connections came to us. “I haven’t thought of that in years,” we would frequently say. Moreover, while connections to “helping,” for example, might have come to us quickly once we started writing, connections to “rural” or “narrative,” though there within us to be made, may have needed deeper digging into memory to identify events or situations in which our sense of them was rooted.

The Researchers’ Stories  37

While each of us writes here about these terms in our own distinct style and voice, what we have in common is that they are intertwined inside us. What is more, our understanding of them has developed as our lives have been enriched by new experiences. Each time we visit a new small community or revisit a familiar one, for instance, our understanding of “rural” in general is inevitably revised in subtle but significant ways. Put differently, we view our earliest experiences of “rural” not so much through the eyes of the child we were in the past as through the lens of our agendas in the present. Thus, what was rural for us then is not necessarily what it is for us now. The point is: “knowing our own story” and how it informs both our practice and our research is no simple task, for “our story” is continually changing. And “knowing” it is a complex, never-ending process. Yet, if we seek to be effective rural helpers, it is one we must engage in all the same. ROSEMARY’S STORY I begin my story with the two people who were enormous influences on my early life: my maternal grandparents, Alf and Rosie. Alf and Rosie left their birthplaces in northern England for the Canadian prairies during the early years of the twentieth century. Like other British settlers at that time, they were charged with the task of building the Empire, specifically “opening up the west.” Alf wrote narrative poems about the changing prairie; his “Lament for the Passing of the Buffalo” is one of my favourites. In the middle of the twentieth century they returned to England. During my early childhood my mother and I lived with them. Rural Canada seemed remote and romantic to me. Alf helped me to read and write by reciting his rural yarns and then showing me what they looked like on a page of script. Thus, sitting on my grandfather’s knee during the very early years of my life provided for me the beginning of an understanding of “rural” and “story,” as well as an understanding about helping relationships. While my grandfather was helping me learn to read and write, my grandmother busily engaged in homemaking activities. She provided me with nursing and sympathy when she tended my scraped knees or childhood illnesses. I loved both of my grandparents but took my grandmother’s helping activities for granted. A few years later, when I returned home from boarding school, I would rush to tell my grandfather what was new in my life – and then

38  Part I – The Context

turn to my grandmother and say I was hungry. Years later I reflected on the gender differences in helping processes between my grandparents, and this gave birth to my feminist orientations. My mother Judith, their eldest daughter, was a prairie girl who grew up listening to the trains roaring through the small town of Weyburn, Saskatchewan. She imagined that the trains were taking people to exciting destinations – in big cities, of course. She envied these lucky travellers. During the Second World War, the opening of the British Air Training Base outside Weyburn brought excitement into the lives of its young female residents. My mother, like many of her friends, developed a friendship with one of the young airmen. They married and my father returned to England while my mother awaited permission to join her husband. A few months after my father left Canada, I was born (Clews & Newman, 2005). In 1946 my mother and I left Saskatchewan for the long train ride across Canada that would take us to the legendary Pier 21, in Halifax, and the troop ship to England. We changed trains in Winnipeg. I recall fear. I was frightened by all the noise. My mother was challenged by a need to take care of a toddler and move her luggage to the Halifaxbound train. Luggage was lost. My mother was frightened. She asked me what she should do. With the wisdom of someone approaching two, I suggested that we should “go home.” My mother told me that this was impossible. With impeccable logic I told her that we must continue our journey. We continued. I decided that I was responsible for my mother, a responsibility that I maintained until her death almost 60 years later. It soon became apparent to Alf and Rosie that their daughter needed more support than could be provided by a precocious two-year-old and the family friends from Saskatchewan who had also settled in York. My grandmother came over to help my mother to settle. When my grandfather realized that my grandmother’s stay would not be a short one, he left his job and Weyburn, too. He must have realized that he would not return. According to my aunt, his younger daughter, before leaving he went out into the wheat fields and said, “The prairie, oh the prairie.” My mother, grandmother, and I eagerly awaited the arrival of my grandfather. We met him from the ship. As I gazed up at him from my stroller I remember thinking how big and strong he was and how safe I felt in his company. My grandfather took over the attic in our large rambling Edwardian house in York, England. My grandfather and I became the best of friends. He unpacked his books and constructed

The Researchers’ Stories  39

bookshelves from orange boxes – wood was probably in short supply but orange boxes were free and readily available. We explored York together and I learned about local history and geography. I learned about pain and suffering through my grandfather’s stories about major wars in Europe and about the misery and the extreme poverty brought about during the 10-year drought and the years of Depression in the Canadian prairies. He told me most of the stories but some he read to me. The reading of books was not a solitary activity. My ­grandfather and I would eagerly read a new book together and then we would talk about it. My grandfather supplemented his books from Canada by buying books from local second-hand bookstores. I still love the smell of old books – it brings back memories of my childhood and happy hours searching for the treasures contained in classic literature. Some of my happiest memories at this time were running up the flights of stairs in our old Edwardian home until I reached my grandfather’s attic where I would hear more stories and learn more about the world. As I grew a little older I progressed from my stroller to a tricycle and then a two-wheeler bike. My grandfather was no longer my main companion. My friends and I explored the local countryside. We often visited the nearby village of Osbaldwick where we were fed and watered by kindly village women – I can still recall the bitter taste of the homemade lemonade and the sweet bread with berry jam that was served with it. My mother was a psychiatric nurse and I often participated in hospital plays and concerts. I liked the hospital community and thought about becoming a nurse but my mother told me that nurses were “glorified chamber maids.” I decided to become a psychiatric social worker. The years of my early childhood passed. At age 11, I was “sent away” to boarding school in the market town of Uttoxeter in the British Midlands. By this time two sisters had been born. I was sad to say goodbye to them but I wept buckets-full when I left my grandfather. He told me that he was old and he might not see me again – a message that was to be repeated scores of times before he died when I was in my mid-twenties. At school I settled into the role of “new girl.” Like all new girls I was befriended by the senior girls and the prefects. Midnight feasts were times when we told stories about home and learned to become part of the boarding school community. Day-girls invited boarders (who they pitied) to “get out” by visiting their homes that were usually in the countryside. I recall little support from the teachers or boarding house staff as we battled with homesickness. An exception was Mrs Quick,

40  Part I – The Context

the English teacher and headmistress. Mrs Quick often invited me into her office for a chat and some sweets but urged me not to tell the other girls. At this time I also became aware that people who could not or did not want to become part of the close-knit boarding school community became marginalized by others. My schooldays came to an end and I began my undergraduate studies in Birmingham, then Britain’s second largest city. I was terrified. I went into a phone box on campus and called my grandfather for reassurance. I hated Birmingham with its industrial grime and unfamiliar accent but I married a Birmingham man and lived there for almost 30 years. I escaped to the countryside though. We owned a cottage on the England/Wales border and my husband and I visited it often. I read sociology at university and was diverted from social work into sociological research and post-secondary teaching. Then I trained as a student counsellor before taking up my first (unqualified) social work job at a child guidance clinic. There were few social workers in this multidisciplinary setting so my social work was largely self-taught and drew on my sociological knowledge. I watched other professional helpers – psychiatrists, psychologists, teachers, and a variety of therapists – speech, occupational, physio-, and family. I read their stories about clients’ lives in the form of case histories in clients’ files. It was very clear to me that helping was much more than people-changing – so many of the difficulties that clients faced were rooted in their context, in particular, their economic and social worlds. Their problems were often caused or exacerbated by poverty and government policies that favoured some and marginalized others. I spent the next decade in many different social work, community work, counselling, and educational settings – and obtaining graduate degrees in social work and criminology. Many of these jobs were in rural settings. I drove quickly past the lines of cars waiting to enter Birmingham each morning while I was one of the few people driving away from it at this time of day. In the early 1980s, I took up a job as a social work manager in the market town of Bromsgrove in Worcestershire. This job confirmed that the learning from my professional courses was of little value in rural settings. I established a “Staff Development Seminar” so that social workers across “the patch,” as I called it, could share their knowledge about ethical and effective rural social work. I was interested to observe and learn about how rural communities resolved their social problems. I was impressed by the diversity of rural communities for which I was responsible. I met my colleague Brenda Barber, a farmer as well as

The Researchers’ Stories  41

a social worker, and drew heavily on her stories of practice to learn about rural social work in central England. Some were traditional farming communities; others were situated in rural beauty spots and relied heavily on tourism from the huge West Midlands conurbation of cities; while others acted as dormitory suburbs for these cities. I learned about formal and informal decision-making processes in rural communities and was interested to see how a few wealthy families exerted much power on the lives of local people. It was clear to me that new social workers needed to understand the communities in which they worked, and I began to grapple with the most effective ways to facilitate this learning. I developed a number of orientation exercises for new social workers. One of these exercises, “walkabout,” required new workers to spend time learning about the community where they would practise. They were asked to read back issues of newspapers, visit local shops, sit in public buildings, and talk to people who lived and worked in their patch. To guide their orientation, I asked them to find answers to my questions about local needs and resources. My life changed and during the summer of 1993 my mother and I prepared to cross the Atlantic again – after almost 50 years. This time we were moving from England back to Saskatchewan. Since arriving in Canada I have been a social work educator in Saskatchewan and in New Brunswick. Again, it was an experienced colleague, Ken Collier, who taught me about rural communities – this time about rural communities in Canada. My grandfather’s stories were supplemented by Ken’s stories about how rural people fought back against poverty and injustice and possible roles for social workers who were employed to help. My students, who have almost all been rural people, told their stories about growing up and working in these settings. Together, these experiences have aided me in understanding the complexities of Canadian rural life. I developed the “walkabout” exercise and spent time with students attempting to identify the knowledge and skills that are needed by effective rural helpers. I draw upon my life experiences in both England and Canada, plus my learning from my relationships with these significant people, as I continue to develop my understanding of “story,” “rural,” and “helping” – each of which I will now explore. Storytelling and storylistening have usually been social events for me. When I think about the stories I have been told, I think about the people who told them and the people who were with me when they were told. Stories and poems from my grandfather were special to me.

42  Part I – The Context

Although the content was usually interesting, more important was the fact that I sat on my grandfather’s knee to listen to them. The storytelling and storylistening affirmed the closeness of our relationship and through the stories our relationship was strengthened. My grandfather knew many stories but he was keen to let me know that sometimes he did not know the stories I was interested in. On these occasions we would search through my grandfather’s books to try to find a story – or we would go to the library and look things up. Then we would construct a story. My grandfather would take a character from history and ask me to pretend I was that character and to tell the character’s story. If I heard a story I found interesting I would share it with my grandfather. My grandfather was thus my first teacher about the social nature of stories. Stories have helped me to develop a sense of identity. From an early age I was taught by my grandmother that I was of a higher social class than other people who lived in our lower middle-class neighbourhood. My grandmother told me about her childhood in a Scottish castle, how she was presented at court, how she chose to marry my grandfather who was of the “scholar” class, and how I must always remember who I was. But who was I? I had a confused sense of national identity. My mother insisted that I should travel on a Canadian passport because I was Canadian – but I remembered very little about Canada. I relied on stories from my grandfather and other family members to gain an understanding about what “Canada” meant – the prairie that stretched as far as the eye could see, the Depression when farmers needed to leave their homes, tumbleweed, the buffalo, the CCF, and the mutuality of helping. I learned also about my family identity. My grandmother told me stories that taught me how an English lady should behave, how I should stir my tea, address the servants, and address the monarch. I learned how the privileged classes lived in Edwardian England when young women were presented at court and then went to a number of social events until they found (or were helped to find) a suitable “catch.” From the stories of both my grandparents I learned that I was a hybrid – both nationally and in terms of social class. Also I learned about rebellion from my grandmother’s stories about marrying my grandfather, who was “beneath her,” and from my grandfather who did not become a schoolteacher like his sisters but who travelled the world and listened to stories until he was in his 30s and ready to settle down.

The Researchers’ Stories  43

My life experiences, then, have taught me about the social nature of stories. Stories are often best when they are told. When they are read, they gain meaning when they are shared. I have learned that stories are associated with my identity; they derive from who I am and, in turn, they help me to develop my sense of self. Whether written or shared orally, stories have given meaning to what I have encountered in my social world and they have helped me to understand issues and events I have not personally experienced. I have found stories to be engaging and exciting. As the story listener/reader, I have enjoyed discovering that stories are unfinished, and there is always an opportunity for me to add to or develop a story through my interpretation of it. As a woman whose life has usually been spent in urban areas, it has been a struggle to avoid developing a meta-narrative of “rural” as “a place to escape to” (Randall & Clews, 2001). Early childhood stories of the idyllic life in rural Saskatchewan were layered with experiences of kindhearted rural people. It was only when I learned about the actual rural communities that my meta-narrative became shattered (Clews, Randall, & Furlong, 2004). It is clear to me that traditional ways of distinguishing urban and rural are inadequate. I have found that definitions put forward by Statistics Canada, which differentiate rural and urban through population density and numbers of inhabitants, tend to mask the amazing diversity within rural communities. My experiences of farming communities, fishing villages, Aboriginal reserves, one-industry towns, and dormitory settlements cum suburbs for far larger centres have impressed upon me how vastly different such communities can be. I have been impressed by their diversity, and by how individual stories combine with community stories, resulting in unique characteristics to each rural setting. I have found that work on an “urban-rural continuum” has not provided me with the tools to understand the richness and diversity in each rural setting. Even multifaceted models that analyse rural communities by statistics about their economic base, climate, distance from a larger centre of population, or recent changes (among other factors) have not helped me. To gain understanding of each community I have found it necessary to listen to stories about their history, geography, demography, economic base, sources of formal and informal power, and patterns of inclusion and exclusion. The more stories I hear the more complex I find each community.

44  Part I – The Context

The term “helping” was much simpler for me to define in my early years in the helping professions. I chose to become a counsellor and then a social worker because I wanted to give aid to individuals and assist communities to preserve and enhance the life-satisfaction of residents. During my professional education and during my practice experiences I became aware of the complexities of problems people face. I learned how human service agencies often impede rather than facilitate helping processes. As a manager in a government agency I learned that the “best interests of clients” (enshrined in social work ethical codes) was often less important than “the best interests of government.” I learned that government narratives were often based on playing safe and avoiding risk. Often I was asked to consider what the press might report if an intervention went wrong. Community developers employed as team members faced serious dilemmas when a major impediment to assisting the community to achieve its goals was, all too often, the policy of the government that employed them. My helping experiences as the recipient of care from my grandparents, plus my professional experiences in cities and small communities, have shown me that “practice wisdom,” as reflected in social work theory, assumes a large community. Rural issues like the isolation of social workers, the difficulty of accessing support and supervision, the challenges of setting personal and professional boundaries between work and non-work, and the limited availability of professionals from other disciplines linked with the many dimensions of difficulties caused, for instance, by limited options in the realm of public transportation. I needed to consider afresh the role of rural social workers and how it related to the roles of those in allied fields. These issues and methods of resolving them were rarely addressed in textbooks. As I became aware of the many dimensions to the role of human service workers in rural communities, I became more and more uncomfortable with the term “helping” to describe what they do. The word “helping” troubles me in many ways. It implies a “helper” – and someone who is “helped” – in a way that is patronizing and arrogant. How can a stranger enter a strange community and “help” without the knowledge that is only gained from years of life within it? Can insiders move to urban settings and gain the knowledge and skills that will enable them to return to their home and “help”? When such issues arose in my classes, I found myself teaching both from my own stories and from those of the students in my class. I concluded that there was a need to develop theory and models for rural “helping” whose starting

The Researchers’ Stories  45

point consisted of the stories of those who, themselves, live and work in small communities. BILL’S STORY I grew up in Harvey Station, a small village in New Brunswick’s southwest corner, once a stopping point for the Canadian Pacific Railway that still cuts through it. Hence the word “Station.” I can still recall the lonesome whistle of the trains as they neared the old station house in the village centre, on their way either east to Saint John on the Bay of Fundy, or west to Montreal, Ontario, the prairies, and the Rockies to the shores of the Pacific. To this day, I can feel the wanderlust that the sound used to trigger, transporting me to all manner of imagined places in the wider world. My father was a Protestant minister with the United Church of Canada. For 20 years (a long time for a minister to stay in one community), he served the people of Harvey in the many roles that ministry entails. For most of those people, Harvey had been their family home for a century or more. In contrast, my two sisters and I were set apart, for we were “preacher’s kids” (PK’s). Because of this, we lived a fishbowl life, as both insiders and outsiders at once, even though we were probably privy to more of the community’s secrets than our classmates at school. We got to know those classmates rather well, of course, since there were scarcely more than 30 of them in every grade with us from 1 through 12, and no more than 250 in the school as a whole. Meanwhile, many of them were growing up in the exact same houses as their parents and grandparents had before them, which meant that, however hard we tried, we never quite fit in. Not that they were snobbish about their heritage or made us feel inferior, but, at bottom, we knew we were “from away.” In our case, “away” was only Nova Scotia, where both our parents were born, and where they, too, had been brought up in small communities. Yet even if Nova Scotia was itself a Maritime province and thus not nearly as bad as our being from, say, Toronto or Vancouver, it was ultimately not New Brunswick, and certainly not this corner of it. Despite the fact that my sisters and I had all been born in New Brunswick, we weren’t born here: a point we could never forget. We were the archetypal nuclear family, as divorced from our “roots” as the average family in any big city. Nearly every summer, we travelled back to

46  Part I – The Context

Nova Scotia to visit grandparents and cousins, and for a few summers even ventured to upstate Vermont, where, due to my father’s interest in genealogy, we discovered an entire clan of Randall relatives, most of whom were very rural people indeed. We had family, too, in other words, so we knew what family meant. Above all, I did, given that my name is William L. Randall the Fourth, a fact that filled me with this quiet sense of obligation to remember who I was and, at all costs, to be a good boy. All the same, “family” for us wasn’t rooted in Harvey, and thus not something that we lived and breathed each day. While to me “rural” meant extended family (even if family I felt outside of, looking in), it also meant Nature, whether the cultivated kind or the wild kind. The cultivated kind consisted of the fields in which farmers grew the hay and oats and other crops that fed the different herds of cattle for which the village had achieved a certain fame. “Welcome to Harvey,” read the billboard greeting motorists: “Jersey Capital of the World.” The wild kind of nature consisted of vast tracts of forestland bordering those fields which, prior to the oxen and axes of the pioneers who cleared them, had been covered in the usual species of hardwood and softwood that are native to New Brunswick: birch, beech, oak, ash, poplar, maple, hemlock, cedar, spruce, fir, and pine. From “the woods,” as I grew up calling them, many men earned their livelihood at the safe end of a chainsaw, cutting down the trees and yarding the logs to the roadside to be trucked by other Harveyites to one or other of the many mills throughout the region. To those woods, as to the various streams that ran through them and lakes that graced them, plus the many camps and cottages lining stream and lake alike, not a few of these men, along with friends and family, were drawn on a regular basis, for fishing in the spring and summer, hunting in the fall, and trapping in the winter. In fact, some of them hired themselves out as guides to sportsmen from “the States,” keen to catch themselves a salmon or bag big game like bear or moose. Indeed, fishing, and hunting, and cottaging in general, played a central (even sacred) role in the rhythms of Harvey life. The woods were alive with all manner of animals, from the cute and cuddly (squirrels, rabbits, deer) to the dangerous and reclusive (bobcat, moose, and bear). “Rural” has always meant for me, therefore, an uneasy blend of friendly-safe and mysterious-dangerous: an environment that, at any point, can demand of its inhabitants the most basic of skills in order to survive And the manse, the house set aside for the minister’s family – a glass house, in essence – in which other ministers’ families had lived before us, was positioned precisely on the boundary

The Researchers’ Stories  47

between these two dimensions of my childhood world. In one sense, it was on the boundary between the village itself and the countryside around it, being one of the last houses on the road leading up the hill and out of town to where the school bus route began. Classmates living just a few houses further up got bussed to school each day. As for me, unless I got a lift with my parents’ or, in spring and autumn, rode my bike, I had to walk. Not that it was any great hardship; quite the opposite. An introvert by nature, I found the 20 minutes it took to go down one hill, cross the tracks, and up the other hill to the school gave me needed time to think. Nonetheless, it was one of those things that, in my mind, set rural apart from really rural. And the manse was located on another boundary, too: between the fields across the road from it and the forest that fanned out behind it, haunting and enticing, for what seemed like forever. I have never quite lost this sense of living on the boundary, nor have I lost my love for the out-of-doors, for forest and field, lake and hill. Though my studies required me to live in large urban centres – Toronto, Boston, Montreal – I’ve always felt myself “a country boy” at heart. Even now, I live on the outskirts of Fredericton, just beyond the city limits, on a ridge ringed with trees. Also, a minister myself, eventually, I spent four years in two distinctly rural settings. One was Gravelbourg, a small French Catholic community (pop. 1,200) in the middle of the wide open prairies of southwestern Saskatchewan, 50 miles “as the crow flies” north of the border with Montana. The trend of rural de-population well underway, and with smaller farms being bought up by bigger ones, there were fewer than two to three persons per square kilometre once you drove outside of town. I knew this firsthand because for three years I criss-crossed 3,000 of those square kilometres on a weekly basis, visiting the 200 or so households and 1,000 persons under my care, for whom either Gravelbourg or one of the other four villages that made up my parish was where they bought their groceries, picked up their mail, or, when the Spirit moved them, went to church. The other setting was the village of Creemore, Ontario. Part tourist town and part bedroom community for the Greater Toronto Area, I served there for one year as an interim minister on a three-point pastorate that took in two other hamlets and the region around them. Consisting of high rolling farmland that straddled the Bruce Trail 40 miles northwest of Toronto’s outer suburbs and 20 miles south of Lake Huron, the area had been farmed uninterruptedly for close to 200

48  Part I – The Context

years. Increasingly, however, if the farmers weren’t either retiring or selling out, then they were going bankrupt. This was opening the way for urbanites fed up with the traffic and tensions of the city to buy up the homesteads, rent out the fields, and design quaint country getaways to retreat to on weekends for relaxing, skiing, entertaining, or, as the case may be, attending church – “weekenders,” the local people dubbed them. Over the years, the range of small communities I have experienced, then, extends from those focused on farming, to those dependent on the forest, to those that cater to sportsmen and vacationers – or all of these at once. And the rural people themselves have run the gamut from ranchers to weekenders, farmwives to woodsmen, and tradesmen to truckers. Turning to my interest in narrative, it too had its beginnings in my childhood. It is impossible here, however, to deal fully with narrative as a topic, not merely because interest in it is growing in so many corners, but because it has become the guiding idea for my own career, providing the sort of depth dimension to our understanding of human life that the social sciences generally so often lack. Narrative was important in my early years for much the same reasons it’s important in many youngsters’ lives. Not only did I like to watch TV (even if we got only one channel!) but I also liked to read. Admittedly, my preference at the time was hardly “literature” as such, but books like The Hardy Boys, a series of mysteries aimed at young male readers that revolved around the same stock characters and formulaic plots. Happily, my tastes in reading have evolved since then, and in fact, many of the works I appreciate most are by authors who specialize in laying bare the complexities of rural life: Alice Munro, for instance, or John Steinbeck, or Margaret Laurence, to cite just a few. One of the most formative factors in my awareness of narrative was my father’s obsession with family history, both our own and Harvey’s itself. I remember the home-made genealogies which he kept in separate files for each of the branches of its founding clans – Littles, Listers, Cleghorns, Messers, Coburns, Swans. In the late 1830s, their forebears had emigrated to the Harvey area from the lowlands of Scotland, along the River Tweed. In fact, one of the settlements outside of Harvey is called Tweedside to this day. Dad knew their stories as well as he did those of his own ancestors. When making pastoral visits, it was his strategy to pump his parishioners – especially the elderly ones, whose

The Researchers’ Stories  49

stories would be lost when they were gone – with all manner of questions about their antecedents. A natural storyteller himself, who could transform the most innocuous occurrence into a riveting tale, he called himself a community storian (storykeeper is the term I’d use now.) What went into his files were not just birth dates and death dates and lists of children’s names, but notes-to-self and, wherever available, photographs to remind him of the stories that were central to that family’s past: the time in the winter of ’83 when so-and-so’s great-grandmother hitched the horses to the sled and drove herself to old Doc Johnson’s house the night she gave birth to Aunt Myrtle, etc. Dad’s passion led to the establishment of the Harvey Historical Society, of which he was president and sole active member for years. His efforts at assembling such material – from scrapbooks, albums, cemetery records, and the ever-dimming memories of his parishioners – resulted in some 25 family histories by descendants far and near whose hunger for roots Dad’s research had inspired. After retiring from ministry, he and my mother returned to Harvey to live a further 20 years, during which time he continued collecting community stories while serving various parishes in the neighbouring region on a part-time basis. To acquaint himself quickly with the people in the pews, he used the same skills that he had honed in Harvey to ferret out those most apt to be keepers of the stories – stories of the congregation, of the families who founded it, of the community at large. In other words, he sought to learn the key players in the original settlement and the main events since: the turning points in the community plot. Another retirement activity that built on this passion was writing a weekly column for six or so years in a newsletter put out by the local Lions Club (The Lionnews), and at one point in a weekly newspaper that served the broader area. Entitled “From the Scrapbook of Dr Randall,” it featured anecdotes from the lives of people in the past: stories that were unlikely to appear in official history books but that, based on the responses he received from readers, were a vital part of local lore. In all, he wrote nearly a hundred such pieces and to this day keeps copies of them on file in the apartment in Fredericton where my parents now live. Dad’s respect for the stories by which people understood their identity equipped him for the approach he took in communicating the Good News from the pulpit. For him, the old, old story was not just a pious phrase from an old hymn, but the core of the Christian religion. And as

50  Part I – The Context

my father’s son, it was hard not to share it. In his view of things, being a Christian was less about assenting to abstract doctrines than being grafted into “the family of God” as adopted sons and daughters, along with other heroes of the faith: apostles and prophets, patriarchs and kings, whose pedigrees I got to know by heart. As a PK, I had little choice but to attend Sunday school every week and, each Tuesday evening, meetings of the Young People’s group. The main activity, every meeting, once the business portion was dispensed with and motions had been made and seconded about upcoming outings, was the weekly Bible quiz, in which Dad asked all the questions: Team A – for 5 points – what are the names of Noah’s three sons? Surely no group of teens was more grounded than us in the “begats” of the Old Testament, for it was there and not the New Testament that, to Dad, the old, old story was laid out: the story of God’s people, “His-story”: And Abraham married Sarah and together they begat Isaac. Isaac wed Rebeccah and they begat Jacob and Esau. Jacob married Rachel and they begat Joseph ... For me, “narrative” was a matter of begats and I had a gut-level sense of their importance to human identity, whether the begats of people in the Bible, whose world itself was mainly rural, or those that lay behind my own life and that of my chums at school. It’s hardly surprising, then, that, midway through seminary some years later, I developed a passionate curiosity about “narrative theology” (Goldberg, 1991; Hauerwas & Jones, 1989). Central to narrative theology is the conviction, for example, that the Bible is less a compendium of doctrinal pronouncements and timeless truths than a meandering amalgam of myths and legends, dreams and parables, chronicles and biographies. In sum, the Bible is narrative from beginning to end. It’s not history per se (as in: what really happened) so much as story – “sacred story,” if you like (Crites, 1971). Moreover, Christianity as a whole offers a master narrative within which to make sense of the ups and downs of our own unique lives. Given my grounding in the begats, I needed scant encouragement to embrace these convictions. However, seeing them legitimized by theologians added impetus to my emerging sense of “the storied nature of human conduct” (Sarbin, 1986). And it helped me begin building an intellectual framework for making sense of the reading on narrative in general that, since leaving the ministry, I’ve continued doing in various fields, among them gerontology, the field I work in now. Whatever else “aging” may entail, I see it as a biographical process just as much as a biological one; it involves how we age on the “inside,” so

The Researchers’ Stories  51

to speak. Inside aging has less to do with changes in our bodies than with changes in how we understand ourselves in relation to our own past, present, and future, or to the Beginning, Middle, and End of our own life-narrative. It has to do with our stories, and how those stories fit – or not – within the ever-changing stories of our family, our community, our culture, our world. Hence, the interest that a number of us have been developing in “narrative gerontology” (Kenyon, Bohlmeijer, & Randall, 2011). This leads me to my interest in “helping.” Here, too, my father was a formative influence. For my mother, while I was growing up, helping meant basically helping him, as she acted to a tee the role of “minister’s wife.” As his helpmate, she maintained the household, kept us cleaned and fed, and (except for being church organist) kept a low profile in the church itself. As for my father, he had a somewhat paternalistic understanding of what helping entails, given that this was, in many ways, the dominant model of ministry at the time: minister up here, people down there; they have the problem, minister has the answer – i.e., the same sort of one-up understanding that “helping” itself can imply. This may help to explain why, throughout his career, he’s been more comfortable ministering in small communities than in urban ones, where your parishioners are apt to be better educated, better paid, and more worldly than yourself, meaning that you are often ministering up to your “flock” rather than down. Having served in such a parish myself, perhaps I have been spared some of his paternalistic attitude. Nor have I been as comfortable with the automatic deference that churchfolk can accord the person in the pulpit, placing him or her upon a pedestal for no other reason than that he or she is “the minister.” On the positive side, what I was able to put into practice when I took up ministry myself was my father’s deep-seated sense that everyone has a story, both a personal one and a family one. The family story, in particular, provides a cultural, historical, and even genetic context in which to appreciate what makes a given person tick – where he or she is “coming from.” The way they walk and talk, the way they look at the world, and even the way they vote can be better understood if you have a real feeling for the social and cultural influences that inform their identity, their character, their nature. When I, too, was visiting “my people,” no matter how tedious those visits could sometimes be or how aged and frail my visitees, and no matter whether I was ministering in a rural congregation or an urban one, I made myself curious about the knick-knacks on their mantelpiece

52  Part I – The Context

and the photos on their wall. Who are these folks?, these items made me want to know, and what is their story? What events shaped the world they lived in as children, as teens, as young adults? What tragedies did they suffer along the way and what adventures have they had? What memories are uppermost in their minds and have shaped their experience of “reality”? And who begat them? What kind of family or community were they born into, and how can a sense of their roots help me make sense of how they think today, of their values and views, relationships and beliefs? But my motives behind this curiosity were more than professional in nature. I was not just trying to get a bead on them so I could better do my job. I was, in many cases, genuinely intrigued by them. The more I listened, the more they expanded in my eyes. From them and through them, I myself was learning, not just about them as unique individuals, but about the field in which they worked, and the experience and expertise they had acquired across the years, be it growing grain, raising kids, coping with cancer, or fighting a war. By learning about them I was learning about myself as well, often about how much I still had to learn – on every front, including my profession. Thus, as I grew in respect for them, I grew (I hope) in humility as well. Of course, in any given week of ministry, “helping” entailed a range of activities and roles, from youth work to pastoral counselling, from crisis intervention to palliative care, from preaching to teaching, marrying to burying – the list goes on. Primarily, however, I see helping as a matter of learning, and of encouraging others on a learning journey of their own – whether they’re parishioners or students. The goal of that journey is to become all that they can be – intellectually, emotionally, socially, and spiritually. As such, helping involves assisting them to experience their “problems” as opportunities for growth. If learning is a central aim of helping – learning about myself, about others, and about how to help others learn about themselves – then listening is the heart of how that happens. By listening, though, I mean not just hearing a person in a technical sense, nor do I mean judging, labelling, or, above all, “fixing” them. I mean attending as closely as possible what people are telling me about their experience of the world. And, just as important, what they are not telling me; what they’re conveying between the lines, through their postures and gestures, their silences and sighs. So then, this is my story – or a version of it anyway – about how rural, narrative, and helping have come to intrigue me as much as they do.

The Researchers’ Stories  53

DOLORES’ STORY I was born in St John’s, the capital city of Newfoundland. Newfoundland was a remote settlement for the Norse Viking sailors around the year 1000, a “colony” of England from the 1500s onward, and since 1949 it has been the tenth province of Canada. Because St John’s is the largest city on the Island, I had always thought of it as being urban. But when I recalled experiences from that time and listened to stories my older brothers told of their childhood experiences, I realized that where we grew up was, when my parents built there, bordering on the City of St John’s, and the Island itself was a rural location, to England, to Canada, to North America – an isolated fishing ground in the cold North Atlantic, a stopover for the European fishing and whaling fleets. Radio and later television programs provided images of St John’s, not as an urban centre with a population of 50,000, five major hospitals, a university, and several private denominational schools with some of the best classical education systems available on the continent, but as an underdeveloped, isolated rural fishing village perched on a cliff with dilapidated fish flakes and humble shacks. Indeed, images of The Battery, a fishing village at the entrance to the city’s harbour, were generally used on national news reports about St John’s. Local folks often wondered about this for years, but now I understand that this was how Canadians or “mainlanders” viewed Newfoundland and its people. Perhaps rural is a way we and others view ourselves and the places in which we live. This became real to me when I moved to rural Ontario to take up a teaching position and went to a local florist in the town to order an arrangement for family in St John’s. The owner hesitated, and asked, “Are you sure you can afford this gift?” Taken aback, I asked why she had said that. Her reply was, “All Newfoundlanders are fishermen and unemployed during the winter months, aren’t they?” I responded by asking, “Are all Ontarians corn farmers and unemployed during the winter months?” I felt sad and left to make my purchase at another shop nearby. When I grew up in St John’s, it was a small city and, like rural New Brunswick, everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business, and particularly their lineage with its collection of saints and sinners and its selection of stories to be used at an appropriate time to win a point. In the heat of an argument, one might hear, “You’re a sliveen just like your father and grandfather before him.” Or, “You’re all right – cut from the same cloth as those fine generations of saints going back to the old country.”

54  Part I – The Context

Most families had been there for generations and their histories were well known, perhaps better known than the Island’s history. Families were of Irish, Scottish, or English descent. Ours was Irish on all sides – Furlong, Flynn, Byrne, Coady, Kavanaugh, Connell, Angel, and more. Stories of my ancestors’ struggles, though they themselves had long passed on, were as alive in my childhood as I was. Their stories were passed down verbally, but were as strong as if they had been passed down genetically, or were “bred in the bone.” When I took courses on curriculum in my doctoral degree, I came to see these stories as, in fact, a kind of “curriculum” – a living curriculum within a family, a community, and a culture that is as strong a teacher as any academic program. During my summer holidays as an adult, I searched down these family ancestors and checked out their legends in the provincial archives and church records across the Island. One of my family’s favourites was of my great-grandfather Edward Furlong, a policeman who had grown up in a large family from the west coast of the island where they had owned a lumber mill and a herring plant. I had visited this beautiful plateau where their home and mill stood during later years with my father and brother. Edward was one of 12 children born in Argentia, on the same land where the American naval base was eventually established. His father, John, sailed from Argentia to northwestern Newfoundland and resettled on a more sheltered location in the Bay of Islands. We combed cemeteries in the Bay of Islands in search of our ancestors’ gravestones, and found the gravesite of Edward’s sister who died en route to their new home. With grief over the loss, John had carved the stone himself, so the family story went. Since the writing on the headstone was illegible, we used chalk to bring the letters into view, but this did not work. My brother suggested that we use our binoculars to enlarge the inscription. It helped, but was blurred. Dad suggested that we switch the view and use the distance lens to see if that would help. It did, and the whole inscription became clear. My father believed that every problem had a solution and that we could find that solution if we worked at it. He had proven this philosophy to be accurate many times during my life. My great-grandfather left the Bay of Islands and moved to the east coast of the Island to become a policeman. His work took him to several rural locations on the east and south coasts of the Island and eventually to St John’s. Stories of his many commendations for heroic acts during riots or disasters came down through the family narrative and were verified later in archival records and those of the Newfoundland

The Researchers’ Stories  55

Constabulary. His oldest son, Dennis, my grandfather, was born in Bay Bulls, a village along the south coast of the Island when his father was posted there. Dennis and his brother Arch were rascals as children. A family story that was often repeated with delight and a degree of pride was of one of their nightly escapades. Policemen at the time in Newfoundland wore swallow-tail coats. Dennis and Arch liked to go out after dark when they could be relatively anonymous because of the poor lighting from the shadowy street lamps. They would run behind a policeman on his beat, grab each side or tail of his coat, and speed past him on either side while the coat ripped up the back seam. They had played this lark on different occasions, but one night when they got home their mother was sewing up their father’s coat. Needless to say, it was their last lark of this kind. As poetic justice would have it, Dennis later became a tailor and spent many an hour repairing policemen’s uniforms. He owned his own shop in downtown St John’s, a couple of blocks from the harbour, exactly where Mile One of the Trans Canada Highway now begins. Dennis loved to tell stories, to tease and be teased. Stories that I remember were about the customers who came to his tailor shop from across the Island and across the world. St John’s was an international harbour at the time and sheltered fishing boats and cargo ships from many different countries – Portugal, Russia, Japan, Jamaica, England, Spain, and more. Many of the fleets were accompanied by their own hospital ships. The Gil Eannes was the Portuguese White Fleet hospital ship. The Portuguese sailors seemed at home in St John’s, playing soccer and attending local church services. My grandfather’s tailor shop was frequented by regulars from many of these countries when tailoring work had to be done. Payment was not generally in the local currency, but in whatever they had of similar value (fish, tools, books, foods from different countries, and other items). When I graduated from nursing, some of my classmates and I decided to back-pack through Europe. We arrived in Lisbon, Portugal, and travelled to the seaside town of Estoril to bask in the sun for a while before travelling to bigger cities in Spain and Italy. On the first day I fell ill and had to be taken to a doctor’s office nearby. The doctor spoke English and provided me with medicine and care. After hearing our accent, he asked where we were from. “Newfoundland,” we replied. He proudly informed us that he had been the doctor on the Gil Eannes hospital ship, and his son was now the White Fleet doctor. What were the chances

56  Part I – The Context

that a Newfoundlander who had never been abroad before would be treated by a Portuguese physician who spoke English and had spent his summers in Newfoundland? He charged nothing for the medical care or for the medications, but sent us on our journey with a rare gift of friendship and kindness. Edward, my father, grew up in this city where the world and its cultures came to his doorstep, and often this world stepped within the walls of his father’s tailor shop. Dad loved to read, and sometimes the payment his father received from the sailors and sea captains took the form of books or photos of their home countries. He had a love of learning through travel, though he rarely had the opportunity to travel himself. He encouraged his children to do so; he believed travel offered a rich educational experience. Dad became the superintendent of the St John’s City Council, ran the mechanical department, and was often head of two other departments as well. These departments had a large number of employees whose families and situations he knew well. Jobs were difficult to get in the city at that time, and salaries were not generally enough to support the large families most employees had. People helped each other out in the best ways they could. I remember the Christmas Eves when my father and mother packed boxes of food from the many gifts of turkeys and hams he had received from companies with whom he did business. Dad knew the families who were struggling to provide for their families with the small salaries they were paid. I went with my father on these visits, but was cautioned by him that not a word was to be spoken about it. Dad was a quiet, somewhat shy, humble, humorous, and deeply reflective man. When he was encouraged, he told jokes and stories about the characters he had met during his lifetime and their antics – which often turned into local sagas. One that comes to mind and still makes me laugh was of a feisty man named Fitzpatrick who worked with the City. The story goes that the circus had come to town and a large snake had escaped. Warnings were out all across town to beware of this venomous creature. As the City’s truck with Mr Fitzpatrick and other crew members in it drove past the Catholic Basilica, the man spotted the snake, jumped from the truck, grabbed it, and tossed it into the back. All the men leaped out to avoid a deadly bite. The next day the local newspaper’s headline read, “St Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland; Fitzpatrick drove the snakes out of Newfoundland” My fondest memories of my father go back to childhood when he would read books about history, other cultures, current events, world

The Researchers’ Stories  57

religions, and more, and he would tell us stories from these books. I grew up knowing about the great leaders of history, the great events, religions, lawgivers, writers, and more – Churchill, Napoleon, Hannibal, Alexander, Confucius, Gandhi, Geronimo, Luther, Chaucer, and Dickens. I learned about the Code of Hammurabi, the differences between Catholicism and Buddhism, and Native spirituality, as well as the great events and documents of history, like the Reformation, the League of Nations, and the Charter of Human Rights. He talked about the Battle of Beaumont Hamel, where Newfoundlanders died in the First World War, about Churchill’s famous statements to rally the Allied Forces, about medical innovations as a result of wars, and so on. My formal schooling, though an excellent program of classical studies (academics, music, athletics, theatre, etc.), couldn’t compare to these great conversations at home. When my parents went to London, Ontario, to celebrate my Master’s graduation from the University of Western Ontario, I gave them a tour of the campus. As we passed the law building, I showed them the carvings of the faces of three men at the top of the building. During my time at UWO I had asked many authorities at the university, even the people in the archives, who these men were, but no one knew. When Dad looked at them, he said, “They are the three great lawgivers of history – Hammurabi, Moses, and Napoleon.” I was amazed that he knew and thrilled to know myself. I was given an informal curriculum at home that I would search for years to experience in my formal education. On my mother’s side were others whose stories shaped my ways of seeing the world. I had come to love hearing these stories – these biographical snippets of my ancestors – and though, as a teenager and adult, I had little interest in reading fiction, I loved reading biographies and autobiographies – real stories of real people’s lives. My mother’s father, John Flynn, was a master cooper who made barrels for transporting fish on ships sailing from Newfoundland to locations around the world. He was a craftsman and was often asked to travel across Newfoundland to teach coopering to those who were learning the trade. During her childhood, my mother helped him every morning before school to fit the barrel headings, and more. In her 70s, she was interviewed by researchers from Memorial University’s Folklore Department about her recollections of this lost craft. Her memories were vivid and detailed and were recorded by these researchers. Grandfather John was also a musician and an exceptional athlete. My mother’s family all played musical instruments (violin, accordion, piano, flute) and they gathered together every Sunday afternoon to

58  Part I – The Context

play familiar songs – Irish ballads, songs from the movies, and hymns. John was a strong swimmer in a time when most Newfoundlanders didn’t know how to swim. The Island waters, both salt and fresh, were generally very cold and not conducive to swimming. John was a rower as well and had rowed for winning teams in St John’s Regatta, the oldest sporting event in North America, during the early part of the 1900s. One of the family stories about the annual Regatta was of a fleet of rowing shells that had turned the buoys at the top of Quidi Vidi Lake. As they headed for the finish line, one of them tipped over, tossing all the rowers into the cold, murky waters. My grandfather was rushed to the site and dove into the waters to rescue the men. While he couldn’t see them, he could see their hair floating upwards in the water. He pulled each one to the surface and not one man drowned. John’s wife, Johanna, my mother’s mother, was a petite, quiet, spiritual woman. She was considered the neighbourhood nurse, and though not trained as a nurse, she accompanied the local doctor on his visits with the sick during epidemics or illnesses. My grandmother had no fear of disease, so folks said; she believed that if you dwelled on illness you would bring it to yourself. She never caught one of the contagious illnesses, nor did any of her children. She was known as the neighbour who visited the sick, the elderly, and the widows in her community and who brought them food in baskets or pots that she hid beneath her apron. Her and my mother’s ethic of care was to help when and where we could. As she often said, and in fact we put this saying on cards made to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, “Do it with love, or don’t do it at all.” Loretta, my mother, was the youngest daughter of John and Johanna Flynn. She grew up playing the piano, singing at family gatherings, dancing at school plays, and swimming a mile across Long Pond with her father during the fine days in summer. She often talked about her childhood, about hooking rugs every day after school for her mother, and about teaching herself to dance by memorizing the steps from the Saturday movies. One of the things Mom would often say is that Newfoundlanders had suffered from two world wars and two depressions. During the Depression years, families had very little to live on and there were few jobs to go around, and during the wars, most of the men were at the front or at sea, while the women and children survived the best way they could at home. In the First World War, this small Island with its limited population sent 500 men to war and most did not

The Researchers’ Stories  59

return. Island people were devastated at the loss of almost a whole generation of their sons, husbands, and brothers. To this day, it is a source of both deep pride and deep sorrow on the Island. Out of respect, the first university built for the Island, Memorial University, was named in honour of these men, and for Newfoundlanders, November the 11th is one of the most important days of the year. Mom used to say that neighbours shared whatever they had with each other, so that everyone could get through the difficult times. If one family was fortunate enough to get a sack of potatoes or turnips, the elderly and widows were cared for first, and what was left was then shared among the rest. My mother knit for the neighbours and they, in turn, did things in kind for her family. “People came before things,” she always said. My parents first met at a basket party (a picnic) at Long Pond. Each had come with someone else, but they went home together, and developed a friendship that lasted a lifetime thereafter. They built their first home with their own hands on the edge of the city, in what was a farming area with many wild fields and old country homes nearby. My older brothers talked about the few houses that were at the end of the street, the Williams’ farm across the street, and cutting through the fields behind the farm to get to school. While the neighbourhood filled in with homes and families during my childhood, growing up seemed like truly rural life in so many, many ways. My brothers and I played hide-and-seek and heist-yourselves-and-run in the nearby fields, we picked wild berries as we played, and we swam in Rennie’s River where Rennie’s Flour Mill once stood. We climbed trees, made treehouses, covered ourselves with the dye of beets from the vegetable gardens in the area, and imagined secret magical worlds underneath the large boulders we sat on in the fields. We walked a mile to and from school twice a day, and knew the shortcuts through the fields. My parents loved the country and spent as much time as possible taking us to their favourite locations to swim, to picnic, and to fish. Our home was also where family gatherings took place. Right up to her death at 97, Mom was a sociable person who loved a crowd around her as often as possible – especially her family. She loved parties, she loved playing the piano, and she loved having sing-alongs. Most of all, she loved people, and she taught us that we needed to be gentle with each other, as life is hard for some. Our Irish heritage was also evident not just in the kitchen parties that Mom so much enjoyed in the evenings but during the daytime as

60  Part I – The Context

well, at school, under the Irish nuns who brought their music, myths, language, culture, and superstitions with them. I hadn’t realized how strong this heritage was until I moved to Ontario to teach nursing and to study voice with a nationally known teacher. After an audition where I was asked to sing the scales, he noted, “You learned voice from Irish teachers, didn’t you?” I asked him, “How did you know?” He replied, “because your minor keys are well developed and your major ones are not.” It amazed me that one’s education – or “curriculum,” as I came to know it later – could show so clearly in one’s vocal sounds. My career began in computer programming, and I was a programmer for several years before switching from working with machines to working with people. While I loved the logical challenges involved in debugging programs so they could work smoothly, I was spending most of my days in a large room, communicating with a wall-to-wall machine. I needed a change. Within a few days, I enrolled in a university nursing program, and while the whole shift was a surprise to me, it was not to those who knew me. Their response was that I should have been doing it all along. After graduation and working for a while in paediatric ICUs, ERs, and other units, I decided to follow my father’s advice – which was to travel and to learn who I was beyond my own borders. I was offered a position in a small Ontario farming community where families were of Dutch and Irish descent. Upon my arrival before the Labour Day weekend and the start of my job the following Tuesday, I responded to ads in the local papers for auditions – an amateur Broadway musical, the Sweet Adelines Chorus, and the local church choir. I auditioned for all and was accepted for all – for a lead role in The Boyfriend, and for soprano in both the Sweet Adelines Chorus and the church choir. After the service on Sunday, the organist invited me to have Sunday dinner with her family on their farm near the city. I felt like I had come home. There was singing, dancing, and storytelling around the kitchen table, and a sense of community similar to the one I had grown up with in Newfoundland. I spent many happy years there, working, singing in musicals and choirs, and attending plays at the Stratford Festival. I biked around the countryside in summer, and watched the corn swaying like waves on the ocean, smelled the new cut hay, and saw cows give birth to their calves in the field. While my colleagues from other provinces warned me on my first day of nursing school that I would find this a cold town and would not

The Researchers’ Stories  61

be able to make friends, I told them that for me it was just the opposite – I had already been welcomed by several families. My career eventually led to graduate studies and leadership positions in southwestern Ontario. On Saturdays, I loved to drive along unfamiliar country roads and let the villages and farms unfold before me. If there was a village café, then I’d stop to take tea and to talk with the local people. I learned much about the areas and their ways of life that served me well in my role as director of nursing programs. I had come to understand some of the values of rural life, where communities had expectations, for example, that, when one of their own was a nurse or a nursing student, she or he was expected to look after any members of the community who came to the hospital for treatments or tests. They were to be their advocates, and were expected to take time from school to support them. And when the harvests came in during the fall, those from local farms were expected to return home for a week or so to help bring in the crops. There seemed to be different curricula at play for students who came to nursing school from urban or rural locations, and these curricula required a different set of responses from educational institutions and educators. However, as nurse educators, we never really addressed these aspects of curriculum formally, though we accommodated for them. We focused primarily on the theoretical and practical nursing curricula. Yet, this larger, informal, and inherited curriculum had a deeper and more compelling impact on students than the formal one did. As an educator, I was intrigued by this informal curriculum, or this curriculum from life experiences, for the rest of my career, and I tried to understand the unspoken and established curricula as I saw them operating in both faculty and students. In my graduate work I studied this intuitive or personal curriculum from many perspectives so that I could understand its influence and give it voice in our programs. I was so fascinated by it that I searched my memory for experiences in my nursing practice where I had seen it at work. I kept notes on these examples and tried to do something tangible with them in my Master’s degree. Using quantitative research approaches, however, did not seem to get me where I had hoped in terms of understanding this deeper story of knowledge that both teachers and students brought to the classroom and the clinic. However, when I encountered a research method some years later in my doctoral studies, I knew intuitively that it would lead me to understand this hidden knowledge that dwells within the lives of

62  Part I – The Context

people, of patients, of students. In my doctoral studies I was introduced to a new research method called “narrative inquiry,” which guided me to recognize and give language to the ways in which this curriculum is shaped by metaphors and stories that are embedded both in personal experiences and in cultures as well. Here was a method that was capable of transcending numbers and of reaching into people’s lives for the evidence that could be drawn on to build meaningful and practical programs of study for people of whatever background or knowledge base. While completing my doctoral studies, I met Bill Randall in Professor Michael Connelly’s course on narrative in education. We lost track of one another for a few years, but reconnected when I moved to Fredericton to work at the University of New Brunswick. Together we co-organized the first (2002) and second (2004) international and interdisciplinary conferences called “Narrative Matters.” Both were successful events, and participants said that it was great to have narrativists gathering together to talk about their use of narrative approaches in either their research or their practice. The conference continues and has moved to national and international sites. It was while planning for the first conference that Rosemary and I first met, and since she and Bill had already been collaborating on issues related to rural helping in general, and in New Brunswick in particular, they invited me to join them. Through working with them on this project, I have developed a yearning to travel around the province all the more and experience in ever-greater depth the richness of its rural life.

PART II The Stories

This page intentionally left blank

4  Tales from the Front: An Introduction

Our purpose in this book is to honour the themes our participants identified in the interviews we did with them. But the intertwining nature of these themes calls for a special mode of presentation, not one that sets forth our “findings” in terms of discrete topics that are discussed one at a time in linear manner (though we do a bit of that under “Recurring Themes” in Part III). Instead, given the range of fields our participants represent, communities they serve, issues they face, and stages they are at in their respective careers, what is needed is a mode of presentation that reflects the diversity of experiences they’ve described, the different contexts in which we interviewed them, and the variety of voices in which they spoke. And that is, in fact, the point: they spoke to us much less in abstract principles than they did in concrete stories: stories from their practice, stories of the communities and people they work with, stories of how they got into such work in the first place – in many cases, stories they hadn’t had the chance before to piece together. So, after much discussion, we decided that the fairest and, in a sense, most realistic way to communicate both the complexity and the feel of rural helping was, once more, a narrative one. In what follows, we move still further into the realm of story, then, by offering glimpses into the lives and worlds of rural helpers as they think about their work in the rambling, stream-of-consciousness style that our participants themselves employed when responding to our questions. In the tradition of fictionalized autoethnographic writing pioneered by scholars such as Carolyn Ellis (2004), these vignettes – these “likely stories,” if you will; these “tales from the front” – were inspired by the individuals with whom we actually chatted, or are composites thereof, and reflect the range of issues and ideas that they shared with

66  Part II – The Stories

us (Furlong, Clews, & Randall, 2007). And they are based as well on our reflections on the various interviews and focus groups we conducted, not to mention on our own experiences in rural communities and rural helping alike. As we noted already in Part I, there is an obvious reason for choosing such a method to present our findings: an ethical reason. Given the comparatively small population of New Brunswick as a whole, and certainly of any given network of helpers within it (e.g., social workers, teachers), it has been critical for us to protect the anonymity of our participants. Apart from centres such as Fredericton, Saint John, Moncton, and Miramichi, whose names we have retained, this has included using pseudonyms to conceal the identity of the communities our participants mentioned. Another reason for presenting our findings in storied form is that, although we have each had experience in rural helping (see Part I) and have drawn upon that experience in imagining ourselves into other helpers’ worlds, these experiences have been restricted both to our particular professions and to the particular communities in which we have worked. The challenge for us, then, has been to convey a sense of the unique issues that are faced by helpers in fields different from our own, and in communities – specifically, New Brunswick communities – that are hardly carbon copies of the ones with which we ourselves are familiar. The point is this: we’re not claiming that these vignettes have captured all the themes that our interviewees touched upon, let alone all aspects of rural helpers’ lives in general and all the issues they encounter in their work: all of the issues faced by rural teachers, for example, or by rural ministers, rural nurses, and so on (although, as we found repeatedly, many of these issues transcend professional boundaries.) But by taking this approach, we have been able to step back from the countless anecdotes and insights our participants have shared with us and to place the emphasis less on information and more on empathy. Indeed, if we’ve learned anything from this research it is that empathy – the capacity to use our narrative imagination and enter compassionately into another person’s work, or world, or story – is central both to helping in general and to rural helping in particular. Our hope is that these vignettes will serve as teaching tales from which readers will take such wisdom as they may require for their respective journeys into the realities of rural helping. The tradition that we’ve had in mind by writing in this mode is that of the tales told by Elders in First Nations cultures, less to instruct their listeners in direct, didactic ways

Tales from the Front  67

than to invite them to a deeper understanding of their situation. In fact, this has been the genius of stories since the beginning: their ability to teach us indirectly and organically, as it were, by dealing with several themes at once, thereby taking us inside the complexity of a given issue or experience – in this case, that of rural helping – in ways more academic prose is less equipped to do.

5 Rural Policing as Real Policing: An Officer’s Tale

To be honest, I knew very little about rural communities before being posted to this detachment. I grew up in a well-heeled suburb of Toronto. Apart from vacations at the cottage my parents rented every summer, “rural,” to me, meant “dull and boring.” It’s also what our suburb used to be, before the local farmers sold off their land for so-called development – a smart decision on their part, I thought at the time. Why put up with a smelly barnyard, with all those animals you’ve got to take care of and crops you’ve got to tend when, instead, you can have clean streets and sidewalks, restaurants and malls, and can hop on a subway and be in the city in minutes? I really like police work, but I’m not quite sure why I wanted to go into it in the first place. I think that, when I was little, I must have seen some movie about the Royal Canadian Mounted Police riding across the prairies in their red serge uniforms and getting their man. It all seemed so exotic and heroic, and – as an added bonus – was completely different from the career plans everyone around me had. Both of my parents had their PhDs and high-profile professions, so they were pretty disappointed when I announced that this was what I wanted for my life’s work. Looking back, I was probably staging some sort of teenage rebellion against the comfortable life my family was living but which, honestly, I found rather stifling. So, my “decision” was maybe more a reaction against all of that than a genuine choice I made on my own. After a couple of years at university, taking courses in criminology and psychology, I was accepted to do my basic training at the RCMP “Depot” on the outskirts of Regina, Saskatchewan. Talk about “rural” – all that sky and open space! Where I got posted after graduation, though, and where I’ve been the five years since, has felt more rural

An Officer’s Tale  69

still. (That’s been police policy, of course: to send rookies to communities they’re unfamiliar with so they’ll be “unbiased” when dealing with local people’s problems.) So, given my suburban background, it’s been quite a learning curve, to say the least – with lots of surprises along the way. One of the biggest has been how different rural people are from one another. You simply can’t paint all “rural people” with the same brush; you can’t stereotype them. Each one is a unique individual with a unique take on the world. In the same way, each community is different from the ones around it. Certainly, the four villages covered by our detachment, spread out along 100 kilometres of highway from Miramichi City to the Acadian Peninsula, are distinct from one another in terms of their history, their culture, their whole feel. The most northeasterly of the four, Thomaston, is an anglophone community, settled originally by United Empire Loyalists. Though some of its people make their living by fishing, its economy is based mostly on small-scale forestry and farming. It’s really just a wide spot on the road, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it place with a scattering of houses, two or three churches, a post office, and a convenience store: a sleepy sort of settlement with quiet, law-abiding folk – or at least, that’s how it appears. Ten miles southwest of it is Nadeauville, a francophone community four times its size, with houses much closer to each other, as if everyone were more sociable somehow. A Roman Catholic church dominates the town, with the rectory beside it – both, massive stone structures that would cost millions to rebuild today. Strung out along the street on either side are various small businesses and stores, a couple of fried chicken restaurants, the detachment office itself, and a Tim Horton’s coffee shop. What a busy spot that is! It’s the place to be at coffee time, for sure, if you want to plug into the local grapevine and catch what’s happening around the town. The main industry of Nadeauville is fishing – especially lobster, crab, and scallops. Even though stocks have declined dramatically in the Gulf of St Lawrence, lots of locals have done quite well, and built some beautiful homes. In fact, all of the houses – even the smallest ones – seem well looked-after, with a style that, overall, is different from those in Thomaston: more colourful and up-to-date. I’d even say that, compared with the average suburb, houses in small communities are more unique in design. Each house stands out. Sometimes, I’ll be driving down a road I’ve driven down umpteen times before and suddenly I’ll

70  Part II – The Stories

notice this particular house as if for the first time, and I’ll see how different it is from the ones on either side of it. Nadeauville wasn’t always this prosperous, certainly before the Equal Opportunity initiatives under Louis Robichaud, New Brunswick’s first francophone premier. For years prior, the French had faced great poverty and unemployment. The status quo has changed significantly in the past two decades alone! Everyone is so proud of their Acadian heritage. Almost every house is flying the Acadian flag. You can sense this deep pride, especially in the summer when they devote three whole days to music and dancing and honouring those who were part of the Expulsion of the Acadians in the 1700s: a horrible period of upheaval that, I would say, still lives on in their memory as a community. A sense of history, and of the arts and culture in general, is a major part of people’s lives here. Granted, each of the other three communities has its special days as well, but these people really get into it! And Robichaud himself is still very much revered. The fact that Robichaud is my own last name and that I can speak un petit peu de français (even if I was brought up in an all-English-speaking home) may give me some added credibility. The next village, 20 kilometres further down the road, heading to Miramichi, is a First Nations community called Great Cove, so the kinds of differences I’m referring to are even more pronounced. I’ll come back to them in a bit. Compared with the other three, the fourth community, Riverbank, seemingly has less of a sense of its own identity. Like Thomaston, it’s basically English, but in the past two decades in particular, it’s become more of a bedroom community for Miramichi – a sort of rural suburb, you could say, with some beautiful mansions along the edge of the river. There’s a mix of families. Besides the English-speaking ones, many of whom aren’t from the area originally, there are a few French ones as well, plus a few from various countries in Europe initially and even one or two from Asia. Some of these are owned by doctors who work at the hospital, but a lot of the people who live here work in management at the paper mill in Miramichi – or rather used to work. As of last year, the plant has been closed, which is another whole story. The entire area has been affected. People are leaving to find work somewhere else, usually out West; young people especially, since there are just fewer opportunities for them all around. It’s like there’s this huge cloud of despair hanging over the region. We certainly feel its effects in our work. In the

An Officer’s Tale  71

past year alone, drunk driving cases have gone up 25% and domestic violence as much as 40%. I hate to tell you the suicide rate! People who work in mental health and addictions tell me they’re being swamped with referrals for help. It’s amazing how one industry can impact so many lives. In any case ... my point is that, overall, Riverbank doesn’t have nearly the same sense of community – of common history – as the other three places. So, that’s an overview of the communities we’re responsible for, but what is it I actually do on a daily basis? The usual police work is mostly what you’d expect in a small detachment – nothing all that exciting most of the time, nothing like on C.S.I. or the police shows you see on TV. That said, back in the 1980s there was this serial killer on the loose that, for weeks, kept everyone on pins and needles (Richards, 2009). From what I’ve heard, it was pretty awful. One of the victims was this priest from Miramichi who everybody knew and loved. So the locals were terrified. They kept their doors locked (which usually they never do) and stayed inside with the blinds drawn down. The whole nightmare went on for weeks, and people talk about it to this day. It was certainly a tense time for us in the police force; though, once we got our man, our status really shot up in people’s eyes. Sadly, the same sort of thing could happen again at any time – the recent killings of fellow officers down in Moncton being a case in point. You never know … Typically, however, our time is taken up with fairly mundane matters: handing out speeding tickets, investigating break-ins at people’s cottages, breaking up fights at the Legion on Saturday night, intervening in domestic disputes, and of course doing reams of paperwork – oh, and monitoring the narcotics trade. Drugs are big around this region, and with the economy suffering because of the mill closing and other businesses folding as a result, the problems are sure to get worse, along with alcoholism, gambling, and so forth. And every so often there are some tense disputes over fishing rights between two of the communities in particular: Great Cove and Nadeauville. Shots get fired across bows and lobster traps get trashed, that sort of thing. Two years ago, they had to bring in officers from outside the area to help us control the situation, until the bureaucrats from Indian Affairs and Fisheries finally got things sorted out. Though most of the time people in the two communities get along okay, long-standing feuds can flare up fast – something that at first I found hard to understand, given my urban background, where you’ve got people from all different cultures and

72  Part II – The Stories

races living more or less in harmony – or so it can seem on the surface. Here, though, whenever trouble of this kind is brewing, the air gets thick pretty quickly with prejudice and anger. That gives you some sense of the what of my job, but regarding the how, I see a few things as critical in a setting like this. The core of policing in a small community, I’m convinced, is listening. I’m not talking about listening in a one-on-one sense, as in “counselling,” since that’s not what I’m trained in. Frankly, when I talk with my social worker friends, my hat goes off to them, for their patience in trying to get inside of people’s heads and sort out their problems. I mean listening in a broader sense, because the “helping” we do as a police officers is different from what, say, social workers, pastors, or teachers do. (It’s such a big word, “helping,” isn’t it? Each of us helps in different ways.) My way of helping is by representing the law. A democratic society depends on the rule of law and somebody has to see that it’s enforced. Let me talk first about my work with Great Cove. Basically, it’s a “reserve.” The people who live on it were uprooted from where they were before and plunked down there some 50 years ago because, administratively, it was convenient for the government: the federal government – my employer. So, really, they have every right to distrust the very sight of my co-workers and me. When you drive through their community in the squad car, you’re in many ways the enemy: the enforcer of the Indian Act. If I were in their shoes, I’d feel much the same! And from talking to other officers who are Native themselves, being Native isn’t necessarily an asset. In fact, it can work against you; certainly if you were brought up in the same community, like a few of those I went through basic training with. Being posted to a similar community can be okay because you have a kind of inside track into how people think and act, their culture and overall view of the world, but certainly not the same community, because then it’s as if – in the eyes of people you’ve known your whole life – you’re basically a traitor. You’ve sold out. Like it or not, that’s where you’re starting from, and you just have to accept it. You’re never going to be buddy-buddy with the members of the community and it’s unrealistic to expect that you can. You’re always going to be an outsider. In a sense, of course, the same holds true in any of the four communities. I mean, your every move is being watched, especially when you first arrive. And if you slip up, they’ll find a way to let you know. As one of the senior officers told me once, “There’s no place for you to hide around here.” The uniform itself makes sure of that! Of course,

An Officer’s Tale  73

“privacy” can be a challenge for anyone in these settings, even for the locals themselves – especially if they’ve lived here all their lives. So, the lack of privacy (at least privacy of the kind you can take for granted in a city) is not just an issue for those of us parachuted in from the outside. It really is true that “everyone knows everyone’s business” – or they make it a point to if they don’t. Like it or not, everyone’s dirty laundry is out there for everyone else to see. Still, those of us in the force experience the privacy issue in spades. The same officer also advised me to get totally away from here on my days off, if I wanted to go partying, or to date someone. On that point, I heard through the grapevine at the coffee shop the other day that one or two of the women in Nadeauville have had their eyes on me. Kind of flattering, I guess, but I get the clear message from my superiors that, under no circumstances, am I to “go there.” If you’re a single social worker or teacher or doctor, or minister even (not a priest!), and you marry a local person, I suppose it could work out, even if you stay on. But for police men and women (whose divorce rates are depressing at the best of times), the stakes are extra high, since anyone you take up with is bound to be related to half the people in the region. If you stop someone for speeding, for example, they’re apt to give you a hard time: “Hey, I’m your cousin in-law now. You can’t give me a ticket!” But I’m digressing. What I want to say is that all of these things – the mistrust, the need to be impartial, the impossibility of having anonymity – are just part of the job. You have to accept them and work around them. And it is not only police folk who have to contend with them. Social workers doing child protection work experience them, too, and certainly the privacy problem is true for my clergy friends as well. Every helping profession has its built-in constraints. Ours are just different – not worse necessarily, just different. You can still work within them and accomplish some really great things. Again, it boils down to listening. By listening, I mean listening between the lines: listening for what people don’t tell you, for what they hold back, for the information they keep to themselves. Remember that in their eyes you’re a policeman first and last. They don’t tend to see you, the person. They also know that if they tell you something about someone else, they could get into trouble with that same someone else, or even with their own families. Word could get back that they’re “snitching” to the police – not the kind of reputation a person wants to get. In a rural community, you see examples every day of how everybody’s life is linked to others’ and

74  Part II – The Stories

how their stories are tied together. The point is: you can usually assume that people are not going to tell you “the whole story” – the “whole truth and nothing but.” Listening between the lines has a more positive – even compassionate – side, though: listening for the difficulties people are facing in their lives, the troubles they’re experiencing in their marriages or with their children. You can pick up hints of these in a glance here or a gesture there. Not that you can do anything, or need to do anything (unless there’s a situation that gets reported) but it’s about keeping your antennae up. Perhaps the next week when you’re talking with one of the social workers in town or hanging out a few extra minutes at Tim Horton’s, you might pick up a few more vibes. You never know. Whatever you pick up could come in handy for whenever a crisis arises and you’re called in to handle it. You won’t be broadsided, in other words. And more important, you might be able to do some preventative police work, nipping problems in the bud. I mean, basically you’re bumping into the people you deal with all the time, in so many situations – at the coffee shop, the hardware store, a funeral, and not just crisis situations – and you have the chance to get to know the feel of their lives in a way you can’t so much when your beat is downtown Montreal. By listening, I also mean listening to all sides of the story. This is critical, and it’s just common sense. By really trying to practise it, though, I think I’ve earned a certain respect in some people’s eyes. I recall one day when I was responding to a domestic dispute – nothing involving firearms, thank goodness, but still an argument that could have escalated, for sure. (Those situations can get scary very fast. I don’t know how many times since I’ve come here that the flag in front of our detachment has been at half-mast because, somewhere in Canada, an officer just like me was killed in the line of duty, responding to this very sort of call.) Anyway, I knocked on the front door and the husband opened it. His wife was standing right behind him, but he immediately went into another room. I thought to myself, “This could be tricky.” Since she was the one who placed the call to 911, I asked her first what was going on. After she told me, however, I went into the room where he was, and asked him to tell me his side of the story. I could see that he was taken aback, since he probably expected me to take her side alone. Maybe it’s not a good example, but the point is there are always two sides to every story, if not more. It’s this idea that there are many sides to any story that I keep in mind all the time. I try not to slip into black-and-white thinking, tempting as

An Officer’s Tale  75

it is to do so. Even if in court, a decision must ultimately be made that so-and-so is – or is not – guilty, that doesn’t negate the fact that any particular misdemeanour has several factors feeding it. They say it takes a whole village to bring up a child; well, by the same token, the whole village has a share of the responsibility when that child goes astray, falls in with the wrong crowd, becomes an adult, and starts getting into major mischief. What this leads me to is another aspect of listening, one that’s harder to put into words, and it’s only been getting clear to me in the last year or so. It’s listening for the larger factors that affect the situations of individuals and families. Maybe this is an example of the courses I took in criminology coming through, but you’ve always got to keep the larger context – the bigger picture – in your sights. And you can do this in a lot of ways. Looking back to four years ago when I first arrived, all ready to round up the bad guys and rid the world of evil, I ended up doing what I see now was a really important thing. I listened as closely as I could to what the senior officers of our detachment were telling me about these four communities. I listened to their stories. (Of course, each of the officers had his own unique version – sometimes quite a cynical one – of each of the four communities as a whole, particularly of its “criminal element.” Certainly, the story of the serial killer wasn’t long in surfacing.) One of the stories they told me, though, illustrates especially well, I think, the need to keep the bigger picture in mind. Back before the Liquour Control Board was set up and there came to be a liquor outlet in practically every village, there used to be this bootlegger who lived on a back road out behind Thomaston. Everyone knew he was there and everyone knew what he was up to. He used to joke that his motto was “We Deliver,” because he would make house calls! But despite the illegality of what he was doing, the word from the officer in charge was “Let him be.” Why? Because the bootlegger was providing a valuable service to the whole area by keeping drunk drivers off the roads! We had all the evidence we needed to put him away, but no one laid a hand on him. They just let him do his thing, since the security of the community was the greater good. It’s said that hindsight is 20/20, and the more you learn about a community, the more your insights into it are bound to change – or ought to. I think this is key: to keep in mind that the community is always changing. From year to year, even week to week, it’s never the same. And as soon as you settle into an opinion as to what it’s all about, you’re going to miss things – new events, new developments, big or little, that are

76  Part II – The Stories

certain to affect life within it. You’ve got to keep open, because a community – any community, with all its people and issues – is an evolving thing. It has a story of its own, and like the stories of the people living in it, that story is always unfolding. Looking on from the outside, or from the perspective of a fast-paced city world, you might not think so. You might think it’s just a sleepy town where nothing ever happens and nothing ever changes, but think again. A good part of that change and evolution has to do with policies decided on not here but somewhere else: in Fredericton, with the provincial Department of Health in the case of hospital closures, or Ottawa, with the Department of Indian Affairs in the case of First Nations communities, or the Department of Fisheries in the case of fishing quotas and other regulations; or in the boardrooms of the corporations that can fix the fate of the fishing industry or the forestry industry at the stroke of a pen, and an entire area loses its economic base. As a police officer, I can’t do much about these larger factors maybe, but having a sense of them helps me put people’s behaviour into context, and helps me understand some of the deeper issues on their minds: fear for their future, or concern about what sort of world their children will have to live in, whether they’ll have to move away to make a living, and so on. And, you know, that can breed a sense of “Why bother?” – of fatalism almost. Apart from the community spirit that Nadeauville exudes, with its strong sense of francophone identity, I’d have to say, again, that there’s a kind of chronic depression in the region as a whole. In more ways than one, it’s a depressed area. In my spare time, I like reading novels about rural life because I think they can flesh out your sense of what people think beneath the surface. I’d taken this course on Canadian literature at university, where I had to read stories by writers like Alice Munro and Margaret Laurence. But the New Brunswick author David Adams Richards, who grew up not far from here, in fact, has really put his finger, I think, on the quiet desperation that’s just below the surface of many people’s lives, and not just the lives of those who are really, really poor, which many of them are. You just have to get onto some of the side roads and see the folks who are living in tarpaper shacks! It’s pretty sobering. All things considered, I wish from the start that I’d listened to a wider range of people for a bigger sense of what these communities are about. Again, the average citizen – the one you cite tomorrow for driving under the influence of alcohol – is not necessarily who I mean

An Officer’s Tale  77

here. I mean my colleagues on the force itself, especially the older ones. Even if some of them are burned out with police work and can be more than a little jaundiced, they have a wisdom that I still benefit from as much now as I did when I arrived. (If I’m a little wiser after 5 years then, presumably, they are too!) But I also mean the social workers or the public health nurses who come down from Bathurst once or twice a week to do what they do in their work. I’ve learned a lot from talking with them about the history of some of the families I’ve interacted with in my work – not the details, necessarily, but a broad-brush picture of the networks that make up the community. I’ve got to know the principal of the high school, too, and she’s been a fantastic source of information of this kind, especially given my passion for “community policing.” She’s invited me to speak to some of the classes about what our work involves. As often as I can, I take those opportunities, not just to do some PR for the force, but to do some public education – about drugs and alcohol and so on – and I think the kids benefit from seeing me and having me on their own turf, seeing me as a member of their community. Which, basically, I am, since I live in the barracks at the back of the local detachment, right on the main street of Nadeauville. Yes, I really believe in the concept of community policing, and unlike some of my colleagues, I’ve tried to practise it. As I say, you’re never going to be buddies with the majority of individuals in the communities you’re responsible for. You’re always going to be seen as an outsider. The uniform ensures that! But you can still play a positive part in the life of the community. In Great Cove, for instance, I’ve made a point to stop by the Community Centre and become informed about the history of the place, the various resources they have on hand, the different programs they’ve had, or have, and so on. One program they used to have 10 years ago was a Breakfast Program for the kids. A greater number of them than you’d think head off to school in the morning without any breakfast at all. No wonder they have trouble concentrating or staying awake and that they soon fall behind. Not just in Great Cove alone, I’m afraid, but all through the region. It’s not surprising that the dropout rate is as much as 25% higher in all four communities than anywhere else in the province. I met some resistance from my colleagues at the start, but I managed to persuade others in the detachment to help me – along with the staff and director of the Centre itself – to restart that program. Not a huge commitment, only one morning a week for each of us on a rotating basis, and very low profile, no uniforms or anything. But word got

78  Part II – The Stories

around quite quickly that we were doing it – not out of charity but out of a desire to connect better with the people of the area – and it really has improved our relationship with the community. We’ve had more people coming up to us and thanking us. Getting involved in this way is so important, and the teachers tell us it’s making a difference. That’s not to say that a lot of the mistrust isn’t still there, because it is, but we’re not viewed quite so much as the Enemy. In general, though, I’ve tried to get involved. I still get away whenever I’ve got a few days off, but even so, some of the other officers and myself have put together a curling team and we play in local bonspiels. It’s been great fun, and the people in the community really seem to enjoy it. Pardon the pun, but it’s really helped to break the ice. To get back to listening: Every community, I’m learning, has two or three people in it (often they’re seniors – a retired teacher, a former mayor, you name it) who’ve been around long enough that they have a perspective on the community as a whole: past, present, and future. If you can identify them, and if they’ll talk with you – a big “if,” to be sure, since being a police officer isn’t always an advantage: you have people’s respect but not necessarily their confidence – then you can fill in many of the gaps in your understanding of the community and get a deeper sense of why it is the way it is. So, it’s all about listening and communicating and building connections with as many as you can, in as many different corners. Connecting with other professionals is important, for sure, and in a rural setting – where you don’t have the same access to programs and resources that you have in a large city, and where you have to make do with what’s in front of you, and inside of you – these colleagues are in many ways your most important resources. When I started out here I had little knowledge of what rural communities are really like; how different they can be from one another, and how complicated. I had little idea of what makes the people living in them “tick.” So, if I’ve learned anything in these past few years, it’s that rural policing is more intriguing than I would have thought. I wish the cadets at Depot could be placed in this sort of context for a few weeks during their training. It would open their eyes, I think, to what police work really feels like, and not from the pages of a rulebook or textbook. I love this kind of work, I really do, because you’re not just dealing with people one-on-one, with isolated “bad people” or individual crimes – like the officers who got posted to big cities tell me they do. You’re dealing with a whole network of personalities and issues,

An Officer’s Tale  79

families and histories – a whole inter-related system with a life of its own. It brings out the innovative side of you, by necessity, because, in many ways, you do have to “make do” with whatever resources are at hand. I’d almost say that rural police work is real police work because, basically, you’re dealing not with “cases” but with “faces,” with real people caught up in real life, and it’s all there in front of you. Maybe someday I’ll grow out of this way of thinking and become cynical like a number of my colleagues, but I truly think you have a chance to make a difference in people’s lives. So, if you need challenge in your work – I know I do, otherwise I’d get bored – then “rural” is the place to be.

6  Born and Bred: A Teacher’s Tale

This is a turning point in my career. Tomorrow, I’ll need to give my decision to the powers that be. To be offered the position of vice-principal of Hillsdale Regional School – as a 30-year-old woman – is nothing to sneeze at. It may be the smallest school in the district, with fewer than 300 students from Grades 6 through 12 and only 15 teachers, but the next step, they tell me, could be principal and (who knows?) regional superintendent. What’s more, District Office is practically begging me to take the position: the very sort of opportunity I’ve always thought I wanted. I’m one of few on staff who actually grew up in Hillsdale, which means I know it like the back of my hand. And I know its people, too, plus more of the skeletons in their closets than you can imagine. For as long as I remember, this place – population 750 (at the most!) – has basically been my life. (“What life?,” John says (he’s my husband); “you have no life.”) Until he retired two years ago, my father had been town manager for over 20 years, and my mother – a teacher at HRS herself at one time – has headed up practically every organization you can think of, from the Women’s Institute to the Catholic Women’s League. Like me, both of them are Hillsdale-born and -bred. In reality, the only time I ever left was when I went to university. Even then, it was only for six years: first to Mount Allison University, an hour away, for my BA and BEd, and then another year at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where I did my Master’s, and where John and I first met. Weather permitting, I came home every weekend I possibly could. “Home,” of course, didn’t always mean my parents’ house; it often meant our family cottage three miles down the river, towards the Bay of Fundy. Life at “the Camp,” as we still call it, was just an extension of

A Teacher’s Tale  81

life in town, because – unlike lots of other folks who leave where they grew up, never to return – I’ve kept close to almost all the kids I graduated with, and the Camp was where we congregated every chance we could. I can honestly say that, over the years, we’ve gotten closer than ever, even if, in other ways, our paths have definitely diverged. Most of them never left Hillsdale at all, or never wanted to. And most of them now have spouses (usually their high school sweethearts), plus two or three children – kids I’ll soon have as students in my classes! As for me, I was Carnival Queen, valedictorian, and the graduate voted “most likely to succeed” – which, unofficially, meant the one most likely to get out of here as soon as she could! But that wasn’t me. I loved HRS, and I loved – I still love – Hillsdale: not just its people, but the beauty around it, the hills, the fields, the river, the bay. Then, there are all the outdoors kinds of things that you can do here: skidooing in the winter; four-wheeling in the fall; fishing, boating, swimming in the summer. But Hillsdale’s appeal is more than just the things there are to do in it. There’s something almost spiritual about the place. Even though I loved research and even though I was awarded a scholarship to do a PhD, I turned it down the moment I learned that a job had become available back here. So, having the chance to be a VP in the school and town I love so much is, to me, a dream come true. It’s also a chance to make a real difference, to give something back to the place that’s given so much to me. As for John, he really, really wants to start a family. And I suppose, in a way, that I do, too. But, so far, I haven’t seemed to find the time to fit one into my plan. And if I take this job, the situation isn’t likely to improve. I think that part of our problem is that he’s not from Hillsdale himself originally. He’s a wonderful man, and he’ll make a wonderful dad, but he just doesn’t think that Hillsdale is the sort of place to bring up children. It’s “too parochial,” he’s always saying, and with not enough opportunities. On the one hand, I can understand what he means, because – technically, yes – there isn’t as much here as there could be by way of sports or entertainment or museums, and so on, and way too many “churchy” things for some people’s tastes – church suppers, church bazaars, churchgoing period. All quite stifling, he finds. In fairness, it’s not his fault he feels that way, for he grew up in downtown Halifax so, even if technically he’s “a Maritimer,” he’s never lived in a place as small as this – nor, to him, as incestuous. What’s more, from Monday to Friday (and Saturday and Sunday if I’d let him) he travels into Moncton to the law firm where he works, so he’s never experienced

82  Part II – The Stories

Hillsdale as I experience it. He can’t understand why, instead of living here, we can’t live in some suburb where “someone with your credentials,” he says, could snap up a teaching job just like that! The thing is, John’s roots aren’t here, so the place isn’t in his blood in the way that it’s in mine. And deep down, he probably thinks I’m crazy for not caring much to travel to places like Manhattan or Paris. He just doesn’t get what it is I see in this place, and why I feel I have to do whatever is in my power to help it thrive – and not just survive. I mean, small communities are under so much pressure! It’s as if governments are bent on cutting the ground out from under them, moneywise and resource-wise. John believes it’s just a matter of time before towns like this will die out completely, that this is where things are headed: urbanization. I disagree. I figure that if there’s any chance, by contributing whatever talents I might have, that we can meet that crisis here in Hillsdale and turn the tide from cities, cities, cities, then it’s something I must be part of. It’s my mission. And yet, is being VP the best way to carry it out? My job at present has a number of pluses I’m not that keen to give up. One of them is the rapport I have with my fellow teachers. As soon as I become VP, as much as I might think my situation will be different, I’ll no longer be one of the gang. Lots of principals and vice-principals have told me that, once they left the classroom, it’s like they had this big bull’s-eye painted on their backs – even if, maybe especially if (like me), they’d been part of the community all along. For instance, doing annual evaluations of your fellow teachers’ performance, not a few of whom you once hung out with at the Camp, influences people’s fortunes, to be sure, but you don’t tend to win many friends. Another thing I’ll have to give up is a lot of my direct connection with the students. I can’t tell you how many different courses I’ve had to teach since starting here. “Multicoursing” is not at all uncommon in smaller schools like this, nor is “multigrading,” especially in the lower grades, where you’ve got kids from two or more grades in one room and you’ve got to go back and forth between them. My two main subjects at the high school level, though – my “teachables,” as they say – have been history and English. I love the challenge of making these subjects relevant for the students, many of them the children of my neighbours growing up. Instilling in them an appreciation for good writing and for the power of language, not to mention the past, including the past of Hillsdale itself – these are my passions. To see the lights go on in their eyes is such a thrill! It’s like my students are my children, and I’m nurturing them

A Teacher’s Tale  83

towards a whole new level in their experience of Life, of the World, of themselves, and of Hillsdale – why not? For many of them, to be quite honest, growing up in Hillsdale is no picnic. Ever since the mines shut down back in the 1970s and the railway stopped running through here, plus a few other setbacks, Hillsdale’s economy has been limping along. If it weren’t for Moncton, 50 kilometres away, where many of our people travel every day to work, or the National Park, 30 kilometres south, where lots of Hillsdale folk get hired every spring and summer, it’d be in a sorry state. You don’t have to look far outside of town (and inside it, too) to see some pretty grim examples of honest-to-goodness poverty, with all the problems that go with it: domestic violence, alcoholism, illiteracy, drug abuse, even incest (in that sense, John has a point). You name it, we’ve got it. And with family break-ups more and more the norm, the local population has become far more transient than it was when I was young, with people now living in the area whose background no one seems to know. Back then, when there were, basically, eight or nine families that had been here since the county was first settled (my own being one of them), everyone was related to everyone else in one way or other. Those families are still here, of course, but they don’t dominate like they used to. These days, we have kids who have come to HRS in the middle of the term, having moved more than twice already through the year – most of them, kids with single parents from somewhere else, usually the city, in need of affordable accommodations (often on back roads in substandard housing) and with ex-partners constantly on their case about custody issues, and so on. Of the 38 schools in our district, HRS has the highest rate of student “mobility,” not to mention the second-lowest scores in the province for basic literacy and numeracy. All of this is just to say that, for several reasons, teachers nowadays, even in “happy, little rural communities,” no longer receive the automatic respect – as The Teacher – that they used to get when my mother taught. And even though my family has always been well regarded in the region, being a teacher myself in no way entitles me to increased respect. In fact, lots of times I think it works against me, but that’s another story. In terms of my two main subjects, English and history, I try and combine them in my teaching whenever I can. For example, I get students to read novels or short stories about small communities written by different authors in different contexts at different stages in history: John Steinbeck’s stories about life in the Salinas Valley of California or Sinclair Lewis’ novel Main Street about small town America; the list goes

84  Part II – The Stories

on. So many great writers have had rural roots and keep returning to them in their writing to make sense of the mysteries of human nature, as if those mysteries were more “in your face” in a small-town setting. And the ways they do so, I believe, are valuable resources for helping kids make sense of their own experience. But beyond the classroom, I’ve developed a reputation as a go-getter in the school at large, which is partially due to the fact that I haven’t nearly as many headaches to contend with as does the vice-principal or the principal. I also have time to do a number of other things outside the school that extend my role as teacher in important ways and, I like to think, benefit the area as a whole by expanding people’s horizons and help Hillsdale become a better place in which to live. What I mean by this are the sorts of ways you just don’t see from the outside – if you’re a tourist driving through it on your way to the Park, for instance, in which case it probably looks like any other sleepy village, the kind you miss completely if you blink. Yet once you scratch the surface and start getting a sense of what is really going on, you see the place as brimming with possibilities – possibilities that people who’ve lived here all their lives often can’t see at all. But I can see them. The other day in the staff room, I was talking with the Grade 8 science teacher, and it saddened me when I realized how little she appreciates the potential here in HRS. From Fredericton originally, she’s never given Hillsdale a chance, despite the fact that she’s been teaching here for four years. She still goes back to Fredericton every chance she gets, and beyond her duties in the classroom during the week, does the bare minimum of service to the school. Yesterday she was going on about how there are no decent restaurants in the area, and about the small-mindedness of Hillsdale people. “Hicksdale,” she called it, halfjoking. I have real problems with that sort of mindset. She’s a teacher; she should know better. Of course (and I can’t completely fault her for this), she knows that, once she gets the sort of position she’s been shooting for ever since she got here – at some high school in a city, preferably Fredericton – she’ll have only one subject to teach, and so only one set of preparations the night before, not the three or more subjects that many of us are teaching here, and having to prep for every evening. In some cases, they’re subjects we haven’t taken courses in ourselves since we were in high school, so we’ve really got to scramble to keep ahead of the students. Then there are the fewer after-hours activities she’ll be required to supervise or organize, compared with the multitasking

A Teacher’s Tale  85

we’re expected to do here – “juggling” more than teaching, if you like – and with fewer resources all the way around: significantly fewer than in most city schools, for instance, in terms of computers, library resources, sports equipment, musical instruments, biology or chemistry labs. Yet what she doesn’t see is that teaching in a city school can be a bit like working on an assembly line. You’re not a generalist, like you have to be in Hillsdale, but a specialist. You may have more students in total, but you get to relate to them in terms of one subject only. You have much less chance to know them – to know their stories – as full-blown individuals with lives beyond the classroom. And overall, I think, you have less of a sense of being part of a wider community, with teaching itself something you experience not as a “calling” or “vocation,” but – at best – a “profession” and, at worst, just a “job.” Dave Rogers, the present VP and also a good friend, will be moving up to principal, as the current one retires. Originally from Saint John, he’s grown to love Hillsdale almost as much as I do, even if, fundamentally, he still sees it through an outsider’s eyes. But at least he tries. He’s leaning on me hard to take over from him, and I think that could work out well, although you never know. Principals get so loaded up with managing budgets, writing reports, and applying for grants that he might turn completely sour on me. Still, having worked with him already on a variety of projects across the years (the Anti-Bullying Task Group, the Reach for the Top show, the Bussing Committee, to name a few), I think the two of us could work quite well together. What concerns me, though, is how busy I’ve seen him become since taking over as VP five years ago: how many headaches, how much paperwork, and how much administrivia: scheduling courses and classrooms, organizing school assemblies, lining up substitute teachers, conducting staff evaluations, attending meetings of the School Board and the ParentTeachers Association, responding to the District Office or the Department of Education to set up this program or that, fielding complaints from parents, handling discipline issues (schoolyard squabbles, bullying, truancy – the list goes on) – all of them necessary tasks in the running of the organization and the same ones I’ll be responsible for as well. In addition, there’ll be keeping my hand in the classroom by still having to teach one course per term – not a problem in my case, since I love to teach, but with an average of two to three meetings every weekday evening, a 70-hour work week won’t be unusual. So with only two or three thousand dollars of added salary, it’s hardly the money that’s the draw! What, then, is the draw?

86  Part II – The Stories

Despite the added work and added hours (starting a family will clearly not be easy), and despite being on the wrong side of “us and them” as far as staff relations are concerned, and despite not having time to get involved in organizing school concerts, drama productions, and the like (which I have loved to do), it’s the feeling that, all things considered, I’m in a better position to make a difference on a broader scale. To do so, though, I’ll have to figure out how to delegate some of these things to other teachers, or to committees; then I can get on to some of those possibilities I hinted at before, the kind that would help the school become a learning centre for the whole region, not just that building where people send their kids for Reading, Riting, and Rithmetic, but a hub of growth and development for folks of every age. One possibility would be some sort of project with the Faculty of Education at Mount Allison or UNB, where we team up with professors whom I knew when I was going through myself to do some sort of action-research study of __. It could be anything: the impact of rural poverty on school attendance, for starters, or the effects on students from outlying areas of spending two hours a day on the bus: what do we really know about the toll that takes in terms of missing out on extracurricular activities like drama or glee club or sports, or having fewer opportunities for tutorial instruction; the toll on their sense of belonging to the school community, to say nothing of the danger of driving on twisty, hilly roads in winter, or some days not being able to get to school at all, and so missing more school on average than their classmates, and falling further behind? It could be the whole question of how rural schools are not just smaller than urban schools but fundamentally different in so many ways; the question of how rural teaching is really a vocation in itself, with unique challenges – and opportunities – that teachers in city schools would be surprised about if they could walk for a week in the shoes of someone like me. Another possibility would be to round up a select group of teachers and other key people in the community, plus some students, and enter into an arrangement with the Department of Extended Learning or of Rural Studies at Mount Allison, where we use school facilities for adult education workshops or information sessions or full-fledged retreats on all sorts of topics. Another possibility could be explored with the penitentiary, an hour away. Surely there’s a way some of our more mature students – properly briefed and supervised – could get involved in visiting inmates, or maybe offering tutoring in particular subjects. And then there’s the project I’ve been wanting us to get started

A Teacher’s Tale  87

on for a while now. We could be forging stronger ties with the local nursing home, Hillview Manor, by getting some intergenerational activities underway, like the “narrative care” program at this large nursing home in Fredericton (Noonan, 2011), where pairs of students from one of the high schools interview selected residents for the story of their lives. In addition to preparing a book with a person’s story printed in it, they also prepare a 15- to 20-minute DVD that features highlights of that individual’s life, often in her own words, and weaves old photos of her and her family together with some of her favourite music. Every month, the nursing home hosts a Narrative Ceremony where the DVD is shown to as many as 100 people from the nursing home itself (other residents, staff, volunteers), as well as from the school and the community at large. It becomes a real celebration of the person’s life! What a great thing it would be to put a program like that in place in Hillsdale, with the strong sense of community we have here still, and the respect we still have for our elders. Speaking as both an English teacher and a history teacher, what an opportunity it would be for our students’ learning in terms of lots of things: their conversational skills, their computer skills, their self-esteem, their literacy skills, their knowledge of local history, and their appreciation for the full, rich lives of their community’s oldest citizens. I could go on and on, but that’s probably enough. Every time I get talking about what I do and what I – what we – could do, I get so excited. Yes, the challenges of teaching in a school this size, in this kind of community, are huge, but so are the possibilities. It’s the possibilities I like to keep in mind.

7 Places, Programs, and People: A Nurse’s Tale

David and I live in St Andrews-by-the-Sea, a once popular historic tourist site on the Fundy Bay in southwestern New Brunswick. In the past century or more it has declined in prominence, but it will, as before, thrive again. Both David and I work in health care in the region. David is a paramedic with the provincial ambulance service and I work as an extramural nurse for the southwestern region. We met about 10 years ago when I practised at the Fredericton Hospital Emergency Department. David, an accountant, volunteered with his family’s ambulance and firefighter service in McCortney. He had essentially grown up being involved in emergency care since his family had managed the volunteer ambulance and fire service in the area for three generations. Many rural areas of the province had family-run volunteer ambulance services until a few years ago when the provincial government decided on a centralized public-private service. Though educated as an accountant, Dave preferred being an EMT and was hired as a paramedic by the new provincial service full-time. His uncle, though the local school principal and mayor of McCortney, managed the volunteer emergency services along with Dave’s father, also an accountant and local historian. Up until a few years ago, most New Brunswick rural communities had family- or locally run ambulance and firefighter services. A former minister of health and rural physician noted that there were around 57 individual ambulance services in New Brunswick before the centralization took place. These volunteers knew, and were related to, many residents in their areas. So when a patient required emergency care and transport to the nearest hospital with the needed service, they were often transporting a relative or a friend; it was a personal experience. Extramural health care has, in contrast, always been

A Nurse’s Tale  89

a provincially run health care program that was designed and established in the 1980s. Modelled on a successful New Zealand system, it provides acute and ongoing follow-up care to physicianreferred clients in their homes. It was the first of its kind in Canada and remains an exceptional and highly valued program in the province and serves both urban and rural populations. Physiotherapists, occupational therapists, nutritionists, nurses, and other health professionals provide assessments, interventions, and supervision. Centralized services are based in regional hospitals or in rural clinics throughout the province. I cover the Charlotte County area that includes St Margaret’s Harbour and McCortney on the US border and St Andrews, St Gregorys, and Scott’s Harbour on the Fundy Bay, with our base office situated at the Fredericton Hospital. Both Dave and I grew up in this area, knew of each other, but had never really met before doing patient transfers at the Fredericton Hospital ER when I worked as an ER nurse. We dated and were married in the beautiful historic Algonquin Hotel in St Andrews, once a holiday location of the rich and famous from around the world during the heyday of railway travel and transport. I love the history of this area and am a member of the St Andrews Historical Society, so if it would be okay, I’d like to tell you about the history of the area and its people that have shaped who we are and how we live. In New Brunswick, both the Canadian Pacific and the Canadian National railways ran to and from Halifax, Maine, and central Canada. William Van Horne (president of the CPR), Sir John A. Macdonald (Canada’s first prime minister), Winston Churchill (prime minister of Great Britain during the Second World War and from 1951 to 1955), several US presidents (both Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt), and many members of royal families have stayed there. While the Roosevelts had a summer place at nearby Campobello Island, Eleanor Roosevelt was often seen in the St Andrews shops. St Andrews is our home – a small town with a huge history linked to many countries in the world from its beginnings. We grew up learning the history of this place and its peoples. It is in many ways a Phoenix rising from the fires, a place of enigmas, as history shows through the hard times when local industries, like the railways, shut down and new businesses were established that revitalized the town. Though it has a Scottish name, its origins are from an extraordinary Acadian-French history. Just a few years ago, in 2004, the village celebrated the 400th Anniversary of the first French settlement in North America. In 1604, on the shores

90  Part II – The Stories

of Passamaquoddy Bay at the mouth of the St Croix River bordering Canada and the United States, an expedition of five ships arrived, having sailed from France with 120 men – artisans, workmen, soldiers, noblemen, a surgeon, a priest, and a minister to settle the New World. Champlain, the French king’s cartographer, mapped the unusual coastline of la Baie Françoise (the Bay of Fundy) now encircled by Maine, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia. The French settlers wintered on the small island of Ste-Croix, located where three rivers meet, giving it its name because it looked like the arms of a cross. Half of the men died of scurvy that winter. Ice jams in the rivers and severe weather created a shortage of firewood and access to food. Though St Croix Island was never settled again, it was honoured in 1984 as an international historic site. Many of the Acadian families of the Bay of Fundy are direct descendants of the 100 or so families from this early settlement. With the help of Native tribes, mainly the Passamaquoddy Nation in the area, some early Acadian families survived the threatening winters. Thus, the founding families of Canada began their lives here. However, the Acadians were later to be the victims of the British Expulsion in the 1750s and were separated and dispersed throughout the eastern seaboard of the United States. Some families searched for decades to find their loved ones – husbands, children, parents. Even today, descendants from around the world arrive for the summer Acadian festivals on the east coast of New Brunswick to learn and share their ancestors’ stories and songs. Longfellow’s story of Evangeline gives a fictional account of the Great Upheaval and history records that the Wabanaki (People of the First Light or Dawnland) Confederacy of North America’s east coast aligned with them to fight the British. Historical documents also claim that a Portuguese explorer, Diego Homem, visited the Bay of Fundy in 1558 and completed engraved maps that accurately depict the coastline of the bay, which he called the “Rio fondo” (deep river). St Andrews has always had an international history. However, like the ebb and flow of the Fundy tides, some of the highest in the world, its population shifts from being highly populated by international tourists in summer to sparsely inhabited by local residents in winter. The focal point of the town, as in earlier times, is the beautiful Algonquin Hotel, one of the Canadian Pacific’s resort hotels built during the railway boom of the nineteenth century. While the area was settled in the 1600s, the town of St Andrews itself was not established until 200 years later in 1783 by United Empire Loyalists following their escape through Maine from the American

A Nurse’s Tale  91

Revolution. Having received land grants from the British government, some even brought pieces of their homes from Maine and rebuilt them in St Andrews. Some of these structures have survived to this day in the village. Though St Andrews is a Scottish name, it was actually named, so the history goes, by a French missionary who landed on St Andrew’s Day. Passamaquoddy legends speak of a different name – Connosquamcook. Following the Loyalists and Scottish settlers, the Irish migration, known as the Diaspóra na nGael, took place during the early and mid1800s. Irish immigrants were forced into quarantine on nearby islands. A Celtic cross stands at Indian Point in memory of those immigrants who left their homeland due to starvation, faced death and disease on the coffin ships, only to face forced quarantine on islands in the New World that were barren and damp places where food supplies were scarce. If any of these desperate travellers survived, like those who tried to settle on St Croix Island 200 years earlier, it was remarkable or even a miracle. They eked out a living by fishing, farming, and hunting until St Andrews became a popular resort town in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The St Andrews Land Company, so historians say, built Canada’s first resort hotel – the grand castlelike Algonquin Hotel – which opened in 1889, equipped with a golf course and in each room a saltwater spa. As they did then, visitors come today, to this beautiful Tudor mansion with its signature red-tiled roof and Scottish pipers playing on the grounds, for rest and rejuvenation. Purchased by the CPR in 1904, the Algonquin became one of the first in a chain of resort hotels across the country, followed by two more grand hotels later in nearby towns. Work for both men and women in this area, at the time, was plentiful. These hotels were part of what was known as the CPR “Sans the World” transportation system, before the opening of the St Lawrence Seaway to winter transport. The McAdam CPR station was even commemorated by the Canadian government on an official postage stamp. Dave and I live part way between St Andrews and McCortney so we can be close to our families. We both work shifts and both travel a lot due to our jobs. I travel the main highway and some of the back roads in the country to visit extramural patients in their homes. Many of our clients are elderly and have chronic illnesses that require monitoring on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Some have been in the program for years while others may have recently been discharged from hospital for care at home. We have several seniors who have suffered strokes or falls

92  Part II – The Stories

and some who have Alzheimer Disease and live with a spouse who may be dealing with a chronic illness as well. Younger clients on our case list may be doing well with a chronic illness such as Cystic Fibrosis or Diabetes, but at times need acute care monitoring. And sometimes, perhaps all too often now, we provide palliative care in the home and support to the family in end-of-life care for their loved ones with terminal illnesses, such as cancer. Perhaps, for me, this has become the most meaningful of the extramural nurses’ roles. To help a loved one or a family member, or even neighbours, provide comfort, consolation, and company during someone’s last days is fulfilling. It is an experience that is moving to the soul, or maybe this is the time when we realize that we have a soul, like it often is at the beginning of life. To have the privilege, as Jean Vanier wrote in Becoming Human (1998), of accompanying a person and those who care most for that person during this important time is profound. So many people, professional or not, fear death and even fear using the term “death.” We want to soften it, make it benign, with terms like “passing” – which, in my view, does not do justice to the most difficult of our life’s work that many dying people take on through their physical, emotional, and spiritual suffering as they process and make sense of their lives. While physical and cognitive care requirements for seniors in urban or rural locations are important, sometimes their real needs are for basic human contact, support, and communication – a hug, a word of kindness, a phone call, a note, a glimpse into important memories. Extramural nurses do assessments of physical and emotional health and try to arrange the appropriate interventions and supports; but for me, the art of listening does more to guide my care than the reading of blood pressures, the taking a blood samples, or the assessment of cognitive responses. Their bodies tell me what the status of their physical health is, but I learn so much more by listening to what the individuals say or do not say, what’s between the lines that may have no words but deep meaning, the stories they choose to tell or keep silent about. Just in the short time I’ve been with the EMP, I’ve listened to many stories, but also I have learned to follow the silent and spoken cues to deeper meaningful close-to-the-heart experiences. I’ve been invited to have a glimpse into deeply painful memories revealed tentatively in hopes that implied fears or dreams can be told. The silent wish for more company – for human contact, for time with old friends and neighbours, for a return to a life of meaning and purpose – comes through loud and clear when a nurse gets to know a client in his or her own world. Some

A Nurse’s Tale  93

seniors live on country roads that are quite a drive from the nearest village or town, and the isolation and loneliness becomes one of the biggest factors in their recovery or decline – not the drugs that keep the body going, which are important, but the spirit’s will to go on. Last year I attended a conference in Fredericton on senior care. On the last day of the conference there was a discussion with a former provincial minister of health, who was also a rural physician. Dr Dennis Furlong had been working for decades with seniors in their homes and in nursing homes in his region and had recently written a book on the Canadian health care system called Medicare Myths (2004). Seniors want to stay in their own homes, if possible, he said, and we have the knowledge and means to help them do so, but they need specific supports. He argued for a fourfold process that he termed “NESS” which involves nutrition, exercise, security, and socialization. This made a lot of sense to me since it captured the experience I have had in caring for seniors trying to stay in their own homes. They need good meals, manageable exercise activities to sustain mobility, protective surroundings and activities, and above all, socialization. While the sophisticated technology helps us diagnose and treat, it is more likely these four dimensions of care that nurture the quality of life that our aging citizens need and deserve. Socialization within a senior’s community, with family and friends, it seems, provides a kind of vaccination, not for a disease, but for loneliness or loss of meaning as a human being in the world. I often think, when I leave the home of an elderly client who lives alone where neighbours are not within walking distance, that while we are proficient at designing tools and drugs to sustain life physically, we may not be so good at using our everyday common sense knowledge to sustain the spirit of that life. As I said earlier, before practising as an extramural nurse, I worked in the Emergency Department at the Fredericton Hospital. It was a fastpaced unit where we dealt with motor vehicle accidents, burn victims, multiple trauma cases, cardiac emergencies, difficult pregnancies, and health crises experienced at all ages and stages of life. We had the latest in technological advances to guide our diagnoses and treatments – CT scans, MRIs, and drugs that could turn the tide from death to life in short order. We cared for patients and families, sometimes during the worst part of their lives, and saw them leave with a sense of hope, confusion, despair, or grief. While there were many quiet times, work in an Emergency Department is primarily of a critical nature. I felt confident about my role on the team and revelled in the challenges we

94  Part II – The Stories

frequently encountered. I liked the pace, the teamwork, and the sense of accomplishment when patients responded and their families were relieved. However, when David and I decided to start our own family, we both felt that it was too much for each of us to be working different shifts and travelling so far from home. I looked for nursing positions available in the region that I could do near home and with less shift work. Few opportunities arose and in this economic downturn there were few options – working in the nursing homes in Charlotte County, working in public health nursing, or applying for an extramural nursing position. Working in a nursing home seemed to be too big a change in my scope of practice from being an ER nurse, so I ruled that one out. I had cared for many seniors during my ER experiences, but did not really have a feel for long-term elder care roles, though I was aware of the work the extramural seniors’ liaison nurse did on our unit in coordinating the needs of seniors admitted to the ER. I turned my attention to public health, as I had had courses on and several clinical rotations in population health nursing during my degree program at UNB, and enjoyed the independent role of a public health nurse. The more I thought about my experiences with public health nursing and how I had enjoyed doing immunization clinics, pre-natal classes, developing programs and posters for special topics such as well-baby clinics, assessment and referrals for preschool children, screening for development for preschoolers, and teen sexual health programs, the more I felt this would work for us at this time in our lives. The only problem was that I watched the job ads online for quite a while and none came available. As I look back on it now, it was for the best. It would have been a major shift in practice for me. Public health is vastly different from ER nursing. I would be caring for groups of people using pre-designed, standardized programs mandated through provincial, federal, and/or international public health agencies rather than individuals who needed one-to-one care as ER demands most of the time. Although there are sometimes outbreaks of illnesses where groups of people seek care in ERs, public health involved a lot of office work with numerous meetings to attend in local or provincial headquarters and a lot of report writing. There seemed to be lots of paperwork, from both ends of the process – reading and learning the standard programs set by the province and writing up records of how and to whom they were delivered. It was too much sitting, meeting, reporting, recording, and taking direction from authorities who were at a distance from my

A Nurse’s Tale  95

work and whom I had never met. After years of making on-the-spot ER decisions, at times on my own or with the ER team alongside me, and having those decisions respected, I did not feel that I could adjust to a public health nursing role as I remembered it. I turned my attention to the extramural nursing program and sent off an application. Though it did take a year or so, it wasn’t too long before a position opened in the region and, because of my experience as an ER nurse, I got the job. Although there were only a few of us in the clinic, we covered a large rural area. It felt good to be travelling familiar roads and meeting families who were recovering from recent surgeries or treatments, clients who needed ongoing health assessments for chronic illnesses, and children who were living with major heath conditions. With my ER background I needed minimal training since I was proficient at drawing blood samples, even in problematic situations, and was experienced in doing physical assessments on patients in different age groups and for a variety of diseases and health conditions, and reading subtle indicators of problematic symptoms. The mixture of hospital and home care suited me well, and I was generally near home and on call periodically. Here I was, driving around the county, going into homes where clients needed direct or supportive care. Unlike the ER, however, patients and their families were much more involved and essential as part of the team, since they would be taking over the care once I left. And every situation was different. When I visited, and they got to know me and I them, they welcomed me into their homes and their lives. I often thought that it was special the way people trusted and welcomed nurses into their homes; perhaps more so than other health professionals, though I’ve never asked them. Older clients, though not all, want to tell their stories, their family histories, their worries and dreams, and sometimes their deepest secrets. Confidentiality is an important part of this job, and it can easily be breached when you are from the community, know the families, and have some of their close relatives on your client list. This was one of the things I worried about the most. In the ER, patients went through quickly and you just moved on from one to another in dealing with their physical or psychiatric need and preparing them for further tests, treatments, or discharges. In EMP nursing, I might see Maggie Stevens, who is 75 and lives in Harrington, for blood work for Leukaemia at 10 a.m. and visit her sister Sarah, who is 78 and lives 15 minutes away in McCortney, at 11:00 for follow-up on her diabetic protocols. Each would want to know how the other was

96  Part II – The Stories

progressing and, at times, I had to be vigilant not to just blurt it out in conversation to allay their sisterly concerns; I had to find a way of comforting without revealing details. I came to respect this work, as I felt like I was making a difference for the person and for the families and friends of fishermen, farmers, loggers, clergymen, housekeepers, store owners, and more. They were not patients that I treated but didn’t know, as in the ER; no, I was becoming embedded in the community in a different way from having grown up here. It was like becoming a part of their everyday lives, and I felt like I was giving something meaningful back to them. It seemed that in caring for the individuals in the EM program, I was slowly learning to care for the whole county in a very different way – as people with richer histories and lives than I had imagined. On some of my travels to McCortney, I had a chance to speak with Fred Farrell, the school principal, the mayor, and the person whose family had run the volunteer ambulance service for three generations before the provincial transfer to a centralized service. Fred talked about his experiences as McCortney’s fire chief and manager of the volunteer ambulance. He knew every family in the area and talked about how they had keys to many of the houses where the elderly or persons with physical challenges live, so they could access them in a hurry should an emergency arise. He emphasized that they had often had to use these keys to rescue a senior in need. He was concerned about rural communities in the province, especially since small towns and villages seemed to give the urban centres their best people; the young people left for greener pastures. Fred is not a person to give up, but one who envisions possible realities. He had realized, he said, that rural communities need to be doing a better job of raising young people, giving them strong skills for life, and giving them the humane side of life, so that urban centres valued their work ethic. Governments, both federal and provincial, make decisions that often negatively impact rural areas. Volunteers, he said, are a vanishing breed in rural life, since many have to work two jobs to stay afloat. In some settlements, there are too few young people even to do odd jobs – lawn mowing, painting, and more. Seniors are dependent on those who are available when they need to go to the bank in town or to the city for groceries. His counterpart in Harrington, Bonnie Dayton, claims that the biggest problem is the lack of public transportation. Seniors can’t get to the doctor’s office or to the hospital for tests unless someone in the community volunteers to take them, and the volunteer has to get expensive liability insurance to

A Nurse’s Tale  97

protect herself and her passengers. When rural seniors have to go to the larger city hospitals for tests, they are, for some strange reason, scheduled for the earliest appointments of the day, while those in the city get later appointments. It doesn’t make sense and creates a lot of stress. For my own part, I felt that on my visits to some of these rural locations, people had few resources at their disposal. One lady, who had a hip replacement, lived alone far down a country road. Often, unless a neighbour came by to tote wood from her woodpile to the house, she did without heat. When they could, the neighbours also brought in groceries for her and her mail from the local post office. There was no phone service and certainly no cable or Internet connection. Yet, when we hear about the government resources available for rural people, we are told the information can be accessed on the Internet so it is “available to everyone.” I wonder how many rural citizens have such access in New Brunswick or in other provinces. A few years ago, before the centralized provincial ambulance service, there was a fire in a rural farmhouse in central New Brunswick. A familyrun ambulance service responded, but it was a difficult call that troubles several of them to this day. Most people from the area near the fire were related to each other or were descendants from the same founding families. Simon, one of the EMTs who took the call, was related to the family caught in the fire. It was his cousin Peter’s house. Peter had awakened to his parents’ screams and rushed to get his wife and parents out. He lifted his elderly parents to safety, and suffered a massive heart attack. While firefighters on the scene cared for the family members, the EMTs tried to keep Peter alive as they sped to the nearest hospital. When they called ahead, they were redirected from this hospital to one much further away. Peter died in the ambulance. It was devastating for his family and for the EMTs, who blamed the bureaucratic obstacles that exist between rural care and urban care. Fred Farrell says that this is the reality in rural communities, where you know everyone and are often related to them. The loss is greatly felt, especially if the person could have been saved. Some changes came out of this tragedy though, as a provincial trauma care committee changed policies for ambulance and emergency services, and in Peter’s community, they all got together and rebuilt Peter’s home for his family. And this, it seems, says it all about rural life – relationships, hardships, rebuilding, and resilience as life goes on. The province, once the ambulance services were centralized, put in new regulations to have basic training and advanced training programs

98  Part II – The Stories

for paramedics, which prepared them to make decisions about their patients and which hospital was the best for the condition of their patients, and which prepared advanced paramedics with the skills to initiate more critical interventions during transport to an ER. Yet, David says, some of the paramedics today suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder or have suicidal tendencies due to the horror of some of their experiences. I guess this will lead to more preparation on self-care and more interventions for the health of paramedics. All in all, life is good here in St Andrews. David and I are planning a family, now that our lives are more settled. We both believe that we live in one of the best places in the world to raise children. After all, we have a lot of family nearby to help and a close community to welcome them, and, as they say, “It takes a community to raise a child.”

8 Developing the Community: An Activist’s Tale

People call me a “workaholic.” It’s true that I rarely stop my helping activities, although I don’t really like that term “helping.” It sounds so patronizing. I work alongside of other people to try to make the area where we live better for everyone. I suppose that if I was pushed into a corner and had to put a label on what I do, I’d call myself a community developer or a social activist. Before I get into describing what I do, I’d better tell you a bit about myself and the area where I live. My name is Julia LeBlanc and I live in a winterized cottage near the village of Balmoral in Restigouche County, 11 miles south of Dalhousie in the northern part of New Brunswick. I moved here in 1977 after my husband’s uncle died and left us the cottage. Jim (my husband) was between jobs at the time so we decided it would be a good idea to relocate from our rented apartment in Montreal to rural New Brunswick. Jim thought he would try his hand at logging. I thought that I would find Advice Centre work or work with people with disabilities. I had worked in both of these fields in Montreal, although I didn’t have any formal “helping” qualification. I looked forward to a quieter pace of life. I’m an active person, and I had always enjoyed the sorts of outdoor activities for which this region is famous. Our son Charlie was 11 at the time we moved here, and he was reluctant to leave his friends in the city. Eventually, though, we persuaded him that a new life in a new province would be good for all three of us. Charlie was citified like me – we had both lived in Montreal for our entire lives. When we got to Balmoral it was a culture shock to say the least. Before I tell you about our culture shock, let me tell you a bit about Balmoral, Dalhousie, and Restigouche County. Restigouche County is located in the extreme north of New Brunswick. In 2001 the population

100  Part II – The Stories

was 36,134 and Campbellton was the only city, with a population of 7,798. The 2001 Census counted 1,836 people in Balmoral, but by 2006 the population had declined to 1,706. Dalhousie is the second largest municipality, with a population in 2001 of 3,975. It’s a bit misleading, though, to talk about “the population” of the county and of Balmoral because there are really two populations. First, there are the people who actually live here, and second there are the people who make use of the area. Every year, wealthy Canadians and Americans descend on Sugarloaf Provincial Park to ski. In the summer, our temporary population of visitors forms colonies that hike on Mount Carleton, exploit our natural resources, and deplete our salmon pools. Don’t get me wrong; we’re pleased about the money and the temporary jobs that our visitors bring to the area, but we are not pleased about the cost to our environment. I’ll say more about that later. Back to 1977: After leaving Montreal at the crack of dawn on a February morning, we arrived at the cottage in our U-Haul around noon. Everything we took for granted was missing. There was no restaurant where we could have lunch before we unpacked our possessions, no “welcome wagon,” no new neighbours to greet us. The silence was deafening and we were cold. We drove into Balmoral to buy supplies. Restigouche County is about one-third anglophone and two-thirds francophone. You wouldn’t have known there were any anglophones at all the day we arrived – and Balmoral is named after a place in Scotland! As an anglophone, I was used to speaking English in Montreal, but fortunately my French was quite good. Charlie and Jim were bilingual so they could converse easily. Nevertheless, our accents made it clear that we had “come from away” and we keenly felt that we were outsiders. Charlie was not pleased when he learned that he needed to catch a bus to travel the four miles from our home to the nearest school; local children have to travel even further now because that particular school has closed. We thought that maybe we had made a big mistake in moving – but there was no going back. We couldn’t afford it. Those first few months here were very difficult. We had no friends and no jobs. We began to attend church in Balmoral and slowly got to know people. Don’t get me wrong. People were friendly but it was very difficult to get beyond the first “Hello” and develop a circle of friends. Everyone knew everyone else. In fact, we often thought that the entire county was one huge extended family. People seemed to be curious about us. But while they asked us a lot of questions, they often told us very little about themselves. I’m glad, then, that we had a relative that gave us bona fide links to the area.

An Activist’s Tale  101

I’m a sociable person and I tried to get to know the community by talking to people in public places. After the snow melted, I heard that the owners were looking for people to clean the parking lot beside the community centre in Dalhousie and the grocery store/café. It was a paying job, full-time for a week and then 3 hours a day twice a week. I had no idea what was involved in that job. It was the hardest I have ever done. I needed the money, and even though it meant travelling to Dalhousie, I heard about Mary who lived 3 kilometres from us and who travelled there twice a week. I bought a very cheap bike and rode to her house. We shared the cost of gas to Dalhousie. That job helped me to get to know the other people who were also employed as cleaners. When we were cleaning one day, some people began talking about entering a Balmoral/Dalhousie float in the Canada Day Parade in Campbellton. But they didn’t know how to go about it. Since I had experience of entering a float in a parade in Montreal, I started to talk to them, and we decided to set up a committee. In Montreal, I had known a lot of people and networking was easy. In Dalhousie, however, I had to start from scratch. People looked to me for direction but I felt that they were rather suspicious of me. I heard whispers about “a city person trying to take over.” We borrowed a truck from a farmer and had a lot of laughs when we were setting up the float. My employer was Jean Arsenault. The Community Centre, the grocery store, and the parking lot were all owned by the Arsenault family. The Arsenaults, who were very community-minded people, had allowed the Centre to be used for community events. It became clear, though, that we were in danger of losing it because of lack of involvement by the community. Jean began talking about using the building for storage. A few of us got together and decided we should try to keep it. We networked with people in Dalhousie and surrounding parts and discovered that people had lots of different ideas about how it could be used. Some people thought it should be used to develop groups for children and for seniors. Others thought we should set up action groups to take up issues of concern. For example, there was a very dangerous crossroads near the elementary school. And even in the 1970s, people in Dalhousie were concerned about the way that summer visitors were abusing the beauty spots. We knew what was troubling, but we didn’t know how to resolve these problems or what to tackle first. I was still treated with a lot of suspicion, but people looked to me for leadership more and more. I suggested that we needed to have priorities and we should set up a board to run the Community Centre.

102  Part II – The Stories

About four of us went door to door asking people if they would like to join it. We organized our first community meeting. Thirty-four people attended and we were very pleased at the turnout. At the end of the meeting we elected a board of eight people. We set up one committee for “activities” and another for “action.” Everyone who wanted to be involved had a seat either on the board or on one of the committees. At the end of the year, on the 5th of December 2007, Charlie suddenly died. It was a terrible tragedy. With some of his new friends, he was skating on the Restigouche River. The ice was thin and Charlie fell through and drowned. I had told him so many times to be careful but I blamed myself for the accident. I was devastated and lost. I stayed at home just holding his things in my arms as if they were him! Perhaps I had been too busy with my community development activities. Perhaps I should have given him more supervision. I had heard it said before, but now I knew that you never get over the loss of a child. Every year on his birthday the grief surges like an ocean of loss for a life never lived, dreams never fulfilled, and arms that never held him again. Yet, Charlie’s death revealed the kindness of rural people. During the first two weeks, we were given at least three casseroles a day. People listened to us and they told us their stories. It was a sad Christmas, as many of them have been in the years afterward, yet – tragically – it was through the death of our son that I established a place in the community, although nearly 30 years on I still feel lots of times as if I don’t fully belong. Restigouche County is a very stable county; a recent census revealed that 90% of its people had lived in it five years earlier. You need to have lived here for generations to be totally accepted. During the time that I worked as a car-park cleaner, and during the time we set up the Community Centre, I listened to the stories about my new community and the people who live in it. I began to learn about some of the problems in Restigouche County. I learned about the anger of local people directed towards the activities of the rich visitors. It’s amazing what just a few people can do to a peaceful environment if they begin to cut down trees, use chemicals on the land, overfish, and introduce noisy speedboats on the waterways, and then there are the mountains of plastic that they leave behind! We had lots of interpersonal squabbles during our early years. There was disagreement about what our priorities should be, with some people pushing for the development of activities and others more interested in social action. Several of us felt that Jean behaved as if he had a right to have the final say in any decision because he was

An Activist’s Tale  103

the owner of the Centre. Sometimes I felt tolerated rather than really accepted. Fortunately, in 1980, we managed to get a small grant to hire a mediator. We talked a lot about Jean’s position and about my position. The outcome was positive. I can’t say everything has been harmonious over the years but I think that we have developed a culture of respect for our differences. We know that there is a lot to do, and we realize that we shouldn’t use our energy in waging battles with each other. In 1982 we were awarded a grant to hire a part-time community developer. I was delighted that the hiring committee decided that I should be appointed. It had taken five years, but my appointment showed that I was gaining the trust of my neighbours. I have been paid for 15 hours work a week for the last 25 years. I’m paid “part-time” but my “working week” often exceeds 50 hours! I don’t resent the hours in the least, although I’m sorry that a lot of my time is spent in fundraising. But I’ve come to love the area. Apart from fundraising, I spend my time in three major ways: giving advice, community development, and social activism. Some of my time is spent in giving advice to people who are experiencing difficulties. I wouldn’t put the label “counselling” on what I do. I listen to people and I try to guide them in a direction that might benefit them. Sometimes I help with filling out forms. On other occasions I put people in touch with government departments or neighbours who might assist them. Over the years I’ve learned a lot about entitlements to government benefits, employment rights, and making do with very little. Today the resources are even fewer than when I arrived here. There is little in the way of health and social care in Balmoral. Even Dalhousie has few resources. Since the mill closed, the town has essentially shut down. The hospital closed, as did many of the local businesses. The high school has half the number of students that it used to have. It’s often necessary to travel to Campbellton – or even out of the county entirely – for these necessary services. The cost of travelling is often prohibitive for many people. Over the years, I’ve learned about the problems experienced by rural women who live in abusive situations. I had assisted women in Montreal to move from abusive relationships, now I heard about the other layers of difficulty that are experienced by rural women. Typically, in Restigouche County, spouses come in and out of the house during the day, so departures have to be carefully stage-managed. “Safe-houses” for rural women tend to be in the cities, cities that are often a large

104  Part II – The Stories

distance from the home. This causes transportation problems. Once a woman leaves home, she experiences enormous difficulty if she attempts to return – the community often ostracizes her. I learned that rural people are expected to keep quiet about their difficulties and that it’s considered particularly disloyal to tell people outside of the community about these difficulties. As I’ve listened to stories of people living in Restigouche County, I’ve learned that rural poverty is often hidden. Isolated seniors are sometimes virtual prisoners in their homes during the winter. When needed, I assist them to get the financial benefits to which they are entitled. Over the years, I’ve developed a network of people I can call upon to volunteer for activities ranging from transportation to medical appointments to minor repairs to property. Each year I have three high school students on co-op placements who work with me. Sometimes I can offer them weekend and evening jobs, too. The second of my activities is community development. I’ve learned that we can rarely rely on municipal, provincial, or federal governments to do what they ought to be doing. I put people in touch with each other and we set up committees for self-help. Sometimes we have task groups – for example, groups of volunteers to clear up mounds of plastic left by careless residents summer and winter alike, or to cut back bushes that obscure the view on the highway. I have linked people who want to “help” with people who would like to receive some service. Each week we have a seniors’ lunch. Then there are clubs for children including a small after-school club. Once a week the Community Centre is transformed into a youth centre. Jean Arsenault offers a return trip from the Community Centre to Campbelltown every Wednesday. He needs to go himself anyway, so he offers a free ride to anyone who needs to travel to town. People want to help each other. When I discover a new “need,” there are usually people who are willing to try to resolve it. I don’t want to give the impression that everything is “sweetness and light,” however. Apart from the spousal abuse that I’ve already mentioned, there have been some unfortunate incidents of child physical abuse and child sexual abuse. Also, a family with Middle Eastern features moved to a cottage just south of Dalhousie. They experienced racism that ranged from name-calling for the high school student to inflexible policies from local businesses and service industries. People from the Mi’kmaq First Nations community in Eel River have spoken to me about racism ever since I arrived in Balmoral. There are structural

An Activist’s Tale  105

inequities (as the sociologists would say). I study census data quite carefully, and I’ve discovered that, compared with anglophones, the Acadian people and other francophones who live in the county have a 44% higher likelihood of leaving school with less than a secondary school certificate, and francophones are 15% less likely than anglophones to leave with a trade diploma. Some of the university researchers should try to find why this is the case and suggest ways that we can encourage young francophones to stay at school, because statistics say that francophones who actually attend community college or university are more likely than anglophones to graduate. My third area of work is social activism. Sometimes self-help is not enough. We need to take action to encourage government bodies and industry to change policies that are rural-unfriendly. Over the past 25 years, we’ve taken on a lot of battles. We’ve lobbied politicians and we’ve used the media to publicize rural disadvantage. Sometimes we’ve been successful, or at least partly successful, but often as not, we have been unsuccessful. When there were plans to close a small school or reduce health care services, we have launched campaigns. In fact, we’re still engaged in conflict with Canada Post over delivering mail to rural addresses. Fast-forward to today! Jim died of a heart attack five years ago, so now I live alone. Once again, I was the recipient of casseroles after the death, but this time I felt that it was friends who were helping me rather than strangers. I realized that I feel as if I belong here. My neighbours are accepting me. You want to know about the knowledge and skills needed for this kind of work in rural New Brunswick? First of all, it’s important for people to be really committed to making life better for people who live in the area. My work is not suitable for clock-watchers. Second, there’s no point in coming in with citified approaches and obscure universityideas. If you have “come from away,” then you need to gain acceptance in the community and, if my experience is typical, this doesn’t happen overnight. How do you gain acceptance? In brief, you listen! It’s important to suspend your judgments about what needs fixing until you discover if what you happen to think is a “problem” is actually considered a problem by the people experiencing it. You need to have (or to develop) skills in contributing to community-led activities, in networking with diverse people. Skills are needed in advocacy for individuals (such as the person who’s not receiving financial benefits to which she or he is entitled) and also advocacy for entire communities:

106  Part II – The Stories

such as a subdivision where Canada Post does not deliver mail. People who are community developers or social activists need to understand the importance of timing – you can often encourage politicians to make changes just before an election. You also need the knowledge, confidence, and skill to challenge government policies and practices, and not be intimidated by bureaucrats. Are these items included in your curricula for “helpers”? How can students learn to work in rural communities? This is a tough question. I am learning every day, even after 25 years. Sometimes I find short courses are helpful, but often they’re not. I think that if you really want to be successful, you need to move “learning” away from the university. Send me a few of your students. Let them work with me and see what I am doing – like the high school students on co-op. You can come and visit the students if you want to do so and tell them how “theory” is actually relating to what they are doing – if you can find the theory, that is! Maybe if university teachers such as yourselves came and spent time with us “rural helpers” you would learn something. But probably my ideas are too radical for your universities and your professional bodies to accept.

9 The Passing of Reverend Bob: A Minister’s Tale

These are my last few days in Sussex. I have so many emotions running through me. Packing things last evening, for instance, I was struck by the plaque presented to me by the Youth Group at the “roast” my parishioners threw me two weeks ago: Reverend Bob, you rock! All the best from all of us! This got me thinking about the great party that the Lions Club threw as well. (Thank God, I was never “Reverend Bob” to them, simply “Lion Bob.”) Lions Club, Youth Group – two of my most enjoyable involvements these past four years! In the morning, I’ll have my 12-year-old daughter Kaylee help me load the last boxes of books into our van, along with the rest of our clothes. The day after, we’ll head back to Ontario and the one-point parish I’m being transferred to on the edge of Toronto. Toronto is the town I grew up in, and where I went to Divinity School, but haven’t visited even once since I left four years ago. Haven’t dared to visit it, for fear I’d never want to come back here! The drive will be a great chance for the two of us to reconnect, because my work has made it hard to give her the quality time she deserves. She’s had her own issues in living here, not just as a “preacher’s kid” but also, since my wife Kate died, as a motherless child. Most of what remains in the manse, certainly the major appliances, will stay behind for Sheila, my successor. If only the Manse Committee would make the repairs that I’ve been nagging them about before she arrives. I don’t want her to feel the kind of let-down that I did when I discovered the house was over 100 years old and, as can happen with church-owned property, has been less than well maintained. Like me four years ago, she’ll be fresh from Divinity School, though her Divinity School was here in the Maritimes, so presumably she’ll

108  Part II – The Stories

avoid the culture shock that I experienced. And I hope she manages better than I did in dealing with four very different congregations, three of them quite tiny. That said, Sussex itself is a growing town. With various local industries (a potash mine and a call centre, among them) and new ones on the drawing board, it’s experiencing something of a boom these days. Maybe I should stay! With a population of 1,500 (hardly “big” by Ontario standards), it’s situated 60 kilometres from Saint John amid some of the prettiest scenery you’ll see in eastern Canada, with lots of rolling farmland and picture-postcard valleys, and an international balloon festival every fall. So, what am I really feeling as I leave? For starters, I am feeling an immense regret. I mean, I could have done such a better job, ministering to these people. But there’s a lot of excitement, too. I can’t wait to get back to an urban environment, with all the bustle and variety that goes with it, and best of all, some anonymity for me. Since Angela left a year ago, I’ve had no chance to meet anyone new, someone who’s not a parishioner, that is. “People want their ministers to be married,” a colleague once told me, “but they don’t want them to date.” Let’s hope that Sheila, a widow in her mid-50s with three grown children living in Saint John, won’t suffer the sort of loneliness I’ve experienced these past 12 months. I’m also guessing that she’ll fit in better with the women of the parish, for if I’ve learned anything, it’s that women are the ones who keep things going in small communities. Of course, it’s volunteers in general – women or men – who make small communities run. But the church – our church at least – would be lost, I’m sure, if it weren’t for women, who nowadays do everything from teaching Sunday school to putting on church suppers to being ministers themselves! As for my relationship with Angela, I should have known better – me of all people, who’s married umpteen couples since coming here! Basically, she was the first interesting woman I met after Kate died, less than six months after arriving here. Looking back, I was still in mourning when our relationship began. (Kate and I had been the proverbial “childhood sweethearts.”) At the time, keen to put my sadness behind me, I thought Angela and I had so much in common. Active in the choir, the Bible Study group, and a dozen other things, she was Sussex-born and -bred, and had been a member of St Mark’s since Day One. It was a match made in heaven. St Mark’s is in East Sussex, 10 kilometres outside Sussex itself, whereas St John’s, the largest church on the parish, is “downtown.” The other two, St David’s and St Andrew’s, are in the villages of Knowlton

A Minister’s Tale   109

and Valleyview, respectively. The differences between the four congregations are remarkable, the more you get to know them. Not only are the church buildings themselves quite different – in size, location, and even the placement of the pulpit and pews – but there are differences in other ways as well: from the mix of families that make them up, to their theological leanings, to the history of how each got started. Each one has a very distinct “feel” to it. St John’s is rather stuffy overall. Its members seem to have an exalted opinion of its status compared with the rest of the charge, and they’re not all that supportive of the directions in which the denomination as a whole is moving. St Mark’s, on the other hand, is a more roll-up-yersleeves, outgoing congregation, with a number of young families and lots of energy (just not as much money in its endowment fund!) – in all, a very “with it” bunch. As for St David’s in Knowlton, most of its members are over 75 years old. They’re warm-hearted enough, but there just aren’t that many of them. And theologically, they’re the most conservative of all four churches – and there’s always been tension anyway between Knowlton and Sussex. Folks in Knowlton feel that the economic boom Sussex is experiencing should, by rights, have fallen to them. The story they like to tell is that “progress” has passed them by unfairly. It still grates on their nerves. I know: I’ve sat in their living rooms and had them tell me. St Andrew’s, in Valleyview, where service is held every second Sunday afternoon, is the smallest and most remote of the four. The majority of its members are either unemployed or employed on a seasonal basis alone. There are lots of welfare cases in the Valleyview area. Yet I always come away from my times with those people feeling good inside. They’re lovely folks, really: very friendly and unpretentious, the kind who’d give you the shirt off their back. St Andrew’s is also quite conservative theologically, but in a way that’s different from St David’s. It’s not so much strict and Calvinist as it is Pentecostal almost – which stands to reason, since the largest church in Valleyview is Pentecostal. So there it is: four different churches and four quite different worlds. Back to Angela: There were warning signs I should have seen earlier on. The main one was that she was less than a year out of her own marriage; in her case, to an abusive man who still lives in East Sussex, in fact, though like several people in the area, commutes each day to Saint John for work. In any case, she seemed to know exactly what she wanted in life and, happily, I was it – just like I felt she was it for

110  Part II – The Stories

me. I’m probably being cynical, but what I think now is that what she was looking for was not me, the person, but me, the minister – the role, in other words. Maybe she thought that I’d automatically be good to her because of my vocation, at the same time restoring her self-esteem in the eyes of her family and community. But as any good counsellor could have pointed out (any counsellor other than me, that is, who was foolish enough to try to be one for her, even when what I really wanted was to ask her on a date!) what she needed was more time to heal. Looking back, I realize that I needed the same, since it’d been only two years before that Kate lost her battle to leukemia. The two of us had this theory that the fresh country air and “quiet rural life” (ha!) would slow down her disease. As the saying goes, it wasn’t meant to be. Still, I should have allowed myself more time to process losing her. As for what unfolded between Angela and me, I won’t go into details but, in a word, it was messy. The people of St Mark’s, though pretty resilient from having to cope with similar messes in the past, and though they’d rallied around Kaylee and me amazingly at the time of Kate’s death, were not amused. Since Angela was related to half of them (as was her ex-), our break-up almost tore the congregation in two, and might easily have done the same for the whole pastorate – which is why the church bureaucrats for the Maritime region recommended that “a change in pastoral relations” would, as their memo to me put it, be “healthy for all parties concerned.” As she begins her ministry, I’m sure that Pastor Sheila will still have some damage control to do – certainly at St Mark’s. Let me tell you: I’ve learned a lot about the power of gossip from all of this. I didn’t know that a story could have so many sides! It seemed like everyone in the congregation – the whole charge, in fact – had a different version of what transpired. It was awful. For a while, I didn’t even dare go into the Co-op for my groceries for fear that every eye would lock onto me the second I walked through the door. And the polite smiles, with all the muttering you could hear behind them, nearly drove me mad. Even Kaylee got hassled about it by classmates at school! And, of course, the legal wranglings between the two of us haven’t helped the situation. From what I’ve been able to pick up secondhand, just about everyone – except for a few kind souls – has it in their head that I’m the one to blame. Not spending enough time at home was the main complaint: not spending enough time with her or her sons (who, thanks to her ex’s lawyer, live mostly with him), or with her friends or parents, etc., etc. But what did they expect? And what

A Minister’s Tale   111

business was it of anyone’s anyway? In Toronto or Montreal, people have marital problems and get divorced all the time. Here, especially since it’s the minister who’s involved (“their” minister, you could say, for people feel like they own you), everyone has to make it their concern. You can see that I still need to process everything – the breakup with Angela, the loss of Kate, trying to raise Kaylee on my own. It’s funny how your own issues – your own story – gets put on hold because you’re so busy listening to the stories of others. The point is: I’ve needed a counsellor myself. Speaking of your workload as a minister, and how it cuts into family life again and again, I’ve been responsible for four quite different congregations with anywhere from 20 to 50 households fanning out for 5 or more kilometres around each one. That means roughly 500 people whom I’ve been expected to visit on a more or less regular basis and who, theoretically, could call me with a crisis anytime, 24/7 – not to mention their relatives or neighbours who could call on me, too. And who could also, if the spirit moved them, show up in the pews on Sunday. Wouldn’t that be something? As it is, I was lucky if 50 came out to a service at St John’s, in Sussex, the largest of the four congregations, and 20 each at any of the other three. There were no more than 75 at the farewell service that St John’s hosted the Sunday before last, the majority of them from St John’s itself. As per usual, folks from the other three congregations probably stayed away in protest at how, time and again, combined services are held at St John’s because it’s the largest. (The tiny turnout by the folks from St Mark’s was due not just to the whole thing with Angela but to the fact that the golf club was having a tournament that day.) Frankly, I’ll be glad to be done with all the bickering among them. It’s funny how the same people who happily drive to Sussex for everything else – shopping, bowling, curling – and for whom everything else in their own immediate area has long since been closed – the school, the post office, and so on – insist that their church remain open and the minister drive to them! On an emotional level, I can understand, even sympathize. In a day when the world as a whole is becoming more organized and technologized, “centralization” must at some point be resisted. But on a financial or administrative level, it makes no sense. Thank God that where I’m going, there’s only one church and only one service a Sunday – not three, and sometimes four, like I was expected to do here. With youth groups (one on every point) one night each week, weekly Bible classes, umpteen committee meetings every

112  Part II – The Stories

month (finance, outreach, education), with any number of fires to put out beforehand or after; not to mention sermon writing, marriage preparation classes, home communions to shut-ins once a year; weekly visits to the regional hospitals (mostly in Saint John but sometimes in Fredericton or Moncton, 70 kilometres either way); monthly services at the nursing home, plus regular office hours if possible, I was seldom home. I put in, easily, an 80- to 90-hour week, every week. And yet, when all is said and done, I loved what I did. Except for Angela and how the whole business with her turned out, I wouldn’t trade a minute of it if I had to start over. Except for a few impossible individuals (every community has them, as does every congregation), I can honestly say I loved “my people.” And I loved the rush of it all, for it’s what I’d wanted to be involved in ever since I was Kaylee’s age myself: to help other people in whatever way I can; in particular, help them develop a healthy sense of spirituality. Yes, I had a sense of “calling,” as I still do, even if I’m wiser now, have been through the mill (including the rumour mill), and don’t take myself as seriously as I used to. And I was energized by never knowing what emergency might be coming at me next. Above all, I loved the chance to get to know some of the finest individuals I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. Not particularly well educated perhaps, or at least not many with degrees. And probably none of them has read Kierkegaard or Tillich, Augustine or Barth, nor seen the need to do so! Nor, when it comes right down to it, have they felt the need to familiarize themselves with more than a few favourite phrases from the Bible itself – most times, wildly out of context. That was my job, I guess you could say: to have my head full of all sorts of fascinating, if somewhat useless, “book knowledge.” I mean, what good, really, has all my reading done for them? What difference has it made in my ministry? Not to take away from books in general, but I wonder what else I might have been taught in seminary that would have prepared me to be more effective in this role? What they lack in schooling, I came to realize, though, they more than make up for in learning – life-learning, that is. When I first got here, I couldn’t believe how unsophisticated most of them seemed, how uncultured, even uncouth. As I see it now, the problem was not them, but me. The problem was that I was bringing with me a whole set of city assumptions about “country people.” It’s these assumptions that were at fault, not the people I projected them onto. As I sat with them in their kitchens and ate the great home cooking that they fed me; as I learned of their secrets and struggles; as I got to know something

A Minister’s Tale   113

about their background and history; as I gained a fuller sense of their worlds, a respect for them grew inside me until, in many ways, I came to feel dwarfed by them, for all that they have been and seen and done. As for me, I grew up in the suburbs where our meat and bread, milk and eggs, appeared on our tables as if by magic, with hardly a thought as to how they got there. But these are the people behind the scenes, who put in the long hours and considerable know-how in order to make all that happen, not the illiterate hicks that part of me expected them to be. In time, I realized that they were people of substance and depth, with questions and curiosities and all sorts of insights and potentials to make them every bit as interesting as people with their PhDs. Not as refined perhaps (if, say, appreciating opera is a badge of refinement), and, judging from their glazed looks when I began quoting some theologian in the middle of my (too long) sermons, not terribly well-read, either. But they are certainly well-lived. And as farm people, many of them are on intimate terms with Nature in ways no one I’ve known before could match: savvy about cloud formations and wind shifts and the signs of the changing seasons and the implications for seeding and harvesting and the whole cycle of farming life. So, then, I guess I’m back to the feeling of regret. There’s more for me to learn here. I’ve barely scratched the surface of these people’s lives, of their stories, of what makes them tick, of how they experience “the world” and “life,” and how their lives and stories intersect in so many, many ways. But the time has come to move on. All things considered, though, I feel that I’m leaving on a positive note. “You’re quitting while you’re ahead,” someone told me the other day at the post office. I suppose I am. The affairs of the charge are generally in good shape; in fact, we’re running a bit in the black. Despite the scandal surrounding Angela and me, or possibly because of it, attendance, even at only 40 per Sunday is up 20% from the five years my predecessor was here, which is something when you consider (a) how good everyone told me he was and (b) how this is not the greatest time for church membership anywhere! And this despite the sorts of global problems that drive people to “find religion”: climate change, tsunamis, terrorism, tensions in the Middle East. But St John’s Pastoral Charge has stood at the top of the charts. Just ask my counterparts at the Presbyterian Church, or the Anglican Church, or the Roman Catholic parish. Whenever the four of us would get together on Monday mornings at the Butternut Café (I’ll miss their “off-collar” humour), we couldn’t help but compare the numbers in our pews the day before. In good

114  Part II – The Stories

fun, they accused me of bribing my people to attend. We could never persuade the Pentecostal pastor to join us, though, nor his counterpart at the Baptist church or the Christian Missionary Alliance. (Seven churches in one town! I can’t imagine a place more church-poor than Sussex.) Not much ecumenical spirit among those chaps, I’m afraid. This was made clear to me on more than one occasion, particularly in Sussex – not so much in the other three communities. This includes a number of crises that friends of our Youth Group members were undergoing, kids I was ready to lend an ear to when I heard they were having troubles (the messes young people get themselves into! I only hope Kaylee will be spared. As a PK, a motherless child, and now a child of divorce – who can say?). It’s because I wasn’t of the “true faith,” as I was told by their parents – in one case, in a nasty message on my phone and, in another, face to face. In short, they didn’t appreciate my “liberal-humanist” influence on their children’s lives. And after our denomination approved the ordination of homosexuals, I’m sure I was viewed as the Devil himself – as I was by some of my own folk, too. I certainly support the policy, and have said so from the pulpit more than once. It’s a necessary and a courageous one, but what a pile of trouble it’s caused us at the local level. And it’s front-line folks like me who’ve had to take much of the flak. In fact, one of the rumours going around in the wake of my break-up with Angela was that I was gay myself. “So what if I am!” I felt like shouting. To shift topics for a minute, it may sound strange to say, but of all the duties I’ve had to perform – preaching and teaching, marrying and burying – it’s burying I like the best. Besides being more “real” somehow than weddings, funerals can be the most amazing community events. People really come together. With some deaths I’ve officiated at, the sanctuary of St John’s was completely filled, with chairs set up in the basement and a loudspeaker relaying everything to the overflow folks outside. And, afterwards, with the lunch put on by, say, the Ladies Auxiliary of the Legion, it could take up to two hours before the crowd would thin out. I felt like I wasn’t just mouthing the usual platitudes to the usual un-listening ears but, basically, because of the high esteem in which the deceased was held and the positive (if sad) energy in the air, I was connecting with the community as a whole somehow. All of us together, it seemed, were taken to a deeper level, to something more solid and, well, eternal. Those were definitely some of the “highs” in my four years here. I’ll never forget them.

A Minister’s Tale   115

Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but these days have felt like a kind of death for me. All the formal farewells got said on Sunday, and since it was a hot summer morning, there weren’t too many out to church to say them. However much some will miss their “Reverend Bob,” the beach and the lake and the golf course were just too attractive as alternatives – not to mention that this is the height of haying season, too. The last person to drop by the manse and say goodbye was actually the chair of the Finance Committee. We had a lovely little chat, but it became obvious that the only reason he stopped by was that he needed me to sign some legal “termination” form for the regional church office. As for Kaylee, she’s been on the phone all morning saying goodbye to her friends. On the one hand, she hates the thought of leaving. On the other, she can’t wait to get going. I can’t wait either. I need a new beginning, a new life. That said, deep down I hate to leave as well because, when all is said and done, I really liked this place. Even if at the start I felt like the national church didn’t just send me here but sentenced me here, it was a terrific place to start. Maybe I should have tried to stay, just to give them a few more years of continuity (most of my predecessors stayed just two years at the most) and of substance. Maybe I should have stayed and tried to drill down deeper into the complex culture of the place. I have so many things still to learn about how these people relate to one another, about the intricate connections and tensions between them. “You’ve got to go deep,” one older minister says to me every time I meet him at regional meetings. Above all, despite the ups and downs around Kate, and then Angela, I like how it’s changed me as a person – as a minister, for sure, but more importantly, as a person. I feel I’m more compassionate, more understanding, more humble somehow. The place itself – not just Sussex and the other settlements I’ve served, but the countryside itself – has shaped me, too. Growing up in the suburbs, a sense of “place” can be quite foreign, but if only just a little (compared with those who’ve lived here all along) this place is rooted in my soul. I’ll never be the same. I came here believing that my job was to save these people, but in a way, it’s they who’ve saved me.

10 Becoming a Helper: A Social Work Student’s Tale

Yesterday I had a midterm evaluation with Henry, my workplace supervisor. I’ve certainly learned a lot since I began my internship in the First Nations community, but it’s clear that there’s a lot more still to learn. I’m a student in the Social Work program at St Thomas University (STU). It’s my second degree. For my first degree, I majored in sociology and Native studies. I thought that sociology would be a good preparation for working with people; it’s certainly helped me with my social work studies. I’ve been interested in learning about Aboriginal people since I was in high school, when I noticed that Aboriginal students were more likely to drop out or get in trouble. I wanted to understand why. When I started taking Native studies courses at STU, my eyes were opened. I learned about the history of Aboriginal people and the racism they experienced. I was horrified when I heard about the residential school experiences and the government policies that caused suffering and disadvantage for Aboriginal women and men. I was determined to know more directly by having an internship in a First Nations community. I wanted to begin right away. Faculty at STU didn’t try to discourage me, but they told me that as a non-Aboriginal student I should be prepared for a difficult experience. We had a guest speaker named Mavis in the Introduction to Social Work course I had taken in my second year. Mavis is a non-Aboriginal social worker who lives in a First Nations community in the north of New Brunswick. Her husband is Aboriginal. Before I began my internship, I arranged to meet with Mavis to get prepared for this assignment. Mavis openly told me about when she began seeing her husbandto-be, and how she was concerned about ethical conflicts, so she decided

A Social Work Student’s Tale  117

that she couldn’t provide social work services to his family. I had heard rural social workers say that “the Code of Ethics does not work” in rural communities. Their experiences taught them that confidentiality and professional boundaries are more of an urban practice that doesn’t make sense in places where communities are small and many of the residents related. Mavis and Simon tried to keep quiet about their relationship but, as it developed, and particularly after they decided to marry, it became the talk of the community. She said that she “cowered like a little mouse” when she first encountered hostility, but later she began to fight back. Some people suggested that she was only marrying an Aboriginal man to get a house. Mavis told them that, by saying so, they were insulting her husband as well as herself. She came to realize that some Aboriginal people as well as white people held prejudiced attitudes. Mavis tried to understand these attitudes and behaviours by reflecting on her own experiences. As a child she had experienced severe poverty, and was discriminated against because of where she lived and the clothes she wore. She realized that she had always taken her “whiteness” for granted. Her knowledge about Aboriginal people was very limited when she began to work in the Aboriginal community. She only knew about First Nations people from a Western point of view that was portrayed in the media, but she was fascinated by Aboriginal spirituality. This fascination – and a wish to help – led her to apply for a job. She was offered the job but became quite fearful as her first day approached. She spent a long time working out what she should wear to work. She did not want to appear overdressed but she thought that she might go to the other extreme and be too casual. It was her jewellery that was criticized on that first day. After several days of trying out different clothes for work, Mavis decided to wear clothes that she found comfortable. As she recalled her first day, Mavis spoke about other challenges. A man who came in to get his welfare cheque looked at her and said, “Who are you?” She replied in what she described as a “squeaky little voice,” “I am the new social worker.” He bellowed in response, “What the f__ do you think you’re going to do here? Grab that mop and start mopping. It’s all you’re good for.” There were lots of people around and she feared that the story would soon spread all through the community. She reminded me that First Nations communities are like other small communities. Word spreads quickly. Her boss, an Aboriginal himself, came out of his office and told the man that he had said

118  Part II – The Stories

enough. Mavis retreated from the room shaking. Then her boss came into her office and told her to not be troubled by the man because he always behaved that way. As she reflected on the incident, Mavis realized just how much pain he must be experiencing. Her boss told Mavis that it would be about three months before she would begin to do any real social work. He advised her that during her first few weeks she should aim to be visible in the community. She took his advice. Mavis soon realized that she needed to unlearn much that she had been taught. For example, on one occasion she suggested that an older person with few family supports might be wise to consider the possibility of a nursing home, and she was told that this suggestion was a “white” suggestion. Mavis felt that everything she said was wrong. At times she felt almost defeated. Nevertheless, she wanted to succeed. Gradually people began to accept that she would not be a typical white social worker – a social worker who came for a short time and then left. As she learned more about Aboriginal culture, Mavis discovered that the best counselling took place on a doorstep or in a car en route to somewhere. She realized that she needed to unlearn “white” social work practices and construct her interventions from Aboriginal perspectives. A meeting with Henry, my fieldwork instructor, was also valuable before I began my practicum. In his opinion, Henry told me, a good social worker is someone who is interested in clients, who has compassion, and who understands child abuse and family violence in an Aboriginal context. Social workers, he said, need to acquire a full understanding about how Aboriginal government works – the role of the Chief in Council and other sources of authority and power within and outside the community. After gaining this knowledge, he stressed, we need to understand the community. We need to learn who are the “movers and shakers,” and then work with them. It’s important to bear in mind, Henry said, that, in an Aboriginal context, “it takes a community to raise a child.” It was clear to me that I would need to unlearn the “white” focus on the nuclear family. As I say, since beginning my practicum, I’ve learned a great deal. Like Mavis, the first guest speaker during that early class, I’ve found some difficulty in gaining acceptance. Henry helped me gain credibility by taking me around the community and introducing me to key people. Many residents in the community have been kind to me and have helped me to learn what I need to know so that I can help them.

A Social Work Student’s Tale  119

Yesterday, Henry told me he’s received feedback that I’m willing to listen. That was feedback I was delighted to receive! During my internship, I’ve learned the importance of networking and I’ve developed skills in this area. For example, transportation is a huge issue in the community where I’ve had my internship. The other day I received a phone call from someone who needs to take her son to Halifax for a medical appointment. She needs transport to travel there or a grant to buy bus tickets. So I got on the phone. I approached Income Support, the hospital social worker, the Health Department, and the Chief in Council. Together we managed to secure the necessary funding. I’ve also learned to consider the community as my primary resource, rather than look for services outside of it. The other day I received a complaint that the three young children in a family were playing, unsupervised, on a high snow bank. The caller was concerned that the children would fall into the snow bank and suffocate. Sometimes calls of this nature are vindictive, but I gained the impression that the caller was genuinely concerned. I visited the parents. Together we worked out a plan for safety. I have learned that dependency among the community members, accompanied by a sense of entitlement, can sometimes present problems for social workers in First Nations communities. When I was on intake duty during my first week, I received a number of phone calls from people who wanted money to solve some problem. On one occasion, I couldn’t think where to go for assistance so I asked Henry for direction. Henry asked me questions: Did the caller really need the money? Had I explored whether the caller had thought about non-monetary ways of solving the problem? Did the caller have access to monetary resources that he could draw upon? These were all good questions. In my zeal to help I had tried to solve a problem that did not really need social work intervention. Henry explained processes by which government policies had led to “learned helplessness” within Aboriginal communities. I learned that sometimes the best way to help is to encourage clients to draw upon their own resources, monetary and non-monetary alike. After my conversation with Mavis, I decided it was important for me to try to understand racism as it’s experienced in rural Aboriginal communities. I listened carefully to what my clients and co-workers said about this matter. I learned that sometimes interpersonal racism

120  Part II – The Stories

was often subtle; one person described it as “read between the lines” or “in the closet” racism. People living and working in the community agreed that racism is certainly all around but it is hidden. Statements are made that can be taken two ways. Even though everyone knows that there is a racist intent, when people are confronted they deny racism or claim it was a joke or a misunderstanding. One person spoke about a visit to a local farmers’ market. When she was inspecting cherry tomatoes she was told repeatedly what they were. She thought to herself, “I know they are cherry tomatoes and I can read.” The implication was clear to her, she said: either she was stupid or she couldn’t read. During my internship I have learned how cultural imperialism is reflected in practice. As I became more familiar with cultural patterns in the community where I was working, I became aware of the pitfalls of viewing every situation through a “white” lens. I began to understand how people in the community might resolve issues such as child care or the care of older people. I learned how “white” structures such as Indian Affairs are frequently not relevant in Aboriginal communities; I discovered that the concept of “chief” has been Europeanized and politicized so that the current role of “chief” bears little resemblance to its original Aboriginal role. My experiences have also helped me to understand attitudes of Aboriginal people towards white people. On one occasion, I was discussing a child care issue with a parent and her mother. The parent became very angry with me and stormed out of the room. I was shaken by the incident. Her mother said quietly that I must remember that white people, particularly those in authority, reminded her people about the history of oppression that they had experienced and I must harden myself and not take such outbursts personally. I’ve learned so much from my clients! Henry reinforced what the mother had told me. He also reminded me that there is much pent-up anger in Aboriginal communities, and whatever other work I am doing, I should also bear in mind that Aboriginal people are healing from the abuse perpetuated by previous generations of white people. During the time I’ve been on my internship, I have encountered extreme poverty. My heart has gone out to people who have to choose between buying food and keeping warm. I have felt guilty about the history of oppression that has led to such poverty. I made the mistake of saying, “I pity you” to one of the clients. She told me that pity and the guilt of white people does nothing to help her people. I won’t make statements like that again.

A Social Work Student’s Tale  121

During my internship I have also been learning about a “dance” that goes on when a white social worker works with an Aboriginal client. I have learned to realize that I am being tested during the early minutes of an encounter with a client. Clients will see how far they can push me. Just yesterday a client told me “I slapped my daughter” and then waited to see how I would react. I realized that my reaction was very important. Word gets around very quickly in small communities, particularly in close-knit Aboriginal ones. I’ve needed to do a lot of learning since I’ve been an intern. I’ve also had to do a lot of unlearning, too. When I first arrived I was ready to polish my new counselling skills and social work skills. I found that often knowledge and skills were not relevant. I’m learning how to work from within the community. I need to learn more about the community, or what one of my professors calls its “story,” if I’m to be an effective social worker. My midterm evaluation went well. Henry said that I’m developing a good rapport with people in the community and that they’re keen to help me to become a good social worker. I am grateful to Mavis, to Henry, to co-workers. Most of all I am grateful to the clients who are helping me to learn how to practise in small Aboriginal communities.

11 Working in Another Language: A Doctor’s Tale

Rural medicine and rural life are like working in another language; it’s a huge classroom and every day you learn about how things work. You observe at the same time that you participate. And I love it! I really do. It gives me satisfaction; something wondrous comes back to me. But while something comes back to me, it has to come from within. I have to feel like I’m doing a good job here and I’m able to look at the good parts of it and learn from the bad parts. You have to do the best that you can and then move on. If you don’t have that ability, then you could easily pack it in. In saying this, I should add that the first five years were the roughest for me, before I really felt, “Okay, now I can do this.” So, it was touch and go for a while. I guess that over those early years a transition happened. I did a little psychology on myself and it became a real time for growth and development to be able to muster the inner strength and wisdom that a rural doctor needs in order to stay. However, it was more of an adjustment than I had anticipated during the first five years. In medical school we had no courses whatsoever on rural medicine, so I had little idea of what to expect as a doctor living in a small mining, logging, and fishing community. Rural medicine is not for everyone, and I’ve felt that way many, many times – especially in the beginning. I don’t think it was a conscious change that took place for me; I think it was something that I learned over time. I was originally from a city of about 60,000 people that had two large hospitals, but I came to like being a country doctor. After graduation from UNB and McGill, I set up practice in Morristown, New Brunswick, and was fortunate to have Dr Andy Thompson as a mentor practising in the village 45 minutes away. During my medical degree, I had the option of doing an internship with Dr Thompson in Stewartville, which itself is

A Doctor’s Tale  123

about a 2–3 hour drive from Fredericton, where the nearest fully serviced hospital and Emergency Room are located. I shadowed him and did everything he did. It was a great experience. He introduced me to the whats, whens, and whys of rural medicine and how it differed from urban medicine. It “lit a spark” for me and I had a new respect for medicine. To this day, my urban colleagues will talk about some aspect of practice and I’ll say, “We do that in my practice,” but they don’t do that in theirs; they don’t have the skills that I have – skills from first-hand experience with almost everything. To be a rural doctor, you need to be a kind of loner, I think. Maybe, that’s what makes a successful rural doctor. Maybe, that’s what has made Dr Thompson and me successful here; we both learned to deal with being alone in our professional lives. Maybe that’s why we stay. Interesting notion, I hadn’t thought of it before. The biggest factor, in my view, is that you don’t have the professional support that you would have in urban practices. I guess both Dr Thompson and I are both kind of isolated. We might see each other a couple times a year and that’s it. Other than that, there’s no professional support, so you have to get used to working on your own and being satisfied with feeling like you’re doing a good job from within yourself; the support is not going to come from anywhere else. I remember a couple of times as a medical student that I assisted in surgeries in the hospital and I was sitting in the surgeons’ lounge hearing the other doctors talking about rural cases that they had, and how difficult it was getting support and feedback from other doctors. They were saying, “You did the right thing; don’t worry about it.” As a rural doctor, you ache for that kind of thing, because you don’t have that in very rural practices; it has to come from within. That’s all I can say. We deal with things as they come up – within our comfort level and within our skill level – but we deal with things like setting fractures and doing sutures and sort of minor trauma type of things such as stabilizing patients before they are transported for an hour or two to the nearest equipped hospital. Physicians talk about that “golden hour” when it comes to trauma care. That “golden hour” here in rural New Brunswick is spent in the back of an ambulance transporting a patient; we do all we can to ensure that the patient is able to be transported safely. Ambulance services in the province used to be run by local families who volunteered their time and who knew their neighbours, and may have been related to many of them. A few years ago, the province privatized the service so ambulances are stationed in locations where

124  Part II – The Stories

they are now mid-way between villages and may have a 30- or 40-minute drive to the emergency site. A lot of procedures that rural doctors do, urban doctors don’t get a chance to do. Here, the social side of medicine is important. Dr Thompson used to say that when you treat somebody in a rural community you are treating the patient’s whole family – the cousins, aunts, uncles, and the whole community basically – by treating that one person. There are networks of people that you are treating when you’re dealing with just one individual, and you may not have any idea who they all are until you see them. You see them at the grocery store. You see them at the post office, and they ask about that patient’s health. Everywhere you go, they are there. It kind of brings it all closer to home. During my early years here, I read Barry Lopez’s book, Arctic Dreams (1986), and it helped me understand rural living beyond the patient’s symptoms. Lopez spent time in the remote Canadian Arctic with Inuit communities. The words of his Jesuit teachers from schools in the United States guided him in the Arctic, “If you want to know, you’ve got to be in a classroom with a person … you’ve got to be on your own … opening yourself up to it, becoming vulnerable… And then just listen” (Moyers, 2010). Though not a medical doctor, Lopez’s quotes have helped me to understand my patients by listening as well – listening to what they tell about themselves and their lives: “Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion” (Lopez, 1986). Knowing my patients’ stories helps me to know how to care for them, their families, and their community. I remember when I first set up practice here. I would treat a patient, and sometimes another patient would say, “Oh I’m a cousin of his and I heard what you did for him.” I then realized just how huge this rural network is – small communities but huge networks. There are big families here with a lot of cousins, lots of aunts and uncles – longestablished Irish, Acadian, and Aboriginal families for the most part who have worked in logging, mining, and the fisheries for generations. I learned that I’m not just affecting this person individually; I’m affecting a lot of people in their circle of life. While this network is an extraordinary support for the patient, it can create a need to maintain a professional distance. There’s a fine line between maintaining a professional distance and getting close to patients and their families; you have to find that place for yourself – no one can teach you this. I feel pretty comfortable with that right now.

A Doctor’s Tale  125

Like I said, I tend to be a loner so I don’t get inside their families. I don’t feel like I have to be a part of my patients’ lives, which is probably good, because they don’t want me to be a part of their lives either. I’m an outsider, I’m from away and I always will be. And that’s okay with me; I’m comfortable with that, but if I were the type of person who needed to be entwined in the community and be accepted by everyone, I would have a much harder time, I expect. So, I have a really good balance; it depends on who you are. Recently, in the medical journals there were a few doctors writing about this issue of not being too involved in patients’ lives. One doctor wrote about going to patients’ funerals, saying that he would never do that because it crossed the line. I didn’t see that at all. To me, going to a funeral is really important. I go to as many of them as I can, because that’s when you see the cousins, the brothers and sisters; you see all of this. I don’t know what to call it, like a web of people that you’re affecting, and that’s really important to me. I think it is also important to the community for their doctor to show up, while at the same time maintaining a professional distance. You don’t have to go into these people’s homes and eat dinner with them, but you can still be there to show that you’re a part of their lives – that they are important to you and that their lives meant something to you as their doctor. It’s just a balance; that’s how I see it. I think that people who don’t put themselves in that situation are missing something very important. Grieving practices differ from culture to culture, and I have had the privilege of being part of the processes for different communities as they honour the life of a loved one – an elder, a friend, a child. I learned a little about different ways of grieving and of healing that university studies didn’t offer. The doctor in this medical journal was talking about not going to funerals because he thought that confidentiality was at risk. But I don’t see that. I deal with confidentiality in a different way. I just know that when people expect me to talk about their family members I simply remind them that I’ll listen to what they’re saying but I won’t talk about things that are confidential, and they understand that. They appreciate it because they know that when they talk to me about something personal, I’m in turn not going to talk to their family members about it. I just don’t see the struggle that these physicians have, which makes me feel sorry that they’re missing out on a part of something that’s very fulfilling in working with rural families.

126  Part II – The Stories

It’s a really special thing to be part of a death, too. I consider it a big honour to be a part of somebody’s death. Recently, I had a patient whom I’d been looking after at home and making almost weekly house calls to before she died. I had the privilege of going to the house and pronouncing her dead and seeing all the family members there, and a few days later, I went to her funeral. To me it’s just special to be able to do that. I like being part of this time in a patient’s life. It’s all a part of life, a solemn occasion that gives me a good perspective on life. I consider it to be as important as a birth. I have a relatively small practice, probably around 2,500 patients, which in a rural area would be considered smaller than average, but they are spread out geographically sometimes in places that are difficult to access or even to find. Some rural doctors have up to 5,000 patients. I deal with, as they say, cradle to grave care, prenatal babies to advanced elderly. I work full-time and do on-call as well – a little bit of everything – house calls, emergency work, lots of psychological care, and a lot of support work. When I first came here, Dr Thompson was doing on call all the time, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, and he spent a lot of his time working, day and night. Patients found it very easy to access him. When I came I fell into doing that, too. I would be on call for a week and then he would be on call for week; we’d cover each other’s practices. I did that for five years, and I felt totally overwhelmed. It was one of the things that made me want to leave. I had a young family and they needed my time and care as well. My spouse was stressed caring for the children during my on-call weeks. I often wondered how Dr Thompson managed to raise his family during their early years. I came to a point after being on call for one weekend and then for a full week straight that I just couldn’t do it anymore; that was it. I began looking for other practices at that point and spoke with doctors in nearby communities. We all got together and talked it out, and came up with a solution whereby we now have the calls forwarded to the nurses at the nearest rural hospital, which is a long ways away, but they are there 24/7 and used to rural life, so they have experience in that. The nurses are used to triaging calls. They take all our calls first, see what they can do over the phone, and page us if they feel it is necessary. So now I take one weekend off a month, which has made it much more bearable.

A Doctor’s Tale  127

Home phone calls are another challenge. For me, when residents call me at home or come to my house, that is a definite barrier. I drew the line when I came here on the advice of other rural physicians in the area, though I know some rural doctors don’t seem to mind this. After I arrived, some said that when you first set up practice in rural locations, you’re going to have people testing your limits to see how much they can access you, and it is up to you to draw the limit, to say, “This is my private life, do not cross this line.” They gave me suggestions about what to do, so the first time somebody came to my door, a few months after I had been here, I assessed the situation and determined that it was not urgent and asked them to come to the office or call the health line in future. In small communities gossip travels very quickly, which happened on this occasion, but it was never a problem after that. You need to be compassionate but firm about the boundaries. You need to set these up for your own survival. Though some doctors list their home numbers, I never give my number out; it’s not listed. You need to set up those kinds of barriers at first, and you feel really bad about doing that, but if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have lasted another year; I’d have had to leave. You need to find a balance for yourself that is comfortable for you and for the community you serve. I’m not sure how it is for those in other professions, like ministers, teachers, and social workers, but I expect it’s an individual thing depending on each of our situations. For most of the weekends that I’m not on call, I leave the area and go to a nearby city – anywhere to get a short break – to recover for the next week. I don’t do much grocery shopping here either, nor do I do my banking here; I go to Fredericton for those activities, which may sound a little distant, but rural life can be quite a fishbowl when everyone knows your business, as it can for your children, too! As a rural doctor, you get asked to do a lot of unusual things. I’ve been asked to be a vet on occasion, though I know little about animals, and asked to be a dentist as well. Rural people find it expensive to go to a vet or a dentist, so they sometimes ask the family doctor. Mostly, though, people need you to be a counsellor – marriage counsellor, personal counsellor – that type of thing. I delivered a baby in the ambulance bay, one time; it was a frantic call. That was a call to my house that I didn’t mind taking. When I first came here we were much more involved in every ambulance call. That was overwhelming, and things really changed when the user pay

128  Part II – The Stories

requirement was established for the ambulance service. In fact, the user pay policy has shifted on and off many times during my years in the province. It can be financially stressful, however, if the family facing an emergency such as an automobile accident has to come up with $125 to $200 to cover the cost of the ambulance service, when they may not even be able to put food on the table. I found this hard to deal with, knowing that many of my patients were living with meagre incomes. When residents don’t have to pay the user fee, it is a blessing. So the ambulance personnel now do most of the work on their own, as they are highly trained, but occasionally I’ll be asked to see people. It’s a nice balance. As I think about this, balance is a word that comes up quite frequently. Searching for that balance is difficult at times – not only my own balance, but balance for patients and their needs and expenses. I know that lots of doctors in the city charge patients for filling out medical notes for work and other forms, but I can’t do that. I know that many of my patients have seasonal work, are unemployed, or are elderly living on minimal incomes; they need every cent to care for themselves and their families. We have wonderful support services in most small New Brunswick communities – extramural nursing, public health nursing, and a great ambulance service – that helps out a lot. The government was going to amalgamate our services, take away our ambulance service and put it in another village, but they came up with a plan where the service was to be shared part-time in both villages so that the ambulance is stationed somewhere between both villages. Rural people, especially in New Brunswick, don’t always have a civic address, or if they do then nobody knows what it is because they don’t use it. When I’d have a call for a home outside the main area, I would ask the person: “Where do you live?” “What’s your address?” They would have no idea of the address, or they’d say, “I don’t know what the house number is,” and they’d either have to send somebody out to look at the number on the house or they might give you directions that only those who’ve lived here all their lives would know. “Doc, you know where that house is that burned down 10 years ago; you remember that one? Well you turn right there and after that you turn where the farmer’s field used to be but it’s all grown over now. You turn there and go down the dirt road till you see the two big pine trees together. After that, it’s just a hop, skip, and jump over the old bridge and past the bog near the river. You can’t miss the old grey house on your right!” They just don’t get it, since they haven’t needed

A Doctor’s Tale  129

to give directions to their house – everyone in the villages and surrounding areas knows. You learn how to deal with that. The other thing that I think is invaluable here is to have one of the office staff from the area. My office assistant was born and raised here; she helps me a great deal. Even when people don’t tell me things, she’ll say, “You’re best bet is to follow these landmarks.” Or she’ll tell me a family’s background about how things came about so that I understand and don’t have to ask them personal questions that may be difficult for them. This helps, because all kind of things fall into place when I understand. A staff member who is from the area is an important resource to have. Just coming up with novel ways to do little things is important, since you really don’t want to send people to emergency rooms. I remember just recently this child who had gotten his finger stuck in a pipe. I wasn’t asking his family to drive an hour or two to the Fredericton ER and sit there for hours, so we tried a pipe cutter on one side and tried to pry it apart. It wouldn’t budge. So my nurse and I, with 12 years of professional education between us, stood there asking ourselves, “What are we going to do?” And with that, this 8-year-old child said, “Why don’t you just turn it around and cut through the other end and cut it in half?” We both burst out laughing because this 8-year-old child figured it out. You have to learn to think outside the box, I guess, which is something I’m still learning to do. It’s an ongoing thing. We have exciting things happen in this small community. I even did a helicopter rescue once that was fun. Back in the woods somebody had gone off the dirt road on his ATV, so we had to be helicoptered in and rescue this guy. Every day is an adventure. In these rural areas, we don’t rely on technology as much as on our own abilities. This, in my view, is a problem with our national conferences, like those for continuing medical education that are geared to urban specialists. They say that the gold standard for diagnosing is a CT or MRI, and rural doctors just laugh and wonder, “How about talking to the patient and listening to her chest because that’s as far as its going to get, because a lot of people can’t make it to the city hospitals to get all these sophisticated diagnostics done.” There’s a Canadian group called Rural Physicians of Canada, or something like that, but there’s no New Brunswick group. Dr Thompson and Dr Snow and I do get together once in a while to have discussions and do continuing medical education; we have little sessions mostly at Dr Thompson’s house, which is midway between Dr Snow’s and my

130  Part II – The Stories

house. He will organize the event, have a specialist come in, and give a talk on a certain topic. It gives the three of us time to get together and talk about medical issues. Teaching medical students is important, too. I have had summer students here, who usually come from Dalhousie or from Université de Sherbrooke in their first or second year of medical school. I’m bilingual so I’m comfortable teaching in both English and French. What is most heart-warming is that several of them have gone into family medicine and some into rural practice because they were impressed with the things that we did here. I think it would be nice if medical students, all of them, had a little more of an idea about what rural medical practice is like. That’s why I agreed to this interview. It would be good for those who are considering rural practice, but also for others so that they know what to expect when receiving a patient referral from a rural doctor. I know that the skills that I acquired from Dr Thompson before I came here were invaluable. Also, having a colleague to talk to is important. We talk about the boundary issues and the psychology of rural practice, which really help make a difference for me. I teach them that rural doctors have to learn unusual things such as reading X-rays on their own. You can’t pop down to the radiology department and say, “What do you think?” Hopefully now we are going to get some tele-medicine in the area, and diagnostic images can be transported to rural doctors’ offices, but I have to say that reading an X-ray on your own is one of the scariest things as a rural doctor, when you have no one to consult with. The three chronic illnesses that keep me busy here are diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity. They take up 50% of my clinic time. It probably has a lot to do with sedentary lifestyles, poor eating habits, not enough money for good quality food, limited options in grocery stores, limited opportunities for education, and genetics. My nurse and I also do a lot of sexusal counselling. That’s something I’ve tried to bring to the community. I’m very comfortable talking about that and I made it a priority because there are a lot teen pregnancies and a lot of sexually transmitted diseases, and so I hope and think that, over time, the kids are becoming more comfortable. I’m not going to judge them, so I think I’ve made inroads in that aspect. Drugs can be a big thing, prescription drug abuse especially. I was invited to a community meeting at the school recently, but I decided not to attend. I know the users, the parents, even the dealers, but I have to consider that I’m their doctor. I have to be aware of the risks of breaking

A Doctor’s Tale  131

confidentiality. They wanted community members to give anonymous tips about where the drugs were coming from. If somebody thought for a minute that I was party to giving anonymous tips to some authority, I place my professional relationships at risk. As a neighbour I am supportive, but as a doctor I need to be vigilant on behalf of my patients. They all want it to stop, even the drug users, but they don’t know how. Everybody is desperate. It’s a tough one. We had a drug addictions counsellor who came out here from Fredericton once every month or so, or every two weeks at the end. She was probably here for a couple of years, but she didn’t have enough business to keep her going. So she left, and that was kind of a kicker. Why wouldn’t people seek help? I don’t know. Maybe it was because she was coming from away, and people didn’t trust her. Maybe it was because she was here only every two weeks, which is not enough. Maybe people felt like they didn’t deserve the help. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s the rural mindset of “We can handle it; this is our problem and we’ll deal with it.” This mindset often wins out over getting help and changing old ways. In rural medicine, once in a while you break through and really help somebody. Even if the individual doesn’t acknowledge it, you know that you did help and you can feel really, really good about that. It’s on a very basic level. It’s not about using big machines and fancy images and all these wonderful diagnostic tools and interventions. It’s about saying to somebody, “I think that you’re strong enough to get out of this adverse situation, this abusive marriage that you’re in.” And then you see it happen and you see that person move on and you know he or she has a better life. You know that it involves just talking to someone and telling that person that you believe in him and that his life can change. It didn’t cost the government, it costs them next to nothing, but it can make all the difference in the world for that person. That’s what fuels my fire I guess. It’s just the simple things; it’s the everyday things that we do. It’s when patients say “Thank you” when they feel you’ve helped them make a difference in their health or their lives. Not every doctor gets appreciation from patients. Some specialists may not even see a patient after care – the anaesthetists, the radiologists, for example. A rural doctor can get a verbal nod of appreciation, but also get to see and be part of how a patient’s birth, life, or death unfolds in meaningful ways. One of the things that impressed me most about rural people is that they are extremely stoic and resilient. I have over the years had to tell a number of people that they have cancer and that it’s not treatable, and

132  Part II – The Stories

I have never once ever had them cry in my office. Not once! I find that so hard to believe; they take it as it comes. Maybe they go home and cry, but they don’t do it here. I can’t get over the stoicism of rural people. I guess they’ve been through so much over the generations, with seasonal work – hard work – in forests, mills and mines, and fishing boats that provide employment and then shut down leaving workers unemployed with little or nothing to go on to support their families. The mill and mine here both closed over the past five years and with global warming the fishery is declining. Supporting businesses closed and only basic services remained. Local rail and bus services declined, leaving residents limited options for travel to the big cities for hospital care or shopping. Many of the young people have left to find a life elsewhere, and the adults are also leaving to find work out West in order to support their families. It is sad, because the older folk who have sustained these communities stay and, unlike in their day, they have few relatives and mostly older neighbours to care for them or to help with expenses. Maybe they have learned to take it as it comes – the loss of work, the poverty, the lack of resources, and the unpredictability of industrial seasonal employment. It makes me think often of Jim Dorie’s song “All Gone Now” (Ghosts of Pictou County, 2012) about small towns in the Maritime provinces dying off slowly: “It’s all gone now, like smoke on the breeze./ Nothin left to see, except in memories.” The other thing that came to my mind is that you really have to learn to deal with the religious side of things because people here are very religious. You have to be able to know how to deal with that aspect of their lives. That is a bit of what plays into the stoicism, too, I expect. It’s God’s will. I don’t need your help. If He wants me to be healed, He will heal me. That just came to my mind because I had a drug user who refuses all help. He just feels like if he hangs out with the right people and goes to the right church that he’ll be okay. Unfortunately, that’s not going to work but it’s okay. This just led me to think about another woman who had breast cancer and she let it go for years before she admitted it to a physician. And it was actually discovered incidentally when she was in the hospital, but she refused all treatment and all help. I remember talking to her about that and why, why she was refusing that, and she just said, “Because it’s God’s will and I’m going to be healed; He’s going to heal me.” So you have to gently talk to people with such beliefs. So I said to her, “I understand that and I understand that miracles can happen and that you believe that miracles can happen, but what if God’s will is for you not to be

A Doctor’s Tale  133

healed?” And she said, “I will be healed.” That was the end of the conversation. So that kind of puts up a wall between us, if you know what I mean. Where can I go? I messed that one up honestly, but I learned a lot from it. With religion being such a huge part of this community, I think it would be much more difficult for me if I hadn’t had that background in my own life. I sort of know the language and rituals and what it all means to them. Even though it’s not a part of my life now, I can talk with my patients and we understand each other’s perspective. I know where they’re coming from. I’m involved in community activities that give me so much insight and stir so much compassion and respect for the families who have lived in this seasonal working environment. Every year I’m asked to sit on school scholarship committees, where the applicant’s parents’ income is identified. It shocks me every time how little these people here make, and how humbled I am by the fact that they are such good citizens who contribute their time and what little they have to the community and to their neighbours. Life here is very difficult, and maybe that’s a part of what helps them build up this quiet dignity that I see so often in them. They learn to live without a lot, and take it as it comes. I’d like to know more about that – what makes them so resilient and stoic. There are days when I realize how fortunate I am to have a university education and to have seen some of the world. People in this community find it a big event to travel to Fredericton, one hour away. It’s humbling – a reality check – realizing that I have no idea what life is like for the local people. I can care for them as their doctor and listen to their stories, but when I learn that there is poverty and isolation hidden deep below the surface having a severe impact on their lives, I know that in my practice I only see the tip of the iceberg. I am rarely privileged to see their personal hardships. I do what I can to make their lives a little better with medical care that focuses on them as people. Rural medicine involves continuously learning a different language – the language that is both spoken and silently held in the stories that the people live.

12 Taking Care of Business: A Social Work Director’s Tale

I’m not sure I’m a good person to be talking to about rural helping because, for the last four months, I’ve been out on stress leave. I must be getting better, though, because I don’t think I’d have been strong enough to talk with you a couple of months ago. I prefer not to talk much about my stress leave, just to say that it’s the first time I have needed to take such a thing. Stresses of work and stresses in my private life combined about five years ago. I tried to struggle on but I realized that it was not good for the clients, and not good for me, to do so. My colleagues and friends said that they’d seen it coming for a long time. Unfortunately, I’m one of many social workers in the province who’s on stress leave at present. As it stands right now, I’m not sure if I’ll return to my job eventually, or look for another social work job – or leave the profession entirely. My name is Jack Briggs and I got my Bachelor of Social Work degree from St Thomas University in the 1980s. I had a practicum placement at Fredericton General Hospital and I was fortunate to be offered a full-time job when I graduated. After a year, I left that job and spent two years as a child protection worker in the Miramichi area. Then I returned to the hospital, where I’ve been a social worker for some 18 years. During this time I’ve worked in orthopaedics, paediatrics, oncology, and geriatrics. Three years ago I was appointed to the position of director of Social Services. Since then, I’ve learned about the work on other wards, too. You want to know about social work and other helping work in rural communities? Well, to begin, about 60% of the population of New Brunswick is rural, but this is an oversimplification. The term “rural” is relative. Recently a medical student on an internship from Dalhousie

A Social Work Director’s Tale  135

University referred to the whole of New Brunswick as rural. Certainly, the towns and cities of New Brunswick are small compared with towns and cities in much of Canada. Here in Fredericton, the capital city, the population is about 60,000. For most Canadians this is small, but if you come from Perth, a town upriver, then Fredericton is a big city. And if you are coming to the Fredericton Hospital from a small village or town, visitors tell us that Fredericton is overwhelming. The Fredericton General Hospital is small in comparison with hospitals in other capital cities, but is large for New Brunswick. The hospital is located in Region Three and is part of the Horizon Health Network or the English health network; Vitalité is the French hospital network. New Brunswick is a bilingual province and health care is available for patients in both official languages. Region Three is the largest of the health care regions, and serves about 200,000 people, out of the 750,000 across the province. Yearly admissions run about 25,000, and the social work staff serve up to 20,000. We look after all age groups and, more and more, are devoting resources to the increasing senior in-patient Alternate Level of Care (ALC) population. In New Brunswick larger numbers of seniors in need of long-term care cannot get placements and are admitted to hospitals for such care. The province cannot build nursing homes fast enough, nor does it have the financial resources, to cope with the tidal wave of seniors with dementia in need of special care. Indeed, the Alzheimer Society of New Brunswick has termed this crisis a “perfect storm.” The Fredericton Hospital’s proportion of in-patient seniors awaiting placements, or ALCs as they are called in administrative circles, or “bed blockers” as they are labelled by some groups, is currently over 23% and rising. Fredericton General is the referral centre for the most complex cases in the surrounding area but there are also six community hospitals in the Horizon Health Network, including a relatively new facility in the Upper River Valley, Waterville Hospital. Saint John General offers the province’s trauma and acute cardiac care services. When the province developed six facilities in the region at Perth-Andover, Bath, Oromocto, Woodstock, Plaster Rock, and Waterville, my job changed a lot. Before their development, I often travelled “upriver” to visit my clients. Now there is an expectation that people will come to one of the hospitals. There’s always a concern for hospital-based social workers that their clients, especially elderly ones, when discharged are going home to families or communities where they can be cared for or checked on. In rural areas of New Brunswick, isolation is a risk factor for seniors living

136  Part II – The Stories

on country roads away from the nearest town or village. For example, if someone in a rural part of the province is diagnosed with cancer or her child needs special treatment in the city, her rural community will often rally around her. However, if she returns home to a location where there are few neighbours, she may become overwhelmed with the fear of complications or of being on her own without support. The Extramural Nursing Program in the province will have nurses visit them as needed – daily or weekly, perhaps – but for the remaining hours in the day and night she may be dealing with anxiety and fear that something will happen and she will have no one around to help. Rural communities, more so than urban ones, it seems, hold frequent fundraisers for ill neighbours and sometimes will set up visiting teams for families in need. However, it can fall to the social worker to make such arrangements so that they are secure as the individuals recover. We can alert local groups and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to assist them during the first weeks of their recuperation. In the Florenceville area, for example, the McCains, a world-famous potato company, and local multicultural associations assist newcomers who don’t have a network of family and friends – and there are quite a number of newcomers in the nearby towns as far away as Woodstock. People say that it takes generations to become established and to develop a network for support in rural settings. This can be true. Nevertheless, on the whole, I’ve found more compassion and more social support within the community for people who live in rural settings. Though in the cities, folks tend to expect formal services, in rural locations people look to their community for support. It’s important for rural social workers to learn about community leaders who will lend aid to individuals in times of need. Problems can arise when people need to move from their rural communities for hospital treatment in the cities. Sometimes, they have to remain in Fredericton for treatment but are not admitted to the hospital. Some of the rural patients I’ve worked with tell me that it can be overwhelming to come to Fredericton if they don’t know anyone or don’t have any family who can help. They may need short- or longterm accommodations and not know the best and most reasonable places to go for housing or to buy groceries and essentials. At a time when they’re not in the best of health, and probably stressed because of illness, they face more demands trying to establish themselves as temporary residents in the city in order to access the hospital for treatments or tests. There’s often an additional financial burden when patients are

A Social Work Director’s Tale  137

required to pay for long-term housing and need to maintain their rural homes at the same time. If they don’t have extra financial resources, they face multiple worries during an already stressful time. When children are ill and need to be treated in hospital, one or both parents will come with them. Sometimes a parent can stay in the hospital with the child, and the hospital will provide a cot for the room, but this isn’t always the case. Whether a parent sleeps in the hospital or finds other accommodation, expenses are high. Social workers are informed and try to meet with the family to help plan for some of the costs or to recommend options. Hospital social workers don’t have financial resources to help, but they do feel concerned, knowing that patients and families may not be able to manage. It causes a lot of stress for us, which accumulates over time, particularly now with so many seniors needing assistance. I recall that when I was a BSW student, we spent a lot of time talking about ways of handling stress but, for some reason, these classroom discussions didn’t transfer into the workplace. And over 35 years, you’d think I’d have the skills for dealing with stress down pat, but that isn’t the case. The limitations of our systems to respond have worn me down. I’ve seen this with many of the social workers in my teams, too. I am aware that students complete their professional education with a zeal to help, but then they end up working ridiculous hours that don’t get them where they had planned or hoped to be with the clients. They don’t have the necessary resources to help their clients, and they feel helpless. No wonder the number of days that social workers take off in stress leave is so high! The nature of social work lends itself to stress, I think, since people who are referred to us during hospital care and treatments bring along their troubles and pressures as well as their health crises. I find it particularly heart-rending to witness the plight of children who are critically or terminally ill, or to witness frail seniors suffer from cognitive or physical deterioration and have no family support. While we work mostly with seniors who are mentally, physically, or socially unwell rather than those who are well, our caseloads are huge nonetheless. We try to help everyone we can and at times end up needing help ourselves, which can lead to cutting corners to get the work done. At these times, important signs and facts can get overlooked. Prioritizing assignments is a constant challenge when dealing with competing demands. Social workers are generally employed by government agencies that by nature are bureaucratic and slow in responding, that have systems designed to protect themselves, it seems, more than their clients. Those

138  Part II – The Stories

of us in administrative positions try to protect our social workers by taking on some of their workloads, only to become overworked and stressed ourselves. I describe my work sometimes as being like a hamster on a wheel – going round and round trying to find a way off but going nowhere. New Brunswick has developed or imported a lot of programs and some are helpful. Often, though, they come with a “one size fits all” model that simply won’t work for rural residents. You need to know your region and its people reasonably well in order to design or adapt a program that may work for their circumstances. Also, at times, there are just no programs available for people in rural areas, and so they are deprived of access to the service and there is little we can do about it, though we believe that rural citizens should have the same opportunities to improve their lives as urban citizens do. One program that I recall that has been valuable in rural communities for patients who have been discharged after breast cancer surgery is “Look Good, Feel Better.” Personal advice is given to those who attend about hair care, wig care, skin care, and more. Specialists in each of these fields travel from Fredericton to smaller communities every second month. The success of the sessions is evident as those who attend leave just glowing! It’s heart-warming to witness the transformation of attitudes and confidence as they gain control over their appearance. Some of them come by to see me when they return to Fredericton for follow-up, which is a rarity for social workers – to have discharged patients stop by to see you when they are in the hospital. I appreciate this a lot. Doctors and nurses tell us that their patients say “Thank-you” to them often and it feels good – they know they are doing a meaningful job – but social workers rarely have that happen. Mostly, we get the complaints about how the bureaucracy makes life difficult for them or about the government’s clawing back their funding for this or that. Social workers in both rural and urban practice talk about the difficulties experienced when roles are blurred between social workers and other professionals. In my early career, when the province was closing a psychiatric hospital and residents were being returned to their families and communities, a nurse who should have done the discharge assessment was too busy, so I was sent instead. It was difficult. As long as I was doing the talking to the resident things were okay, but as soon as the resident spoke, it was clear that he was delusional. Since part of my assignment was to check his medications, I told him that I needed to see his pills. He let me into his home and I noticed that no one else

A Social Work Director’s Tale  139

was there. I had not thought about the danger I might be putting myself into, until I realized the risks before me. I quickly did what I needed to do and left. With the wisdom of age, I look back on my naiveté and appreciate that my departure was a safe one. We take personal safety more seriously now, and we inform social worker students about managing risky situations when there is no one there to help. On a visit to a patient in the Miramichi area on an icy winter day many years ago, the person I was visiting did not want to let me into his home. I parked in a long driveway that slanted down, and was worried that I would fall and break a leg or that the car would slide back onto the road. As I stepped out of the car, I heard a dog barking fiercely. In a state of fright and sudden confusion, I froze, thinking this big dog might attack me if he ever snapped the cord holding him. There were no cell phones then to call for help, so I gingerly stepped to the door and knocked until someone answered. A man peered through the curtains. Seeing how distressed I was, he finally opened the door to calm the dog and let me in. There have been many times over the years on visits to homes off the beaten track when I was scared doing the visit. Experience brought more confidence and tricks to use to offset the dangers and my fears. Over time, fear and insight seemed to balance themselves out. I became less anxious and learned that there may be subtle gifts hidden in the visits with a wise old farmer or grandmother who reminisced about olden times and local characters. I felt that I could stay for hours just listening to their engaging stories and humorous tales that left me on the long car ride home, reflecting on my own life. I know from my experience and from talking with colleagues at professional gatherings that there is a huge amount of stress among social workers, particularly in child protection and child care, and I remember this from my early days working in Miramichi. Often, though, I think that a disproportionate share of social work resources are devoted to children’s services in urban settings, which leaves rural social workers facing a higher degree of stress in trying to help their clients. I’ve heard some say that the most tragic hardship is experienced by older adults and people with disabilities living in rural communities or small towns. Sometimes during the winter months older adults in rural locations are virtual prisoners in their homes. Public transport may be unavailable (our local bus service and train service were both closed down a few years ago, so rural seniors need to rely on family or friends for drives to the cities) to take them to medical appointments, or they may be too disabled or frail to use the transport that is available. People

140  Part II – The Stories

who are unsteady on their feet – and this is quite a high proportion of older adults – are often fearful about slipping on the ice and sustaining a fracture. Poverty experienced by the very old is almost as heartrending as poverty experienced by the very young. Sometimes older adults choose between keeping warm and having a meal. It has been only in the past decade or so that we’ve recognized that elder abuse exists, both in homes and in institutions. For decades social workers have known about older people who are victims of physical, sexual, or financial abuse – abuse that is more likely to be hidden in rural settings. It has become clear to me that the profession is vulnerable to stress as I learned that a number of rural social workers have taken leaves of absence to deal with their states of exhaustion and burnout. I guess our professional social work educators need to build more skills of self-care into their programs. As for me, after talking about my experience and reflecting on the pros and cons of being a social worker in these financially difficult times in the province, I’ve come to a decision. I will retire early from my job as soon as I can arrange it. I’ve given it all I could but I need to find ways to recover and restore myself. In many ways, I need to re-story myself. In reflecting on the decades of practice, I have come to understand that there are different kinds of social workers who deal with practice and stress in different ways – each with its own strengths and limitations. Perhaps, each of us falls into one or more of these categories. There are “the traditionalists” who try to apply university-created theories in their work, whether these theories fit or not. I remember one social worker who went on a short course on “strategic family therapy” and then tried to get reluctant families together in rural New Brunswick so she could practise it. Then there are “the rebels” – the social workers who try very hard to change government departments, sometimes in such a determined fashion that they burn themselves out early in practice and tend not to last long but change careers. Then there’s the third group, “organization folk,” who learn the manuals in detail and do exactly what they think the department wants them to do. Often they do very well in their social work careers, but sometimes I think they are in danger of forsaking the humanitarian and egalitarian ideals that underpin the profession. Finally, there are the “community based” social workers – social workers who apply social work theories when they fit. While they challenge agency policies, they also have learned to work within the policies, slowly changing them over time. These social workers learn what is meaningful about their communities, and they learn how provincial

A Social Work Director’s Tale  141

and federal guidelines impinge on their clients, but they strategically determine how to get what they need through negotiation and integration. They listen to clients’ experiences of what worked and didn’t work and use this knowledge to gain useful resources and alliances. I’m not sure, really, which group I would place myself in at this time, since I need time to look back over my work life, what I did and did not do, and why, and see if the way I looked at the world and dealt with challenges led me to this degree of stress and burnout.

13  Fish out of Water: A Volunteer’s Tale

If you had asked me an hour ago why I’m at this conference on Human Services in Rural Communities, I don’t know what I would have said. Surrounded by all these “helping professionals,” as they call themselves, plus various experts and professors, I was feeling like “a fish out of water,” as you English would put it. I only agreed to come at all because the person who invited me (and arranged to pay my way) is my lifelong friend, Giselle. “Giselle,” I said, “how can I say No to you?” Giselle was hired two years ago by the Department of Social Development as service coordinator for the region around Ste-Simone-Sur-Mer on the Acadian Peninsula of northeastern New Brunswick, where both of us grew up. Ste-Simone is a village of about 750. The main source of people’s livelihood has always been fishing, primarily lobster and crab, though more and more, it’s fish-farming – what’s called “aquaculture.” A year into her job, Giselle asked if I would serve on a task force that she was told to set up. Its purpose was to study “resource sharing” among the 16 different regions and the department itself, whose central office is 300 kilometres away, in Fredericton – historically, anglophone to the core. Even if it now has a francophone high school and Roman Catholic parish, and even if, as a New Brunswicker, in Canada’s only bilingual province, you have the right to be served in French in a restaurant or store, Fredericton might just as well be on the moon. The truth is, I feel badly for Giselle because I figure the task force’s real purpose has to do with public relations; with reversing people’s image of the government as top-down, top-heavy with bureaucrats out of touch with the unique issues – and culture – of New Brunswick’s francophone communities. Giselle picked me because she’s known me since we went to school together, 30 years ago. After graduation, we went our separate ways.

A Volunteer’s Tale  143

While I stayed in Ste-Simone, she went off to the University of Moncton to get her degree in nursing, something she’d dreamed of since elementary school. After working for years in the Emergency Department at the hospitals in both Moncton and Saint John, she went back to do a degree in social work. When I asked her why, she told me it was so she could help people in a less hands-on, less stressful way than nursing – one that could lead some day to a position in the civil service. As luck would have it, that led her back to the Peninsula. I’ve always admired Giselle. I would have jumped at the chance to go to university myself, because, like her, I was really good in school, and especially good at English. And I’ve always been an avid reader – especially English books. But all in all, it wasn’t meant to be. My father lost his arm working on a crab boat back in 1963, when I was only two years old. After that, he found his comfort in the bottle. My mother died of a stroke the day I turned 16. That left me, the oldest of twelve brothers and sisters, to step up to the plate and take the lead in bringing up the family: cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, supervising homework – all of it. This was not an easy job for a teenager, even though the neighbours (most of whom had families just as big!) were there to lend a hand when needed. But even by the standards of Ste-Simone, which compared with the rest of the Peninsula, and the province as a whole, was at the bottom of the economic ladder, our family was really, really poor. I don’t know how we did it, but we did. I can still recall that Christmas Eve many years ago when a group of neighbours showed up on our doorstep with a turkey and all the trimmings, plus presents for all of us kids. They even brought a tree! I’ll never forget the mix of shame and gratitude I felt the moment I opened the door and saw them standing there in the cold night singing “Il est né, le divin enfant.” That very night I made a silent vow to give back to my community in whatever way I could. At the time, I didn’t think of our family as underprivileged. With no more than 10 weeks a year of sure employment in the fishing industry (at the time, the only industry in the region), Unemployment Insurance and Income Assistance were just a way of life. There was always this unspoken sense that, with another bad storm or a string of poor catches, our fortunes could be reversed, and it would be our family bringing Christmas to the neighbours. Pardon the pun, but we were all in the same boat, for in many ways the lives of all of us depended on the sea. Overall, things have changed a lot, and mostly for the better, what with the development of the peat moss business and fish-farming, not

144  Part II – The Stories

to mention the establishment of a campus of L’Université de Moncton in the area and, with it, a research institute aimed at developing local expertise in the various sectors of our economy. Still, lots of problems remain, not just economic ones but social ones, too. And it seems that with each change in government, in Fredericton or Ottawa, and the shifts in priorities that go with it, more new problems appear, because governments just never seem to grasp the special way we look at things up here. I know, because ever since my husband, Armand, got on fulltime with the Department of Transportation 15 years ago, driving a snow plow in the winter and working on the road crew the rest of the year, I’ve been able to throw myself into what I love most of all: community service. For the first few years, I was a volunteer with Meals on Wheels, delivering dinners to seniors in Ste-Simone and the surrounding area. Our base of operations was the kitchen of La Salle Parossiale. I loved this work. It seemed like most of the folks I delivered meals to were related to me, too. If not, then they had been friends of my parents or neighbours of my grandparents, and so on. People are extremely interrelated on the Peninsula, and most days it can feel like we’re one big happy family. Some days, though, it’s too much: everybody bickering back and forth because someone said something to someone else that somebody else overheard and, before you know it, the whole community turns into one big family feud. On those days, I envy Giselle for having had the guts to get away when she had the chance. Part of me always wanted to get away, too, but at the time too many things were tugging at me to stay. Even if basically I’m happy that I did, she had all those years to explore possibilities I never could: for travel, love – you name it. As for Giselle herself, she’d probably say that she’s the one who envies me. I married Armand, my high school sweetheart, and, even though we’ve had our troubles like anyone else, we’re still together, have raised four great kids, and if I don’t jinx things by saying so, are happier now than ever. After two marriages, various affairs, and no children, Giselle has this sadness around her that makes me want to cry. She tells me she jumped at the chance to get back here, hoping that the people and landscape familiar to her from growing up would provide her with some sense of stability and, who knows?, another chance at romance – maybe with Jean-Guy Simard, her high school sweetheart! From what I hear, he’s still available. It’s been great to renew our connection. The only problem is that, even though Giselle has worked with the provincial department for a

A Volunteer’s Tale  145

while and had her eyes opened by all of the predicaments she’s seen families and communities get themselves into – or be thrown into – she’s naive, I think, when it comes to what life is really like up here. She still has this sort of “happy family” myth about the place that’s 30 years outdated, despite the fact she comes home every Christmas to spend time with her brothers and sisters and her mother, who’s still going strong at 83. But this rosy picture keeps her from seeing how awful life can be in so many of the homes, and the alcohol abuse, drug abuse, sexual abuse, and honest-to-goodness poverty that’s just below the surface. Sitting in church the other Sunday, I looked around and counted, easily, 50 people whose children’s lives, whose own lives or marriages, I happen to know first-hand, are in a sorry state. And the parish priest, I fear, as nice as he is, is blind to most of it. I say this with confidence because I’ve listened to his Pollyanna picture of the world through hundreds of homilies over the years. Also, through all the meetings I’ve had with him and the Parish Council to report on Meals on Wheels, ever since six years ago when I took on the job of executive director. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, and I’m the best person they could have hired for it, because I know this area – its people, its history, its secrets – like the back of my hand. I know what’s going on behind the scenes, who’s sleeping with whom, and what’s happened in the past that explains their behaviour in the present. Wherever I go – the bank, the drugstore, grocery store, or coffee shop – there’s hardly anyone I don’t know by name directly or else recognize as the sister, son, or neighbour of someone whose house I’ve been into numerous times for one thing or another. It’s not just my Meals on Wheels connection that keeps me plugged into what’s happening. It’s my membership on the Credit Union, the School Board, and the Economic Development Council, not to mention the planning committee for the Music Festival that pulls in people from all over eastern Canada for three days of celebration every year. (If there’s one thing I can say about the people of this region, they know how to have fun! And are they ever talented! Whether it’s singing, dancing, or acting, people really get into the arts and support them tremendously. I’m sure there’s a concert of some sort every single weekend!) Yes, I’ve learned an incredible amount through all of my commitments. It’s been like doing a degree at university: I’ve had to make myself familiar with so many subjects – from home care and nutrition to basic accounting, adult education, and, increasingly, intergovernmental relations. With all these activities, I’m so busy that my friends are starting to tease me that I should run for mayor of Ste-Simone because I’m a

146  Part II – The Stories

natural-born leader. Well, in my own way, maybe that’s what I am: a leader. Basically, though, I see myself as an ordinary member of my community who wants the best for it in every way. When people tell me how amazed they are at all the projects I get myself into, all I can say is “You’ve just got to be involved in your community.” I mean, it’s a spiritual thing almost that motivates me; it’s my “calling,” the priest might say. It might not sound terribly sophisticated just to say get involved, but it’s true. In the back of my mind there’s always this story of Christmas being brought to us by our neighbours. That’s what drives me, what makes me tick. It’s certainly what I told Giselle when she asked me why I was willing to put on one more hat and sit on her task force. If the truth were told, though, I’m still not clear – even after three quarterly meetings plus a “team-building” weekend in Fredericton – what our “task” really is. For one thing, as good as I am in both languages, I get lost in all the government-ese we have to wade through in the reports we have to read. Even Giselle gets carried away with all this bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo and, like the rest of them, tends to see the community’s problems as just that, as “problems,” which only the government – not we ourselves – is equipped to fix. One of my pet peeves is the “one-size-fits-all” philosophy behind the various training programs that come down the pipe to us rural people. The Meals on Wheels organization is pretty good in this respect, because they know that every community is different and that setting up the program and implementing it week after week has to be tailored to each place and each set of volunteers who carry out the work. But I’ve got friends in social work or public health who tell me that many of the programs they’re asked to put in place – whether on parent effectiveness, managing diabetes, or whatever – were designed by city people with little sense of how different each little community can be. For instance, the Department of Education had this big push on a few years ago to combat illiteracy. So, they sent this expert up from L’Université de Moncton one night a week to teach a class for people from around the region. The only problem is, the class was held at the Lions Club hall. Well – big surprise – no one showed up. I mean, who would want to have their car seen in front of the Lions Club every Thursday night? There’s a huge sense of shame involved. Everyone knew where the classes were being held, since the ads had been in the local papers for weeks before. It’s not that illiteracy isn’t a big issue, because it is. But many of the people who are illiterate have become experts at hiding the fact that they can’t read and write. In fact, a lot of them are very

A Volunteer’s Tale  147

clever people, and in every other aspect of their lives do quite well. Why would they want their cover blown? So, the project failed. What the people of our area deserve most of all (I feel this in my bones, from 50 years of living here) is respect – respect for their culture, their language, their heritage, their talents. And respect for their right to have the chance to have meaningful employment all year round, work that gives them a more stable income and more self-esteem than the 10 weeks or so of seasonal work that’s been the pattern here for years and – it has to be said – has created a dependency on government in many people’s minds that isn’t easy to break. So then, here I am at this conference wondering why I came. Most of the other delegates, whether they’re practitioners or professors, are linked to one or another of the main “helping” professions (I don’t like that word, helping, because it makes it sound like we’re charity cases): social work, teaching, counselling, and public health. Not too many of them are ordinary people like myself, with no formal training, no degrees, and no “certification” – and (up until 6 years ago) no salary, no benefits, and no pension plan either. Why was I invited? Until an hour ago, I wouldn’t have had an answer for you, because not once has anyone seriously asked me my opinion in any of the discussions. Instead, they’ve all looked at me and my name tag (which says simply “C. LeBlanc, Ste-Simone-sur-Mer”) with these polite little smiles that tell me I’m nothing more to them than this quaint country mouse who couldn’t possibly have something of substance to contribute. But then, during the question-and-answer period after the plenary speech by some big-name researcher on “The Global Village and the Postmodern Crisis of Meaning,” Giselle poked me in the ribs and told me to go to the mike before I exploded. From all the squirming I was doing in my seat, she must have figured that I wasn’t impressed with the speaker’s insinuation that, compared with big centres like Montreal or Toronto, rural communities, in just about every aspect he touched on, are “backward.” At least that’s how it felt to me; that’s what he seemed to be implying. “Resource-starved” was the phrase he used a dozen times, along with other tongue-twisters like “infrastructure-challenged” and “leadership-deprived.” Honestly, I was ready to be sick, not so much because of his content, which basically I could decipher and which, frankly, I didn’t disagree with, but because of his tone. It was the same tone I’d heard in other speakers, too, and from many of the normal delegates as well (even from Giselle a little bit) when I attended their presentations. Their titles

148  Part II – The Stories

alone were enough to put a person off, and to me they all reflected the same basic attitude. It’s this condescending, patronizing, we-knowbetter-than-they-do attitude – “they” being rural people, people like me – that I’m convinced undermines the rapport that “helpers” supposedly want to have with the people they want to “help.” Maybe I was over-reacting. No doubt both the speaker and the other delegates are, at bottom, good-hearted folk who want to make a difference, their only fault being that they’ve “professionalized” themselves out of the ability to be with rural people on rural people’s terms, not from some position of implied superior knowledge that rural people themselves could never possibly possess. In my experience, we rural people already possess most of the knowledge that we need. We just need someone to coax it out of us or help us find the courage to put it into operation. I’ve seen it happen again and again: the time the fishermen of the region rallied together and formed the first union, for instance, or the time that hundreds of us went to Fredericton to lobby the government to keep our hospital open, and so on and so forth. My heart pounding, then, I got up from my seat and walked to the mike. “Professor, sir,” I said, struggling to find the right words in English, and to pronounce them with as little accent as possible. (Although we live in the only officially bilingual province, it’s only bilingual for the francophone part of it. I mean, we all had to learn English growing up because we needed it to survive once we went beyond the Peninsula – which some of us never did! – but I can count on my left hand the English people I know who can speak French, or are even willing to try.) “Professor, sir,” I continued, “I’m sure you’re a smart man and that you know a lot about rural communities from all your research. But you talk about ‘rural’ as if it was something abstract. I have to ask you, when was the last time you actually lived in a community that was smaller than Toronto.” I was fuming, not just at him but at myself. My mother had always told us that if we can’t say something nice to someone, don’t say anything at all. Yet here I was, losing my cool. My 50 years of rural roots were showing themselves for sure and were feeding my fire – as was the image of my father, who lost his spirit the day he lost his arm, and the image of those neighbours at our door on Christmas Eve. “Ah well, er ...,” he stammered, “I was brought up in a town of 20,000 until I was a teenager, which seemed pretty small to me in retrospect, but actually I’ve lived in Toronto pretty much ever since.” “Well, then, Professor sir,” I went on, “may I suggest that you leave

A Volunteer’s Tale  149

your library for a couple of months and come and help me deliver Meals on Wheels to the people of Ste-Simone. I’d be glad to make all the arrangements for you and even find you a place to stay. But may I suggest that you come, not in the summer when everything is pretty and all the tourists are around, but in January and February when the weather can be really wild and you can see what rural life is really like. Maybe then” – there was no stopping me now – “you’ll have something to say to the rest of us that we can understand and that will be of some real ‘help’ to us.” As I went back to my seat, I was shaking all over. I’d never said such a thing to anyone in all my life. I was so busy beating myself up for what I’d just done, however, that I couldn’t hear the applause coming from the others. For the next hour, people were coming up to me left, right, and centre to thank me, telling me they wished I’d spoken up earlier in the conference, that I’d put into words what they’d been thinking, too, but were too shy to say. As for Giselle, she hugged me as hard as she could and said, “Mon amie, you said exactly what needed to be said. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you!” Believe me, that felt good!

This page intentionally left blank

PART III The Lessons

This page intentionally left blank

14  A Narrative Curriculum for Rural Helping

Our goal in this part of the book is to outline the implications of our research into rural helping for curriculum that is aimed at preparing people to work effectively in small communities. Such curriculum is most relevant, we believe, when it is based on an in-depth understanding of rural life itself, one accessed best through the narratives of those who live and work within those communities. By contrast, traditional models of education tend to view “curriculum” as a blueprint for teaching and learning that is one-dimensional in nature and laid out in terms of “outcomes” and “objectives.” Based on an external understanding of rural communities and reflected in specific and often narrow goals, this kind of curriculum can be rather artificial and therefore limiting for the students at whom it is aimed. In contrast, what we are advocating here is a curriculum based on the experiences of people who actually live and work in rural areas, as their experiences are reflected – and reflected on – in the stories that they relate. In short, we are advocating a curriculum based on stories (see Hopkins, 1994). By doing so, we’re in agreement with educators Connelly and Clandinin (1990) in seeing stories “as arguments in which we learn something essentially human by understanding an actual life as lived” (p. 8). Put more directly, lessons are learned best when conveyed by means of stories. Underlying this book, then, is a conviction that is increasingly common across the social sciences, not to mention in several helping fields, too. It’s the conviction that human beings are, at bottom, hermeneutical beings. We are interpretive beings, in other words. We are makers of meaning. Moreover, as “the story species” (Gold, 2002), our chief means of making it is by making stories. In short, human life is a narrative affair on every level. On the individual level, things like memory, emotion,

154  Part III – The Lessons

and identity, whatever else they may entail, have a narrative dimension (see McAdams, 2006; Sarbin, 1986; Bruner, 1987; Polkinghorne, 1988). On the social level, from families to villages to entire cultures, “communities” are complex, ever-changing webs of stories: long and short, big and small (Bamberg, 2006), old and new, true and not-sotrue. There are front stories and backstories, cover stories and covert stories, public stories and private stories; positive, affirmative stories and negative, destructive ones. Throughout the book, then, we have been borrowing from fields such as narrative psychology, narrative medicine, and narrative sociology in developing our ideas. Sociologist Ken Plummer (1995) captures nicely, for example, the vision that has guided us thus far: We work and worry, pray and play, love and hate: and all the time we are telling stories about our pasts, our presents, and our futures … We are constantly writing the story of the world around us: its periods and places, its purposes and programmes, its people and plots … everywhere we go, we are charged with telling stories and making meaning – giving sense to ourselves and the world around us. And the meanings … remain emergent: never fixed, always indeterminate, ceaselessly contested … we are always becoming, never arriving; and the social order heaves as a vast negotiated web of dialogue and conversation. (p. 20; emphasis added)

With Plummer, we have been interested from the outset in a whole host of questions concerning “the social role that stories play” (p. 25) – questions that should interest rural helpers just as much they do sociologists. For example: How do stories get produced and what brings people to the brink of tellings? • How do people come to construct their particular stories (and possess them as their own)? • When can a story be heard, and most especially how is it heard? • What are the links between stories and the wider social world – the contextual conditions for stories to be told and for stories to be received? • What brings people to give voice to a story at a particular moment? Which kinds of narratives work to empower people and which degrade, control, and dominate? • What strategies enable stories to be told, how are spaces created for them, and how are voices silenced? (pp. 24–29)

A Narrative Curriculum for Helping  155

At the heart of the curriculum we are envisioning in this book is a narrative perspective, one that explicitly acknowledges the storied complexity of human life in general and of rural life in particular – not to mention of our own lives as helpers, for as curriculum expert David Hunt (1987) insists, if we hope to understand others and the meanings they make in the midst of their lives, then we must begin with ourselves. That said, how helpers employ a narrative perspective will vary from profession to profession, indeed community to community, as displayed in the fictionalized vignettes that are featured in Part II. Perhaps a good place to begin, then, is to talk about some of the leading themes that run through these vignettes and that surfaced repeatedly in the stories our participants shared with us. Next, we’ll return to the one core theme that has informed our study from the start: the need to know the story – our own stories, the stories of the communities we serve, and the larger stories by which those communities are affected. We’ll then suggest a range of strategies and exercises that can be used with students and practitioners alike to assist them in approaching rural helping in a more reflective – and more narrative – manner, to assist them in developing their “narrative literacy,” if you will (see Baldwin, 2013), and in honing their skills at narrative practice. We’ll conclude with an assortment of questions that link such exercises directly to rural helping; questions that instructors (in social work, nursing, etc.) can ask about their students, that students can ask about themselves, and that both, plus practitioners, can ask about the communities in which they are, or will be, working. One last point before we proceed: The importance of stories to both rural helping and rural communities is scarcely a new idea (see MartinezBrawley, 2000; Cheers, 2004; Flynn, 1991). What is new, however, is that of a curriculum built deliberately on a narrative foundation.

15  Recurring Themes

Insider versus Outsider A number of our participants told us that, all too frequently, they felt like outsiders in the communities they served, like strangers in a strange land. They told us of the challenge of being trusted and accepted by rural people, many of whom have lived in those communities all their lives. When our work requires gaining such people’s trust in comparatively short order, so we can respond appropriately and swiftly to the issues they face, meeting this challenge is vital. What is more, while in some professions our work is structured around “cases” or “clients” or prepackaged programs and requires a kind of clinical detachment from people’s situations, in others – like social work or even police work – what is essential is an inside understanding of the context of their lives, of the fabric of family and friendships in which they have been shaped. The question, then, is: how to get inside a small community? One of the first things to keep in mind is that just because a person has been a member of the community all along doesn’t automatically make that person an insider – in the sense, that is, of someone who “knows the story.” It is quite possible for someone to “come from away” and, by various means (see “Strategies and Exercises” below), zero in quite quickly on what makes the place tick: its history and culture, its issues and tensions, its principal players, and its “open secrets” (Lischer, 2001). Sometimes, in other words, a bona fide outsider can gain an understanding of a community that’s more insightful – more inside-ful – than that of those who’ve lived there all their lives. If you like, “insider” and “outsider” represent points in a spectrum, ranging from someone who has no clue at all about rural

Recurring Themes  157

communities – a complete greenhorn, so to speak – to someone who has at least some understanding of “rural” and employs it in practice, to someone who is privy to the issues and the stories that are central to the community’s identity. Another aspect of the insider-outsider question was identified by a woman in one of the focus groups we led. A social worker in a remote community in the Canadian north, she was originally from that community herself, having moved back to practise – having wanted to move back – on completing her training. In theory, coming from the community would be an asset, she had assumed, yet it turned out that she knew the community – its story and its people – almost too well. As such, her insider knowledge made her practice harder, not easier, to carry out. With a number of her cases involving domestic violence and abuse, she was often pitted against the very people who had been her friends and neighbours (even family) growing up. Soon, she felt they didn’t really trust her anymore, that they saw her, not as one of them, but as a traitor almost, enforcing policies that had been dreamed up by bureaucrats far removed – geographically and culturally – from the realities of their lives. Another of our participants, a social worker responsible for child protection, lives in a First Nations community. A First Nations person himself, his story is similar to the one above. As a community member involved in a variety of volunteer activities – school programs, sports events, etc. – he has found that practising in the same village where he lives brings with it several challenges. Besides the day-today struggles involved in living on a reserve – poverty, substandard housing, domestic violence, substance abuse, depression – he is faced at times with having to remove a child from the home of people who happen to be his relatives or friends, hardly a role that endears him to his neighbours. Having heard doctors and teachers tell us comparable tales about the mixed blessing of living in the same community where you practise, we realized that, at bottom, terms like “insider” and “outsider” are problematic at best, and perhaps irrelevant in the end. Even long-standing residents can feel like insiders in certain situations yet outsiders in others. At church, we may sense a deep connection to the people in the pews around us, while at the curling club get the feeling that we don’t fit in. The line between insider and outsider is nothing if not fuzzy. In fact, it runs through all of us – professional helpers and community members alike – and is shifting all the time. Some days we feel like an

158  Part III – The Lessons

insider, that we belong, that we’re one of the gang. Other days – or the same days in different situations – we are on the outside looking in. When entering a community for the first time, it can be important to keep such things in mind, for, ultimately, we do enter it as outsiders, often by virtue of our education itself, and by being one of just a handful perhaps with a university degree. Moreover, no matter how much experience we may have had in similar communities, this one is bound to be different, with a history that sets it apart from the one down the road, plus a unique network of neighbours and friends, each with a distinct set of stories – about themselves and their families, about one another, about the community itself, about the world at large. By way of example, to enter the local coffee shop – which is an excellent place to sample the culture of any small community – is to enter an environment whose intricacy from a narrative perspective is, at base, impossible to grasp. It is impossible to appreciate all the nuances in all the conversations at all the tables; to discern the meaning of what is being said (by whom, to whom, and how) and, as important, what is not being said. It’s impossible to sense the hints and innuendoes, the backstories behind the scenes, the skeletons in the closets, the layers of narratives to which no one person, not even a local, could possibly be privy. To avoid burning out due to too high expectations, perhaps it is essential, then, whether we’re from the community or not, that we accept our outsider status at the start, as we make our way – carefully and respectfully, one conversation at a time – from obvious outsider to, in due course, trusted insider: someone who “knows the story” – or is trying to at least; someone who truly cares. While we can never know the whole story of a community, there can still be ways to enter into it, or corners of it at least, comparatively fast. Suppose, for instance, that we are newly arrived in town and are unsure where to start. Something that we have always loved to do, however, is singing in a choir. Find out where the community choir gathers for its practices and show up for the next one. Chances are, they’ll be grateful for a fresh voice. If we’re a curler, then head for the local rink. If a hunter, a bowler, or a Scout leader, the same principle applies: Go where our interests lie and, sooner or later, doors will be opened, connections made, and friendships forged. As many of our participants insisted, get involved. Don’t be a stranger; don’t stand on the sidelines and wait to be asked. After only one practice or one meeting, we might not feel that we fully belong, nor will we piece together the story of the community at one go. But such strategies are important steps towards

Recurring Themes  159

making connections with people and with their stories – with the past that they remember and the future they envision. Naturally, we need to be sensitive to boundaries and wait for invitations to cross them, not barge into a given situation assuming that, just because we are the minister or the doctor or the teacher, we can talk on whatever topic with whomever we wish. That said, we can still be alert for opportunities to be a member of the community, or at least to demonstrate that we are trying to be. For example, one of our participants, who is a social worker living in the same community where he practises, told us about offering one day to help his neighbour do some yard work. Having grown up on a farm himself, he donned a pair of wellingtons as he chipped in to assist. In doing so, he was conveying the message, so he felt, that he was no shirt-and-tie professional with little sense of ordinary life but just a neighbour pitching in to lend a helping hand, like anyone would do. Another participant, again a social worker, often drove from her office in the city to visit housebound clients in outlying villages. One day, one of them informed her that, hanging in the pantry, was fresh bear meat that a neighbour had recently delivered. In a flash, this triggered pleasant memories of hunting trips her father used to take. “Bear meat tastes good!” she responded, feeling the connection warm immediately between them. Overall, the insider-outsider tension can be a real one for us as rural helpers, and indeed, it may never fully disappear. Rather, we simply grow accustomed to it. As in many kinds of ethnographic research, it can ultimately be an advantage in our quest for understanding, given that we are always, to some degree, participant-observers, insiders and outsiders at once. The example of joining the curling club or local choir points, however, to another theme that surfaced in our interviews: working from within. Working from Within By their very nature, some professions (police work, for instance, but also social work, ministry, public health nursing, and teaching, too) are structured hierarchically. People have different ranks in relation to each other, whether higher or lower. And there is a bureaucracy behind the scenes that directs them to implement policies or programs that come from above – policies and programs that may reflect only faintly life “on the ground.” Even in such cases, though, there are ways of practising from a perspective that is “bottom-up” and not “top-down.” Recall

160  Part III – The Lessons

some of the strategies mentioned by the officer in “Rural Policing Is Real Policing” to insert himself into the community and work with people rather than above them. Working from within means many things. It means that even though, in some respects, we will always be seen as outsiders in a small community, by making the effort to get to know its members on their own terms and to see them as persons with their own distinct stories, we become more respectful of the experience and the wisdom they have gained across the years. It means accepting them for themselves, thus lessening some of the outsider-insider gap and taking, so to speak, an inside-out approach. Working from within means trying to see the community, and the world, through their eyes; to see it as they see it, not as we do – through the lens of our own experience or profession, or the bureaucracy or agency to which we must report. It means not “storyotyping” them (Randall, 1995, p. 57), not assuming that the story they are living is of a certain type, one more static and restricted, more onedimensional, than the one we are living ourselves. Starting from this basis, working from within means identifying – with them, not for them – the strengths that people already possess, the insights they have already arrived at on the issues they face, the solutions they have already considered to the problems they confront – as persons, as families, as communities. Putting aside our fear of not fitting in, which itself can make us see them in problematic ways, working from within means working alongside of them, like a pianist accompanying a singer, letting them take the lead. It means not operating above them or despite them but in tandem with them as, together, we identify the stories they have been living by to date – of themselves, of their community – and encourage the more positive versions which, deep down, they are eager to articulate. It means assisting them in embodying such better versions (sub-versions) in their attitudes and actions in the future. Dual Relationships and Personal Boundaries In a number of helping professions, practitioners are instructed to avoid “dual relationships” with “clients.” Certainly, this theme was mentioned by many whom we interviewed. Nurses and doctors told us how their training had taught them to maintain a “professional distance” from their patients; teachers were told to do the same with students. If you are a social worker, for instance, and are counselling

Recurring Themes  161

people about a broken relationship, or a problem with depression or addiction, then, theoretically, so your Code of Ethics says, you ought not to fraternize outside the office – not befriend them, not party with them, and certainly not date them. In contrast to an urban setting, though, where your office and your home could easily be in two quite different neighbourhoods, and where it is rare that your path would cross with those of your clients, in a rural setting, maintaining a clear professional distance can be impossible to do. The same person you see for counselling on Monday, you are bound to bump into at the grocery store on Tuesday, the drug store on Wednesday, the Lions Club on Thursday, the hockey game on Friday, and the dance at the Legion on Saturday night, not to mention at church the morning after. As a helper in a small community, how we conduct ourselves and how we set suitable boundaries in these potentially awkward encounters will vary from profession to profession. As a rural doctor, it may be perfectly appropriate to say to a patient, “When I see you outside my office, don’t be offended if I don’t ask how you’re feeling. It’s best if we keep your health status confidential.” In rural ministry, however, running into our “clients” in contexts outside of a strictly professional one can be impossible to avoid. Indeed, interacting with our parishioners is not unlike interacting with members of our family – our “church family” – and the movement in and out of different roles towards them throughout the week (as confessor, counsellor, preacher, teacher, friend) is, in many ways, at the heart of the whole vocation. One minister described staying up late at night helping her parishioners to fill out their tax returns! One of few people in a rural community with a university degree, her experience of role-blurring, as others whom we interviewed confirmed, is hardly uncommon. Another dimension to the issue of dual relationships in rural communities is, again, the narrative one. The rumour mill being what it is, for any individual with whom we might work, a dozen different stories could be in circulation (many of them from long before we arrived on the scene) about what they are like, what family they are from, and what backstory they possess. The longer we stay in a community, then, the harder it is to be “objective” about anyone within it; the more difficult to relate to them free of bias. Rather, each person will be wrapped in a bundle of stories that other people believe about them – to say nothing of the stories they believe about themselves and the ones that we will weave around them, too.

162  Part III – The Lessons

A related issue that many of our participants noted – especially those who live in the same communities where they work – is that of setting suitable boundaries around their personal lives. Many spoke of the need to leave the community entirely from time to time, so that they could carve out some semblance of a private life and feel anonymous – whether this meant driving to the town up the road to buy their beer or do their banking, or travelling to a nearby city, booking a room in a motel, and taking the weekend off. On the other hand, other helpers spoke about their need, not so much for privacy and anonymity, as for a sense of community – though not within the community where they work. Networking Boundaries around professional practice – these, too, can intersect in rural communities much more than they do in urban ones. In relation to a given individual or family, especially at times of crisis (an accident, a bereavement), where exactly the social worker’s involvement begins and that of the local priest or the teacher or some well-meaning neighbour ends can be unclear. Each can be offering her own brand of counselling or caring. Accordingly, several of our participants spoke of the need to connect on a more or less regular basis with counterparts in allied fields, not to mention with community volunteers and other informal helpers, in order to exchange ideas about their respective realms of expertise. And they spoke of the need sometimes to commiserate over stressors in their work, certainly not to be at cross purposes, not to waste time on “turf wars,” but, as often as possible, to cooperate on common problems or projects. The need to work together can also be driven by the logistical challenges that rural helpers face, especially in remote communities; in other words, the limited range of services and resources that, in urban settings, are more readily available. In a real sense, rural helpers must become as resourceful, as capable of pooling their talents for the common good, and as able to “make do” as rural people have been known for all along. Diversity (or “One Size Doesn’t Fit All”) When we analysed the narratives from our participants, in addition to reflecting on our own experiences (see Part I), it became clear to us that there was no consensus on the meaning of the concepts of “rural”

Recurring Themes  163

and “helping.” Even though, except for the social work students whom Rosemary taught from Newfoundland and Labrador, all of our participants resided in New Brunswick, there was a rich variety of ideas about the meaning of these key concepts, a variety reflected in demographic differences among the participants themselves. There was no consensus, for instance, on the meaning of “rural” as applied to New Brunswick itself. Some of our participants thought that size of population determined whether a community was rural or urban. While some held that the entire province was “rural,” for others, cities such as Moncton, Saint John, and Fredericton were “urban,” however tiny they are alongside of places like Toronto or New York. For these latter participants, “rural” was reserved for the smallest centres in the province. Some participants thought that cultural differences were particularly important in determining “rurality” and spoke about such differences between individual communities. To borrow from Tönnies (2001), the most isolated communities were viewed as gemeinschaft, in contrast with urban gesellschaft. In other words, rural community life was set against urban associational life. That said, the concept of “rural” was not helpful at all for several of our interviewees who pointed to the vast differences that can prevail between communities – one obvious example being the broad difference between “rural” and “remote,” or between “incorporated” and “unincorporated” – and who advocated that those working in each community should consider its distinctive features in the course of constructing their practice. Our participants held differing views on “helping” as well. A microperspective resulted in it being defined by some as assistance to individuals. Others, however, looked at the more macro-dimensions of helping, through community development work or policy changes. Like ourselves, a number of our participants were uncomfortable with the word “helping” altogether because they thought it carried patronizing connotations. It is hardly surprising, of course, that there were differences in opinions about the nature of “helping” and “rural,” since among those we interviewed there was significant diversity. Indeed, we intentionally selected participants who would reflect the diversity in New Brunswick as a whole. Thus, we included people from different ethnic groups, different locations in the province, different sizes of community, and different professional backgrounds, as well as participants who had no affiliation with a helping profession at all but who considered their

164  Part III – The Lessons

“helping” to be a natural dimension of their citizenship within the community. The theme of diversity also concerns service delivery. By way of example, “Marcel” has been a social worker for several years in a fishing village on the Acadian Peninsula, the same one, in fact, where he was born and brought up, so he clearly has inside experience. One of his pet peeves is how policy makers and program planners with the provincial departments responsible for social development are guided by a “one size fits all” mentality. He cited the Parent Effectiveness Training program that had been launched in his region a few years before but that failed from the start because the trainers, directed from head office in Fredericton, chose to hold it in a public place where the neighbours could easily see whose cars were parked outside and therefore who was attending. As a result, no one signed up, given the stigma that doing so brought with it. Such programs, he insisted, as did others with whom we talked, need to be tailored to the community’s unique nature – its unique story – and to take that story into account at every stage of their planning and implementation. Another example comes from a participant who was assigned to a community with the aim of helping people identified as “illiterate” by using a program that was pre-packaged and government approved. Once more, when the time came for the first class, no one showed up. In dismay, he talked with a colleague from the same village who advised him to change the focus of the course and advertise it as dealing with a variety of issues and not just literacy per se. He offered it again. This time, a healthy number attended and completed the program, because it addressed the needs of the community as a whole rather than those of particular individuals who had been singled out as deficient. His advice to us was to “walk alongside” the people of the community; in other words, to accompany them, to accord them their dignity, and to respect their right to decide what it is that they need – and, accordingly, how we can best help them. In sum, let them teach us how we can help them (see Furlong, 1994). Power and Oppression The concepts of “power” and “oppression” were relevant for our participants in numerous ways. They spoke to us, for instance, of the power exerted by people and organizations outside of the community, as well as differential power relations within it. They stressed how important it

Recurring Themes  165

is, if helpers are to be of assistance to rural people, to understand where such power resides. The autonomy of rural people is limited, our participants also noted, because decisions affecting rural people’s lives are often made in distant locations. It was pointed out, for instance, that decisions affecting the province’s rural people are made in the provincial capital, often by those with little or no experience themselves of rural life. Accordingly, key concerns for rural people (such as difficulty in regard to transportation or to accessing services) are either ignored altogether or given low priority – health care services being an excellent case in point. We learned, for instance, of one expectant mother in a small community who had to be transported to a hospital in the city, nearly 100 miles away, in order to deliver her child, and then receiving a bill of over $600 for the ambulance ride! Similarly, our participants contended that issues of importance for all New Brunswickers are given low priority at the federal level, as well (as is the case in other provinces, too). In turn, the power of global forces such as transnational companies or the proximity of the United States works to the disadvantage of rural New Brunswickers. Overall, our participants thought, rural New Brunswick is at the bottom of the heap – a sentiment that rural people in other jurisdictions may share as well. Many of our participants spoke about differential power within rural communities, too. Income, age, occupation, ethnicity, length of residence in the community, and gender especially – all influence the control that people can exert over their own lives. In narrative terms, for instance, the stories of women, older people, or immigrants are either silent or silenced, a point that underscores the importance of helpers listening for and responding to all of the stories – whether told, untold, or simply untellable. Stress and Burnout Many of the practitioners we interviewed talked about the stress they encountered in navigating – and negotiating with – rural communities in order to succeed as professional helpers. Helping in general can be stressful enough; however, particularly high levels of stress can be experienced by helpers in rural settings. For reasons already noted, the actual work in rural areas can be more challenging, in fact, than in urban ones. What is more, rural helpers can find it more difficult to access the support they need to carry out their work. The combination of stressful

166  Part III – The Lessons

work and limited support can lead to burnout, a reality that may have been discussed very little, in fact, in their training as social workers, teachers, pastors, nurses, doctors, meaning they have little preparation to deal with it, let alone recognize it, when caught in its grips. Rural helpers can find their work especially challenging because, in many professions, as already noted, they are required to implement protocols and policies that fit rather poorly with rural realties, leading them to feel certain ethical tensions as well. Moreover, their mandate is often broader than that of their urban counterparts because, in several ways, it is neither feasible nor affordable to have specialist workers and resources onsite in small settings. Specialist resources – which, themselves, may not fit well with rural realities – are typically located in larger towns and cities, meaning that very often helpers need to rely upon their own resources (to be “self-sufficient”), or to draw upon resources – if not develop them – within the community itself. Helpers who actually live in the community where they work are additionally challenged, of course, when they attempt to set a boundary between work and non-work. Some of our participants told us stories, for instance, about being contacted at home if someone they were working with was experiencing a crisis, or about receiving requests for help while waiting in a line-up at the grocery store. And some told us of needing to travel to other communities for their leisure activities in order to avoid bumping into clients, although sometimes they were simply too weary to bother. While stress can be alleviated if helpers have access to good support, supervisors or mentors may not be readily available to novice practitioners, and face-to-face discussions can be all too infrequent. In an era when ever-more layers of hierarchy are built into many organizations – as has happened in New Brunswick, for instance, with a decrease in just 10 years from seven to five to only two health care districts – supervisors are often located at head office and not close enough to call on for advice or guidance or a discussion of issues that arise. Yes, we have voice mail and e-mail, but in some parts of the province, Internet connections are intermittent at best. What is more, some of our participants thought that their supervisors had limited understanding about the challenges of rural helping, obliging them once again to turn to their own resources – personal resources that eventually become depleted. Some of this stress may be the result of feeling a sense of guilt merely by virtue of your education. Several participants talked about how when you are “posted” to a rural setting, there is a tendency to think

Recurring Themes  167

that you can – and should – be all things to all people, simply because you have professional training, making you the only one in town, for instance, deemed qualified to help residents fill out complicated government forms, do their income taxes, and so forth. Our interviewees taught us that, yes, we need to be there when rural residents need us, and not when it’s convenient for us or only during official working hours. We also need to belong to the community, to be contributing members ourselves, so that we can come to understand the intricacies of the relationships the people of the community have and the nuances and meanings in the issues they face. Nonetheless, there are risks to being there whenever needed, that of burnout being one. Being all things to all persons at all times can lead a rural professional to have too little time for personal recovery. In other words, there is a fine balance between, on the one hand, being present when one is needed in order to earn insider status and, on the other, caring for oneself, which may require maintaining some outsider rights. Nonetheless, it is important to try and strike such a balance. In sum, while there are strengths and limitations to each of the pathways to becoming a trusted member of a small community, there are many things we can learn both from the professionals who move to the rural setting from away and from the informal helpers who live within it already. One of them is that it is not always necessary – let alone possible or appropriate – to be all things to all people at all times, and this can be a hard lesson to master, especially for a novice professional who is eager to prove himself or herself, or for a committed caregiver who wants to make things better for everyone. Common Sense Ethics In rural settings, practitioners may encounter ethical dilemmas, not only in their practice itself, but even in the matter of parking their cars in a location that doesn’t compromise confidentiality. Social workers’ vehicles, for example, will often be known to the whole community, and when parked outside a client’s home can quickly set off rumours around the community that can do their client harm. To avoid this, and to protect their client’s (and their own) anonymity, they might park further away, or arrange to meet at a more neutral, more discrete location. The health needs of rural persons are often complex, arising from poorer health status in general, as well as from a broad range of social inequities due to their location, given that geography is itself a

168  Part III – The Lessons

determinant of health. If you will, practitioners need to become expert generalists, or multispecialists, or multiskilled generalists. They are often “one of a kind” in their settings, working with a diverse team of persons from professional roles and lay roles alike. In a given situation or crisis that arises, their ethical responses are often dictated by common sense. Regardless of what unfolds, in other words, they are expected to deliver, to care, to protect, to nurse, etc. Professional associations develop codes of ethical conduct, but in the field these codes can be limiting and costly to put into practice. In other words, the context itself may define the ethical parameters of helping – for instance, as we alluded to under “Insider versus Outsider” above, when a social worker is Aboriginal, working in his own community, and is required to remove children from the home of one of his relations. There is also a different work ethic in rural practice because these people are ultimately your people. They are your neighbours and may even be your family. A more personal level of involvement is therefore called for as you come to know your people in the ever-changing context of their own unique lives over time. What Is “Expertise”? “Expertise” is a term that is often used in educational conversations, but what does it mean for practitioners in rural settings? When a professional is posted to a rural community, the letters listed after the person’s name might be important in terms of knowing, for example, that the physician is an accredited practitioner, but membership in and trust from a small community needs to be earned, through a variety of approaches. Limited or outdated resources are often what professional helpers encounter when they locate to a rural setting. Specialty services are often not available or are a considerable distance from a client’s or patient’s location. Medical evacuation may often be necessary for emergency situations, but in a region such as New Brunswick this can be expensive. As in the example cited earlier, one pregnant woman whose delivery became high risk was transported from a small community to a larger one that had a hospital. Within hours, however, she was transported to an urban centre, due to the lack of equipment to assist her high-risk infant. Once the baby was born, though, the mother had to stay in a hotel close by the hospital until the infant was sent by ambulance to a community nearer to her rural home. She was charged

Recurring Themes  169

$130 for the first short trip, $260 for the longer second trip, and another $230 to transport her infant to a nearby centre. She endured the costs of hotels and food while staying at the urban centre, then the cost of car travel while the infant was within 100 miles of home, not to mention the cost of providing care for her toddler at home while she was away – costs typically not encountered by urban citizens. The further north you live, or the more remote your location, the more responsibility a professional helper is required to assume. Having a broad knowledge base is vital in order to function safely, since there are often limited professional resources, persons, or networks available. Practitioners deal with dual roles – as professionals and as community members – in caring for the people they know closely from their small locations. Rural and remote practitioners who have participated in research studies recommend that professional curricula address the realities of rural care and its different modalities for delivery. Curricula must be designed to match the rural community’s needs, realities, and resources rather than having the one-size-fits-all model – or pre-packaged programs – downloaded from urban centres. Ongoing education for rural helpers needs to be tailored to practitioners’ needs within the context of their working situations. Practitioners identify that strong critical thinking skills are necessary for working in the independent roles that they are assigned. As much experience as possible is needed in their field of practice before they come to the rural setting via mentored experiences, field-based experiences, simulations, or rural placements for a term. Such novice practitioners need to learn to function in resource-limited situations and be self-directed, independent, and resourceful. As they enter rural helping roles, they may encounter a “fear factor” that can be self-limiting in the early stages of their practice and can cause them to pack up and leave. They will need mentors to guide them through this time period and perhaps mentors in the educational program and mentor-practitioners in the field (see, e.g., “A Doctor’s Tale” in Part II). Their undergraduate education as professionals needs to be as much “hands-on” as possible. Survival/Self-Sufficiency “Going home” and “becoming home” are different perspectives for rural helpers and have different results overall. Nurses who go home because it’s where they grew up, for instance, have a different sense

170  Part III – The Lessons

of job satisfaction. They are more attached and more self-satisfied. In contrast, nurses who are working to make it their home, who chose the community or who married someone who lived there or was posted there, have lower levels of satisfaction and may seek ways to leave. Being rural and becoming rural are different. If dissatisfied, the helper needs to either love it or leave it. Relationships are close and some see them as supportive while others may see them as intrusive. Remote practitioners feel that it is not a job; it is a lifestyle, and it is difficult to separate self from work. If they decide to stay, then an investment in long-term relationships is needed with members of the community. This is often developed through volunteering and through introducing themselves to the community in gentle but meaningful ways. Goudy (1990) noted that different people attach to different communities in different ways. For some it involves physical experiences (natural environment), while for others it is social (closeness to people). Volunteering is a good way to become part of a community. Incentives offered by governments, professions, or communities can help bring home professionals who have an original attachment to the community. In rural settings, helpers “do it all,” so they need to be versatile, to know a little bit about everything, to have good common sense and critical thinking skills, and to have an openness to learning from the experts who live in the community already – to realize that they are simply a “different kind of nurse or practitioner.” To survive, they also need to seek multidisciplinary team support; in other words, to secure productive relationships with fellow helpers, and not throw up boundaries or barriers, since these may well be the persons they will require at critical times, times when resources are not there to assist them or when ethical issues arise. There are positive factors (lifestyle) and challenges (access to amenities) that come with the roles. Independence can be seen as a positive since there is little hierarchy to direct the work of rural professionals, and they are the ones who are ultimately accountable. They work at developing local and long-distance team networks to supplement their knowledge base when needed – something that’s made more possible to do nowadays, given the technology available for texting and Skyping. As a practitioner becomes part of the community, her satisfaction with both her job and her life are apt to increase. Those practitioners who isolate themselves from the community, however, have lower levels of satisfaction and less community attachment. The latter is important for survival in rural settings.

Recurring Themes  171

In 1977, Rosemary tried to secure grant aid to assist a community in England to celebrate 25 years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth II. She assumed that money would be needed to purchase tangible resources as well as staff time to coordinate the event. Imagine her surprise when she learned that community members had beaten her to it! They had arranged an impressive event that included street parties as well as a range of activities for children, youth, and older adults. She learned that rich reservoirs of resources reside within rural communities. It was both unnecessary and inappropriate to seek financial help from outside the community. Policies and Programs Governments need to understand the context of the rural setting – its realities, limitations, complexities, and distances, its roles and relationships, its boundaries – before making policies and decisions that may have devastating consequences for both the community and the province. Often rural helpers feel marginalized by administration, whether it be the government or their parent agency or organization. They feel that their voices are not heard – “out of sight, out of mind,” as the saying goes. They want to be included in the making of decisions and the discussions that surround them, yet not have to endure long meetings that consume time that is needed to do front-line work. Policy makers can be helpful by recognizing the unique and specific needs of the rural setting, and can be supportive – and respectful – of the extraordinary scope of practice that’s expected of rural helpers. Focusing on involving the helpers and their communities in the processes of planning and policy development can make a difference in how these policies are implemented – or bypassed – in practice. Policies that support healthy rural workplaces are required. Such policies need to attend to the scope of the work, not limit the professionals in addressing the scope of practice required. As well, strong networks among disciplines are needed in order to get referrals for clients to needed urban services, given how relatively small numbers of helpers are often spread over large distances. Given the need of rural helpers to have knowledge at their fingertips on a wide range of issues, new partnerships between education and practice are required as well, in order to support them in doing the jobs they have to do.

16  The Need to Know the Story

“Nothing happens without conversation,” one of our participants insisted. She was explaining how, for rural people, the most valuable times are often those spent around the kitchen table exchanging stories about everyday problems and employing common sense to generate solutions. After interviewing over 40 participants in total, not to mention conducting workshops, hosting focus groups, reviewing related research, and presenting academic papers on the topic of rural helping, this comment seemed to us to sum things up. Since conversation is nothing if not the sharing of stories, then human life in general and rural life in particular, it implies, is housed in stories. If so, then helping in rural communities means, above all, listening to stories. It means learning the ways of these communities through the narratives – grand and small, old and new, public and private – that are woven through the fabric of life within them, then working with community members as they draw upon the stories that most sustain them. Put another way, rural helping involves appreciating – and accessing – the diversity of narratives that, together, constitute knowledge of a community’s origins, visions, and values. Such field-based knowledge offers novice practitioners the wisdom and skills necessary for success in their work with rural people. Academic curricula can provide professional content, while experiences grounded in conversations and stories provide context – and in that sense, meaning. By learning to dwell within such stories, rural helping professionals gain a greater sense of what it’s like to walk in rural people’s shoes, of how the community looks through the eyes of those who live within it. In this section, we focus on the “ordinary wisdom” (Randall & Kenyon, 2001) that is embodied in our participants’ stories, not to mention

The Need to Know the Story  173

our own stories, too. That said, such wisdom – based on story – cannot be neatly packaged, nor can it be organized in a step-by-step manner, as in the case of a conventional curriculum text. It exists in both the simple and the complex issues that dwell – silently, implicitly, and historically – within individual, family, and community stories and are intertwined with the grander narratives that affect these stories through events at the regional, national, and international levels. At bottom, such wisdom begins with us; it begins with us knowing ourselves (Hunt, 1987). As we come to know ourselves, we engage in a to-and-fro dance of understanding self and other both. Narrative is not a linear process. Like any conversation, it moves back and forth through time – past, present, and future – amid the complexities of personalities and issues. Stories touch on life’s interweaving threads, on what Connelly and Clandinin (1986) call “narrative unities.” As such, stories get us thinking, as we note the many themes that run through story-rich discussions and reflect on what these mean. Reflecting on the themes we heard repeatedly from our participants, we came to realize that, overall, three broad stories need acknowledging if we wish to be effective rural helpers, and need incorporating into curriculum aimed at training them: (1) our own stories, (2) the stories of the communities we serve, and (3) the larger stories by which they are affected. Knowing Our Own Stories Reflecting on our own stories as rural practitioners and on how they have been affected by the communities in which we ourselves served led us eventually to a rather different vision of what this book should be about, compared with when we started. Initially, our concept of the structure of the book was in line with traditional formulae for presenting social science research: state the purpose of the study, identify the research questions, review the relevant literature, explain the methodology, summarize the data, discuss the findings, and spell out recommendations for research and practice. For several reasons, the further we went the more we became uncomfortable with this approach. It didn’t ring true to the wisdom our participants shared with us, nor to how it had been shared: not in lofty pronouncements or abstract statements but in earthy examples and personal stories. And it didn’t honour their unique voices – let alone our own – nor the conversations in which rural helping is brought to life. Most importantly, it didn’t itself have the feel of a conversation, a conversation that begins

174  Part III – The Lessons

with understanding who we are ourselves, as persons and as professionals, and understanding what it is we bring to rural helping from our own experience. Our participants identified such understanding as essential to successful rural practice. So we began the book again, writing more about ourselves – as researchers, teachers, and practitioners – and about what it was that we brought to the discussion of rural practice from our own experience of living and working in small communities. Reflecting on that experience, we realized that, having been educated in city universities, our urban-based training – in theology, social work, and nursing – proved of limited use as we sought to apply it to the realities of rural settings. Armed at the time with the latest in theories and techniques from our respective disciplines, we also held a variety of assumptions about what it was we should actually be doing on the ground. Yet, all the while, niggling away at the back of our minds was the sense that rural people deserved something better, something that spoke to their unique ways of living, something not to be found in the textbooks and manuals that we carried around with us. Working in rural settings, it became more and more clear to us, was different from working in urban ones, something closer to the people, something rooted in the land and embedded in local issues. It was not until we reflected on each interview in the course of our research, though, that we also came to appreciate how much self-understanding – self-­knowledge – is critical to understanding rural communities. In effect, our reflection on rural practice brought us home to our selves, and home to our own rural roots. All of this said, knowing ourselves is no easy matter. How, indeed, does one “know” one’s “self”? Whatever else it might be, the self is multidimensional in nature, not black and white; and, as narrative psychologists insist, the self is narrative in nature as well (McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006; Freeman, 2010). In all, it is a complexity, not a simplicity, and knowing oneself is a never-ending process, forever evolving. Despite this, or perhaps because of this, philosophers since Socrates have stressed the need to “know thyself,” the necessity of selfunderstanding in whatever it is we do. Each of us was fortunate, of course, in that before heading off to university we had experiences in childhood of living in small communities, which gave us at least some implicit understanding of how things work within them. Still, to go inside ourselves and examine who we are – to reflect on what we do and why it is we do it, to be honest about our biases and breaking points,

The Need to Know the Story  175

our habits and assumptions, our weaknesses and strengths – proved challenging, to say the least. By virtue of our formal education, we had acquired what could be called an urban sense of self, which meant we needed to examine the layers of stories and assumptions – for “rural” and against it – that were packed within this identity. During our reflections on the interviews with our participants, however, we started to unpack it, as we discussed the meanings we each found in the issues and insights our interviewees raised about the complexity of rural helping. From these three-way conversations with each other, as well as with our participants’ recorded voices, we came to understand ourselves as, after all, academics who inevitably look at rural helping, and rural life in general, through the mainly urban lens of our professional knowledge and training in programming and practice. As this understanding has grown, our vision of and assumptions about both rural life and rural helping have become steadily more rooted in rural reality. As educators, we also realized through our discussions that each of us has always used a variety of techniques to aid our students in learning who they are. We realized, in other words, that each of us has all along had an instinctive sense that self-knowledge is essential to effective practice. For this reason, we’ve always employed reflective or narrative methods in our teaching; among them, breaking open metaphors, examining critical incidents, journalling, and writing one’s own life story, a process that makes one more familiar with the complexity of that story and, by extension, more mindful of the complexity of others’ stories, too. Now more than ever, our belief is that such techniques offer ways of unpacking our habits and fears, our assumptions and issues, so that we can appreciate how much such things affect ourselves, our relationships, and our practice. They help us look behind the blind spots in our own eyes, beyond our own vision of life and experience, and past our pet perceptions – about “rural” and “helping,” for instance – in order to appreciate what motivates (and inhibits) our actions as helpers and how these actions are interpreted by others. In this way, they build bridges of understanding between our world and theirs. Knowing the Stories of the Communities We Serve Knowing what we bring to rural communities from our own experience – from our own story – is just the beginning, although one we should return to continually. We need to know the community’s stories,

176  Part III – The Lessons

too. We need to access the many narratives – obvious and embedded, privileged and hidden, present and historical, “dominant” and “subversive,” “latent” and “emerging” (Cheers, 2004, p. 11) – that underlie the dynamics of daily life within it. Such access, though, does not happen simply by virtue of having certain professional qualifications, nor by residing in the community itself. Access has to be earned, by listening to what is said and not said, and by listening for the metaphors that people use to describe their experiences. It has to be earned by becoming a trusted member of the community and showing respect for its people’s ways of knowing and living. Again, this requires that practitioners, whether they are from an urban or a rural setting originally, know their own stories, are comfortable in them, and are open to their complexity – and, by extension, the complexity of the community’s story, too. In rural communities generally, our participants assured us, people and places are steeped in story, much like in days gone by when a pot of tea steeped all day on the stove as neighbours came and went, exchanging bits of gossip, comparing versions of the day’s events, and swapping opinions on the “open secrets” (Lischer, 2001) that run through village life. However, getting to know those stories that are most central to a community’s sense of self involves identifying and talking with what First Nations peoples call the “wisdomkeepers” (Wall & Arden, 2006) of the community, which is to say, its storykeepers, or its “storycatchers” (Baldwin, 2005). These terms refer to those individuals who carry the stories of the people – past, present, and even future – in their hearts. As such, they may choose to reveal these stories only to those who can be trusted to use them wisely and treat them with respect. Storykeeping in Aboriginal cultures is a highly honoured role, for storykeepers hold the spirit of the tribe with their knowledge of the myths and legends that have guided it throughout the years. In Australia, for instance, Indigenous peoples have passed down knowledge of key hunting and fishing routes from one generation to the next by means of stories conveyed through songs – “songlines,” as they are known (Chatwin, 1986). While some of these stories are known to the people, many of them are not. Rather, they comprise the “narrative unconscious” (Freeman, 2010) of the community, the foundation underlying all the other stories that constitute its life. Several of our participants advised us to ease our way gently into a community by taking time to wander about, keep our eyes and ears open, hold our assumptions at bay, and learn “the lay of the land.” To

The Need to Know the Story  177

help us do this, and to help us learn who and where the storykeepers are, we need to become part of the fabric of the community as much as we can, through volunteering, say, or becoming a listener at the local coffee shop. For several years, for instance, Bill has spent a portion of almost every day sitting in a Tim Horton’s coffee shop that is close to where he lives. It’s there he does the majority of his homework for university: preparing lectures, marking essays, and generally reading, writing, and reflecting. Over time, the other “regulars” – a mix of tradesmen, retirees, and ordinary folk from the local neighbourhood – have come to know him and accept him and even, on occasion, share with him something of their stories, as he does with them. He keeps a notebook of insights that come to him amid these encounters and draws upon them to understand what it’s like to be a senior in New Brunswick, a server behind the counter, and so forth (see Randall, in press). If you like, he serves as a storykeeper for those who frequent this particular Tim’s. More importantly, he’s come to identify, among the ones who meet there to chat every day, those who are, effectively, the storykeepers for this part of town – keeping the conversation going, as it were. The key is that every community, not to mention every family (Stone, 2004), has individuals within it who seem to hold others’ narratives in safe keeping, who have their finger on the pulse of the community, narratively speaking; who act as its “storians.” Carrying its core stories inside them, they know which ones are central to the community’s identity, which ones are its “sacred stories” (Crites, 1971). And they know why and when – if ever – these stories get told. A community, we are suggesting, often defines itself by an overarching narrative – a tacit understanding of its history, its heritage, its soul – that has been passed down through the generations like a genetic code: a narrative code, you might well say. Often, though, residents themselves, not unlike many rural helpers, are unaware of what this narrative is and how it informs their daily lives and actions. As such, it constitutes what educators call “tacit knowing” (Polanyi, 1958) or the “implicit curriculum.” Entering a rural community as an outsider can be challenging, therefore, if one is unmindful of the mores and values such hidden stories house, stories that are bred in the bone across the generations and that can express themselves (if at all) in unexpected ways at unexpected times. In other words, listening for the stories of the community involves listening, not just for the stories that get told, but for the untold ones as well. It means listening for what goes left

178  Part III – The Lessons

unsaid: for the secrets, the suffering, the unspoken longing for a better way – or for the way it was. Listening for the stories, positive and negative, that dwell behind the ones that are told, and then drawing out those that aren’t, is a vital but difficult skill to learn. Once again, it requires that we be in touch with our own hidden stories; otherwise, how can we expect to help others get in touch with theirs? In these deeper, more silent stories – these backstories – dwells the implicit curriculum that underlies day-to-day existence in the community, more so at least than in the cover stories or front stories we’re apt to hear when arriving on the scene initially and meeting people for the first time. The deeper the story, the saying goes, the deeper the wisdom within it. Bringing such stories from the depth of the spirit is a sensitive process and requires trust, however; a process that calls for care and compassion and close consideration. For they tend to be stories without words, imbued with powerful metaphors and emotions, tensions and implications. Sometimes, though, they can be discerned during gaps in the conversation when certain things seem taken for granted, or when mention of some person’s name or some incident in the past causes discomfort for storytellers and storylisteners alike. In such cases, people’s body language, tone of voice, facial expressions, or other non-verbal behaviours signal their uneasiness with what is being said – or not said; to those secret, sacred, or unsettling stories that operate between the lines. A related approach is to listen for the metaphors that people use when talking about the community – “this place is ... God’s country ... a dump ... the town that time passed by ... in a province people drive through on their way to somewhere else,” etc. Metaphors act as a coded language that allows people to allude to matters they lack the words to articulate directly; that lets them point to things elliptically, instead of naming them head-on. In the United States during the Civil War years, by way of example, the Underground Railroad was created to help Black slaves travel safely through to Canada. Since many of them could neither read nor write, maps of safe houses, rendezvous times and locations, and so forth were embedded in spiritual songs. These songs served as metaphorical maps that guided thousands of people to freedom. Along similar lines, during the English occupation of Ireland, people were forbidden to sing their national anthem. To get around this, troubadours and raconteurs wove metaphors about the love of a beautiful black-haired maiden into their songs and stories as a way of steeling their countrymen’s hearts with hope and easing their sense of oppression.

The Need to Know the Story  179

As such hidden narratives become known – to an individual, a family, a community – transformation can happen, re-storying can happen. While some of these narratives may be stories that people have outgrown and would do well to let go of, some may be success stories or survival stories which, echoed back to people, can support them and inspire them in maintaining continuity with their past and planning a more positive future amid the changing diversities and dilemmas of the wider world. Knowing the Larger Stories That Impact Rural Life As we outlined earlier in the book, the New Brunswick story is one of a province under pressure to survive, not unlike the stories of many other regions nowadays that have significant rural populations. While it has a distinctive history in terms of immigration, arts and culture, hard-working citizens, and a rich range of natural resources, its oceans, rivers, forests, and fields are rapidly being stripped of their sustainability due to government regulations that allow overusage. Ironically, the New Brunswick government has recently been pushing an agenda of “self-sufficiency,” encouraging people to create “sustainable” alternatives. However, the result of this push with respect to health care, to cite one issue, is that budgets and resources are fast approaching a state of emergency. Around the province, smaller hospitals are being closed and medical personnel are leaving. Meanwhile, ambulance services are being stretched to their geographical limits in terms of transporting patients to facilities that can provide the timely treatment they need. Although a few new hospitals have been built, their location “in the middle of nowhere” doesn’t necessarily make it easier for rural people to reach them. Meanwhile, the clinics that are being set up in small communities to compensate for closure of the old hospitals lack the capacity to provide even the most basic of emergency services to local people around the clock, or to respond to more serious concerns without their having to drive an hour or more to have them addressed. With respect to industry, in the past decade alone, the province has suffered more than its share of mill closures in small communities, and with them the loss of skilled workers to other parts of the country, if not to chronic unemployment. When these workers leave, they often take their families, their direct and in-kind economic support, and obviously their skills. As a rule, rural life is highly interdependent. The owner of the corner store, for instance, is dependent on the buying power of

180  Part III – The Lessons

his neighbours. When the mill shuts down and its workers leave town, many local businesses will decline, if not go bankrupt, as the economic base erodes. With this, the continuity of the community’s story is disrupted and those who remain feel a real sense of loss – financial, relational, emotional – as reflected in the increasing incidence of addiction, depression, suicide, and the like in rural areas. With “narrative disruption” (Randall & McKim, 2008, pp. 194–196), can come “narrative foreclosure” (Bohlmeijer, Westerhof, Randall, Tromp, & Kenyon, 2011), the state of heart in which, though one’s life continues on, one’s story seems all but over. No new chapters are apt to open up; no new twists in its plot are likely to occur. Rural sociologist David Flynn (1991) expresses the tragedy this entails: “When my community no longer is a story, then I lose part of my existence. I become storyless” (p. 33). Put another way, I am de-storied. But the story of the mill is tied to larger stories still. For a century or more, small communities in New Brunswick and beyond have been dependent on global markets to trade the goods that come from mine, sea, forest, and farm. Increasingly, these markets are in crisis, though, with demands and prices both being lowered so that the huge multinational corporations will survive at any cost, including their impact on the livelihood of local people and the fabric of their families. As well, oil prices are fluctuating continually on the international scene, with job uncertainty the inevitable result across the spectrum from urban to rural. As an example of such trends, one of our participants spoke to us of the negative impact on the business done by stores in his community due to fluctuating Canada-US exchange rates. “Ralph” is a retired school principal-turned-mayor in a little town close to the American border, a majority of whose inhabitants were traditionally employed by the Canadian Pacific Railway. While a succession of minor industries have helped to fill the void since the railway’s operations were scaled back – passenger service eliminated, repair shops shut down, the station house closed – the town’s fortunes are precarious at best. As mayor, volunteer fire fighter, ambulance driver, school principal, and paramedic all rolled into one, not to mention key storykeeper, too, Ralph has his finger on the pulse of the place and – quite literally, at times – the lives of his neighbours in his hands. Besides the town’s dismal economic prospects, however, he’s especially concerned about the policies of the provincial government, which he sees as undermining the volunteer spirit that keeps such towns alive.

The Need to Know the Story  181

Since volunteer ambulance drivers must be certified, for instance, they have to take time off from their day jobs to attend training sessions in Fredericton, which is a good 100 kilometres away. For their part, local seniors are saddled with additional burdens as their children, who are parents themselves, need two jobs simply to survive, not to mention travel back and forth to Fredericton every day for work. With several lakes nearby, the village is also in the heart of cottage country. Yet, while it is wonderful to have newcomers coming to the region every year, they tend to come “from away,” be summer residents only, and seldom lend a hand with volunteer activities – those of the village fire brigade, for one. If anything, they end up adding to the load on the folks who live there all year long. Still, an optimist (and activist!) by nature, Ralph insists on describing his community as self-sufficient, and he is committed to doing everything he can to enable it, not simply to survive, but rather to thrive. Ralph’s infectious vision parallels what has helped to save the small New Brunswick town of Nackawic. After the local pulp and paper mill was closed due to a downturn in global markets, and many workers and their families therefore moved away, its people have demonstrated that it is possible to “make do” with the resources and services they still possess – provided, that is, that they can draw upon the strengths of those who remain and on the story that’s kept the community alive and surviving hitherto, a story that is frequently implicit in people’s everyday conversations about previous successes and achievements and in their stories of “self-sufficiency” in the past. Honouring the survival stories and the success stories that rural people have, their stories of resilience and courage to soldier on against all odds, then echoing those stories back to them, as needed, to support them in maintaining continuity with the past and planning for the future: all of this is a sophisticated narrative skill. As noted already, it requires practitioners to reach beyond their own individual stories and walk vicariously in the stories of others, leading them along on their own path, so to speak, when the road maps have become distorted or blurred. It involves listening for the recurring metaphors, the telltale themes, the unspoken tales, and the underlying meanings at work within the secret or implicit stories whose role in shaping their actions and decisions community members themselves may well be unaware of. In essence, it’s a form of “narrative therapy” (White & Epston, 1990). A counselling strategy typically applied to individuals, though adapted for couples, groups, and indeed whole communities (see Storywise.

182  Part III – The Lessons

com), narrative therapy focuses on identifying and d ­ e-constructing the dysfunctional or “problem-saturated” stories that keep a person – or community – in a state of narrative foreclosure. Through a process of asking questions not unlike those asked above by Plummer (1995, pp. 24–29), new, more open, and more positive stories are constructed and supported, built around memories of events or times when the community narrative was dominated, not by “the problem” (the mill closing down, the railway leaving town), but by the vision of what might be. Great storykeepers down through the years have shown the potential of both self-knowledge and community knowledge to inspire whole nations with such a vision and to seed in them a “counter-story” (Nelson, 2001) with which to unseat long-standing narratives of injustice and oppression. Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, and Martin Luther King Jr are some of the more famous who come to mind for their ability to honour their people’s stories and reflect them back in order to comfort, encourage, and transform. Upon winning political power in South Africa, rather than seeking retribution for his people, Mandela changed a history of anger and brutality into one of reconciliation. Mother Theresa transformed the way the world views the poor and destitute in our midst from the lowest in society to those who reveal to us the face of God. Instead of retaliating militarily against the English, Ghandi taught his fellow Indians to resist by means of self-sufficiency, using the resources and the trades – salt making, for instance – that had sustained them in the past. By inspiring them to return to weaving cloth and selling it, he helped his nation shed the story of colonial slavery in favour of that of an independent people who achieve their freedom through powerful yet peaceful means. Closer to home, in New Brunswick in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Louis Robichaud became the first premier to represent the francophone population of the province, most of whom lived in small communities. During his time in office, he fostered legislation that provided recognition of and education in Acadian culture, heritage, and language. As a result of his efforts, New Brunswick became the first, and remains the only, Canadian province that is officially bilingual. Recognized widely as a seminal figure, Robichaud helped to bring the stories of two of its founding cultures – anglophone and Acadian – together into one, thereby changing the course of history for this mostly rural province. While storykeepers in small communities may seldom rise to the same

The Need to Know the Story  183

level of renown as these examples, they nonetheless hold the power of the community story within them and, with our aid as agents of “restorying” perhaps (Kenyon & Randall, 1997), can bring that story back to the people, thus helping them to transform difficult situations into opportunities for growth.

17  Strategies and Exercises

Trolling for Memories From the various workshops and courses he has given as a gerontologist, Bill has developed an assortment of exercises to assist people in exploring the complexity of their own life narratives. This one, which he calls Trolling for Memories, can be adapted to help people identify specific experiences and relationships that have influenced their decision to enter a helping profession. First, they are asked to focus on a period in the past that’s been influential in their wanting to help others as their life’s vocation. It could be as far back as their childhood or as recent as last month; it could be spread out over several years or be a single life-changing encounter. To help them bring this period in mind, they are invited to list the following: • The main events and experiences in your life during this time • The people who were part of your life, especially those who affected your decision to become a professional helper • The main activities you were involved in (jobs, pastimes, projects, etc.) • The house you lived in, community you grew up in, school you went to, clubs you belonged to, places you travelled • The objects or possessions that were part of your life: toys, clothes, cars, etc. • The books you were reading, movies you were watching, music you were listening to After recalling such things, they are then asked to reflect on the following:

Strategies and Exercises  185

• What feelings, positive or negative, are triggered in recalling this period? • What more would you like to know about this period to fill in the blanks? How would you get answers to your questions? • What have you learned about yourself by bringing this period to mind, especially about your decision to become a professional helper? • What other observations do you have about the role this period played in your decision? Community as Story Sociologist David Flynn (1991) suggests that our understanding of a small community can be enriched by thinking of it as an unfolding story, with its own unique plot, characters, setting, genre, and theme – albeit a story, as hinted already, with as many versions as the community has members! Based on Flynn’s insights, Bill has developed the following questions to aid us in looking at any community through a narrative lens: • Insofar as stories often have titles, what would be the title of this community’s story, or more accurately, your story about it? What would be the subtitles? Why? Do they pertain to stories of particular individuals, of particular groups within the community, or of the community as a whole? Do they suggest certain underlying themes that run through the community’s story? If so, what sorts of themes are they? • Insofar as stories have characters, who are the main and minor characters – the heroes and villains – in the story of this community? What is the role played, say, by age or gender, by family or ethnicity, in who is main and who is minor? • Insofar as characters in stories have relationships, how do the individual characters, major and minor, in the community story relate to one another? What is the basis for strong relationships, e.g., kinship, occupation, interest, age, or some other element of homogeneity? • Plots in stories typically revolve around a conflict that needs sorting out, a problem that requires solving. What are some of the problems, past and present, faced by this community? How do they drive the plot of its story? Does the story metaphor itself suggest ways these problems could be resolved?

186  Part III – The Lessons

• What is the role played by diversity (age, gender, ethnicity, etc.) as subplots in the story of this community, or as alternative versions or sub-versions to it? • Insofar as stories are set in space and time, how important is history and culture in providing an identity for this community? How and why does the community history provide a community identity? • Which helpers are most central to the community’s story? Why? Is it a function of occupation, of personality, or of something else? As a helper yourself, what is your own role in that story? • Is there a particular future predicted for the story of this community? In other words, where is the story going, and can it be changed? If so, how? Again, what might be your own role in helping that change to happen? Walkabout As a team manager in the United Kingdom, Rosemary developed an exercise for use with novice social workers. Building on an idea by Tom Tierney, the organizer of a student unit at East Birmingham Family Service Unit, her goal in developing it was to help them understand the local area where they would practise; at the same time, to assist them in integrating with the team. She urged them to be as creative as possible in designing ways to find out what life was like in that area. Among her suggestions were the following: walk around the community; sit in the waiting room at the local health centre; read what is posted on community notice boards; attend public meetings; read through back issues of church bulletins or local newspapers; participate in festivals and other special events; identify and speak to community leaders; find places where the action is and go there. Naturally, she encouraged them to think of other ways as well to gain knowledge about the area and to get a feeling for life within it. By way of a guide, she provided them with a series of questions they could use as a checklist, including: • What are the major advantages of living in the area? • What are the major difficulties? • What is the demographic makeup? • Where do people work? • Where do people spend their leisure time? • How do people resolve their individual and community problems?

Strategies and Exercises  187

• Who are key people in the area? • Where is the action taking place? When? • If you had a large sum of money, say a million dollars, how would you spend it to improve the lives of local residents? On completing their research, the new social workers would return to the team and speak about what they had found. Often, they provided new information that led inevitably to interesting discussions about how, together, the team could develop its work. Not only had they met key people in the area and now had a sense of the layout, but the discussions their discoveries stimulated within the team as a whole helped them learn more about their colleagues. Overall, they were in a stronger position to begin their practice in earnest. Houses This exercise was originally developed for children in some form of social care, so that they can review their lives to date and gain some insight from the exercise. But it can be used with rural helpers, too. Participants are asked to draw a set of boxes on a sheet of paper, each one representing a place where they have lived: a town, a neighbourhood, an apartment, a house. The same exercise can be used in more deliberate autobiographical work as well. By means of it, students can identify the context in which they developed their ideas about helping or about rural practice. Houses can also represent stages in the life of a community, or represent different opinions within a community about an issue of importance. Inkshedding “Inkshedding” is an exercise designed in the 1980s by our colleague Russ Hunt, along with Jim Reither. They wanted to develop a “dialogically transactional” method by which students could read, understand, and respond to what was written, rather than evaluate and “help” with the writing (Hunt, 2005). Students are asked to free-write in response to a shared experience and then pass what they’ve written along to another student to read. The reader is asked to mark passages in which the writer said something “interesting,” “striking,” or “outrageous.” Scripts are then collected and “the most often-marked

188  Part III – The Lessons

passages” are copied and circulated in the next class. The exercise has since developed in a number of ways and has been used by many university teachers. Indeed, whole conferences have been devoted to the topic. Inkshedding has a number of possibilities for students who are learning to become rural helpers. For example, they can be asked to write a few sentences about their understanding of a particular concept, such as “rural New Brunswick” or “helping,” or of a particular experience, such as a challenge they faced during a practicum (or placement) in a small community. They could then be asked to pass their work to a classmate. The second student could make written comments and either return them to the writer or pass them to a third student to make even more. This could lead to a small group discussion, or to one in the class as a whole. Alternatively, a paragraph from a book could be the catalyst for discussion. In either case, such an exercise can be developed in many ways at many stages in a course or program. Overall, it provides a means for students to learn from one another; in particular, to aid the student who is quieter or shyer (Hunt, 2005). Snakes and Ladders This exercise, based on the work of Priestley and McGuire (1983), can be adapted for students of rural human services. Originally, it was developed so that people can review setbacks and accomplishments in their lives and can set goals for change. Students draw a chart with 10 columns and 10 rows, inserting snakes to indicate setbacks and ladders to indicate accomplishments. In relation to rural helping, students could be asked to draw snakes to show mistakes they have made in rural practice and ladders to indicate successful interventions. Alternatively, the board could represent a community and students could draw the snakes to show community setbacks (such as the closure of a factory) and ladders to show successful initiatives (such as the development of tourism). This exercise could be completed in a small class, in breakout groups, or by individual learners. The discussions that take place when the board is constructed and after the board has been completed may be particularly useful. For instance, instructors could ask students how to deal with snakes and how to build ladders in their rural helping practice.

Strategies and Exercises  189

Case Studies and Community Studies Case studies can provide information about rural communities and can facilitate group discussions. The social work students that Rosemary met in Labrador, for example, were presented with some of the vignettes that appear in this book and were asked to discuss appropriate interventions in the issues these vignettes portray. They were able to consider similarities and differences between their own experiences and those the vignettes described. More experienced students might be encouraged to write fictional case studies, or to provide an analysis of their own communities. These could then be used for role plays or for class discussions. Turning Points In her work with students in the field of nursing, Dolores uses a series of questions to get them thinking about particular turning points in their lives, as illustrated by the two examples included below. When they write about these turning points in their learning journals or other autobiographical assignments, she then comments on their work extensively in writing, which often leads to further conversations with them face to face. In particular, she asks them to: • Examine pivotal life events or turning points that have made a difference for them and write these stories out. • Look at three key themes that arise from these stories and examine their meaning, e.g., responsibility, perseverance, resilience. • Identify how these themes play out for them in their role as nurses, drawing on actual experiences that illustrate how these stories influence their caring situations, and their patients, positively or negatively. • Reflect on how they feel when things go wrong, how they respond to these difficulties, and how these feelings play out in their caregiving practices. • Formulate from these experiences a theory of nursing and personal health that they believe they work by. One student’s story, for example, was about how her life was turned upside down when her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, which

190  Part III – The Lessons

required many trips from their local village to the cancer treatment centre in a large urban hospital, over two hours away. The continuity and security she had once experienced in the family had changed, as she took on new responsibilities and roles. If her parents were together during his treatments in the city, for instance, then as the eldest child, she was required to care for her younger siblings and to take on a variety of household tasks. Another student reported that when she had won a regional swimming championship, something she had worked hard for during many years of early morning practices, she had finally reached her goal and the hard work had paid off. She now had a keen sense of who she was and a confidence in her ability to accomplish any task she put her mind and body to doing. Each of these students identified pivotal points in their young lives that proved significant in the course of their autobiographical examination, an examination that itself was personally empowering. Through doing this exercise, the student whose father eventually died of brain cancer realized that responsibility was now a key theme in her life and her nursing practice alike. Since her mother had to work to support the family, she became the primary caregiver for her siblings: preparing them for school, making their lunches, helping with their homework, cooking, cleaning, and the like. Other themes that arose were being organized so that things got done that needed to be done, and grieving the loss of her father who could not be there for her high school and university graduations. She also grieved the loss of her childhood in having to become a parent figure at too young an age. As a student nurse, she felt that she now understood what families and patients go through when one of their own is ill. Asking the patients about their families at home would be important to do, she realized, in terms of learning what the experience meant to them. She felt that she would give them the best she had to offer, that she would be efficient yet keep the conversation going – about their lives, their families, and their communities – so that she could assess any feelings of loss, loneliness, or worry that their illnesses might have initiated. By the same token, she felt that she would not be able to work in palliative care because she would pull away from her patients, given that the experience was still too close to home. Through doing the turning-point exercise, the student who won swimming competitions identified three combination themes: perseverance/hard work, independence/personal growth, and confidence/selfawareness. Her perseverance and hard work are what she believed got

Strategies and Exercises  191

her through all the early morning practices on cold winter days and her weekend competitions away from home. She kept working hard through her coaches’ criticisms, and through the many competitions that she did not win. She didn’t lose heart. On days when she felt like giving up or felt lonely and far from home, she became aware that she was, in fact, maturing and becoming independent, able to manage both schoolwork and a demanding schedule in her efforts to do better. In learning to deal with life’s demands, in other words, her confidence grew as a swimmer and an individual alike. Success felt good when it was earned. Applying these same learnings to her chosen profession, she realized that she might work best with patients who were independent and strove to get better, rather than with those who lacked a positive outlook. For instance, she had already helped stroke victims learn to walk to regain their mobility and had taken time to help them become independent in feeding and dressing themselves. She rewarded them for their successes by taking them to the solarium or to the TV room to watch their favourite show. In such ways, she helped them build up their confidence. As well, she realized that shift work didn’t bother her either, for she was already used to early mornings and to challenging schedules and demanding routines. She relied on her strengths to help her help others, and to nurture similar strengths in them.

18  Questions for Consideration

In preparing students to bring a narrative perspective to their work as rural helpers, it is crucial that we know these students as persons, as well as the background from which they have come. It is critical that we ask certain questions concerning them – or, as the case may be, that they ask them of themselves. Carrying on, then, from the various strategies and exercises outlined above, we have included several such questions below. We can hardly stress too much, however, that the process of helping people to become helpers of others should really begin at home; it should begin with ourselves. Before asking questions about our students and the communities in which they will be living or working, it is imperative that we put comparable questions to ourselves: in particular, questions about our experiences of “rural,” of “helping,” of “narrative,” as each of us has done in Part I. Doing so helps us as educators to identify what it is we can take from our own lives – what themes and learnings – in order to motivate our students to reflect on their lives, too. Questions about Students Our premise in this book is that the stories of rural helpers themselves have an important impact on their practice. Students learning to be helpers need to become familiar with the stories that have influenced – have limited, biased, or otherwise shaped – their understanding not only of themselves but of rural communities, as well. In turn, instructors need to have some knowledge of these same stories so that the curricula they design can be geared to their students’ interests and experiences. In what follows, we offer a number of questions that may

Questions for Consideration  193

be helpful for instructors and students alike, as well as serve as checklists for instructors to ask of students. Alternatively, students could be asked to reflect on these questions themselves and, working within their own comfort zone, of course, to share their reflections with the class. In all cases, students and instructors should be encouraged to think about the implications of these answers for rural practice. If students are encouraged to share their reflections with other class members, then both students and instructors will learn about the rich resources for teaching and learning that are present in the class itself. Personal Background Which community does the student identify as “home,” and what does “home” itself mean? Does it mean their community of birth, or others where they spent much of their lives? Where are these communities located? Is home in the province where they currently live, or in some other province or country altogether? What are the implications of identifying with particular communities for their practice? Given that some students may not identify with particular communities at all, how might this impoverish – or enrich – their practice? Do the students categorize their community or communities in some way or other, or perhaps in terms of some metaphor? Do they see them as “urban” or “suburban,” as “rural” or “remote,” as an industrial community, farming community, forestry community, or fishing community? What do each of these categories mean to them? Do they think in terms of “northern,” “eastern,” or “western” communities, or do they use other categories instead? Are there any features of their community that they think are unique? If so, which? Did the students grow up in a small nuclear family, or a large extended one? What was the nature of “helping” within that family, and how did the family relate to the larger community? What was its story within that community – e.g., as a family of leaders or helpers, or the owners of the mill? What is their current family situation? What are the helping processes at work within it, and what is its relationship to the larger community? Career Ambitions Do the students have a career ambition in a particular helping profession? If so, which one? How much knowledge or experience do the

194  Part III – The Lessons

students have of their chosen professions already? For students who do not intend to have a helping career, how do they think the course will be relevant to their lives as citizens? What theories, concepts, or strategies will be most relevant? Least relevant? What personal stories and experiences might impede particular students in their work – e.g., agency policies, financial and other resources, professional ethical codes? Where do the students intend to live and help? Do they want to return to their community of origin to work, or to a community that’s otherwise well known to them? Knowledge and Assumptions about Rural Helping What do the students believe about “rural,” about “helping,” about “narrative”? How have they acquired these ideas? What assumptions, or what meta-narratives, about rural communities might they want to challenge – e.g., as places to “escape to” or “escape from” (Randall & Clews, 2001)? What are they confident that they know already about helping in such communities? What do they still need to learn, and how best can they be helped to learn it? Questions about Communities Effective rural helping requires an in-depth understanding of the communities in which we practice. The questions that follow, which are similar in spirit to those posed by Plummer (1995) that we listed at the start, can enrich this understanding, whether we are students or practitioners, and whether we answer them from our own existing knowledge or by means of the sorts of strategies provided in the previous section. Storykeepers Who are the storykeepers of the community, those who for various reasons (age, profession, reputation) seem privy to the “real story” of the community, to its inside story, so to speak; those who have a greater grasp of its history, its founding families, its “origin-myths” (Flynn, 1991, p. 31); a deeper understanding of its secrets, of the backstories behind particular issues or tensions or feuds? Is it the postmaster, perhaps, or the mayor, or the president of the local historical society? Is it the druggist, the librarian, the priest – or possibly a particular senior

Questions for Consideration  195

citizen who lives quietly at the edge of village life? In case such individuals don’t stand out automatically, however, who in the community could help us to identify them and, if need be, introduce us to them? “So, you want to know something about the story of this place? Well, then, you need to talk to So-and-So.” Narrative Communities Where are the naturally occurring narrative communities within the larger community; the “hardly worth mentioning” groups perhaps (Banks, 2004), whose members, whenever they assemble for conversation, keep the community’s stories alive (Banks & Mangan, 1999)? Do they assemble on a regular basis (every Monday morning at the coffee shop on the corner) or as the occasion arises – at funerals, for instance, or at the tavern after local sports events, after meetings of the parish council, at the seniors’ centre, the Lions Club, and so on? Are there certain groups – service clubs, church congregations, etc. – whose members could collectively function as such a community, and serve as a source of local lore? If such natural narrative communities don’t seem to exist, how could one be started or encouraged? Might one bring together some of the known storykeepers for coffee and conversation, with the aim of getting more people as well to remember together the community’s story (or stories) and, in the process, envision where that story could or should be going? Community Narratives Do all of the members of the community agree about its story – past, present, and future? In talking with different storykeepers, or gaining access to various narrative communities in the community as a whole, is there one main story that stands out or a variety of versions between the lines? How do these versions differ? Do they compete with one another in some respects? Do certain ones surface more frequently than others? Which ones are officially sanctioned and which are quietly silenced? If silenced, then when, why, and by whom? Are some more dominant, more powerful, or more official, while others come out only in certain situations or when recounted by particular tellers? What sorts of situations are they, and what sorts of tellers? And what is the relevance of gender and ethnicity in influencing which stories get heard? How is it that some stories dominate discourse in the community more

196  Part III – The Lessons

than others do? What sorts of stories are they? In what genre do they fall: tragedy, comedy, romance, myth? Are there certain central events, certain pivotal stories or “signature stories” (Kenyon & Randall, 1997), certain “nuclear episodes” (McAdams, 1988) in the community narrative to which the various tellers consistently refer – e.g., the time the mill was built, the plant was closed, the highway went through, the school burned down? In each version, how are these events interpreted? How are they storied? For example, might what one person, one family, or one group construes as the crucial event in the community story remain in the background of what another one narrates as a minor episode or tiny subplot at best? Might an event portrayed in one telling as a tragedy from which no good could ever come be re-storied in another telling as an opportunity? “Yes, the closing of the mill was devastating to our town, but at the same time, it motivated us to take greater control of our own destiny, to become more self-­ reliant. And it brought us more together.” Are there certain versions of “the community story” as a whole, in fact, that possess more positive potential to help people move forward into the future? Also, are there certain versions of the community’s story, not to mention certain events within it, that are simply no longer told? Why would this be? What recurring themes run through the various versions of the story that people entertain – e.g.,“the northside vs. southside,” “the struggle to survive,” “the town that might have been,” “some day our ship will come in,” etc.? In the various versions that you hear in the course of your duties, do certain individuals, families, or groups stand out as “main characters” – whether heroes or villains – while others are more minor or supporting characters instead? Are such people heroes in the business field, the religious realm, the cultural world, the athletic scene? Are they members of the community itself or outsiders, people who “come from away”? And who are the main characters in the story of the community that may be emerging in the present? In general, what is unique about the web of stories that the community entertains about itself, when compared, say, with the stories entertained about themselves by neighbouring communities? Overall, how strong or focused, how cohesive or consistent, is the community story – or, rather, people’s sense of the community story? What seems to be the community’s “origin story,” its “creation myth” – the story of how it was founded and grew to what it is today? What themes run through this origin story or creation myth, and how are

Questions for Consideration  197

they reflected in the versions you have heard recounted? Is this storymyth generally subscribed to? Who subscribes and who does not? Historical Sources Is there a local historical society or museum in the community? an information centre or tourist bureau? a town hall or municipal office? If so, what books, pamphlets, reports, articles, or other documents have been written on the history of the community? How can copies be obtained? Are their authors still alive? Are/were they members of the community or people “from away”? Are/were they individuals or organizations or government departments? What agenda has informed the writing? And how “official” are these documents deemed to be? How do the versions of the community story that each document reflects compare – or compete – with the versions that you have heard from the various storykeepers or narrative communities in the community itself? What stories or novels, plays or songs, have been written about the community, about a pivotal event in its history, or about the surrounding region? Are/were their authors members of the community itself? Are any of them still alive, and if so, where do they live? What special gatherings are part of community life – e.g., Remembrance Day ceremonies, Fair Day festivities, political meetings, town hall meetings, weddings, funerals, anniversaries, family reunions? How do people interact with one another at them? Who talks with whom about what? Which versions of the community story are reflected in speeches that are made, and which are hinted at in private conversation? How long do these gatherings go on and what tends to be the mood at them? Judging from such assemblies, what is the “narrative environment” of the community as a whole – open or closed, inviting or controlled? How does this environment compare with other communities – for instance, the ones just up the road?

19  Curriculum and Conversation

Throughout this book, we have stressed the importance of conversation in effective rural helping. This is the case on several levels, we believe, beginning with that of daily life in rural communities, as people gather in local coffee shops or around the kitchen table to talk about their lives. Conversation is also central to helping itself, as one person offers herself to another to understand the challenges to be faced. And it has been essential to our research, too, which has revolved around our chats with the 40-plus helpers – paid and unpaid, professional and volunteer – whom we interviewed about their life and work. Then, in listening to the recordings of these conversations and reflecting on their implications, we had rich and rambling conversations among ourselves. In fact, from the get-go, we had been having conversations inside ourselves as well – about what “rural” and “helping” and “narrative” mean to each of us. Later, when assembling a selection of participants for a focus group to talk about our preliminary findings, we were treated to more conversation still. Certainly, as we have noted all throughout Part III, conversation is central to curriculum that is geared to training rural helpers: conversation between instructors and students, students and courses, students and students, students and themselves; between novice helpers and those already in the field and between practitioners of every stripe and the rural people whom they serve and among whom they may live. Lastly, we have sought to write this book itself as much as possible in a conversational style. Some 25 years ago, educator Madeline Grumet (1988) wrote that curriculum happens when we are in conversation, especially in the spaces within conversations, when we listen to each other, reflect on what has been said, and wrestle with the meanings conveyed. Reflecting on

Curriculum and Conversation  199

information and reaching for the meanings within it takes time, however. It is a deeper process of connecting with previous experiences and making sense of what they have taught us. A rural curriculum, based in conversation, is therefore very much a non-linear process, unlike models of curriculum that tend to be the case in professional programs, which follow a more inductive, logical, linear, sequential design. While Grumet was not referring to curriculum for rural helping in particular, she confirms what our participants shared with us, which is that effective rural practice is learned best through conversations. And since conversation is nothing if not the sharing of stories, it is learned best through narrative – through listening to the stories people tell (and listening for those they don’t), appreciating the meaning in the metaphors they use, and drawing on these stories and meanings to guide our actions and decisions. As rural practitioners, so one of our participants advised us, “we need new ways of talking to each other” that facilitate a coming together with our respective realms of expertise and create a collective wisdom. The real teachers in our study, this advice implies, were not those who had academic positions. They were not us, in other words; not the academics writing about rural life but the people who are living it, who walk the talk of rural helping every day. Our research has thus led us from academic confidence to the kind of humility that comes when we experience the other as mentor and see our own assumptions as limited in nature. This is when we really come to know ourselves, when we let go of our cover stories as “experts,” when we let the stories of rural helpers and rural people show us the way; when we let them teach us how to help them, how to be with them, how to become a part of their community or family. What has happened to us as researchers, then, has been a transformation. It is the same sort of transformation, we believe, that needs to happen for practitioners who are starting out. It involves shedding the gown and guise of academe and donning the jeans and coveralls of rural life. It involves bringing an open mind to the ongoing conversation within a given small community, letting its residents teach us what it is they need, and learning how our skills can “meet” their needs, not assuming that, as “trained professionals,” we know this in advance. In completing our work on this project, therefore, we have become acutely aware of how our notions of rural helping have evolved through the research process itself. The stories of our participants, like those of our students, have enriched our own stories, too, and how it is we teach and learn.

200  Part III – The Lessons

For her part, for instance, Dolores now makes sure she incorporates a unit on rural nursing into all her courses. As well, she has a deepened understanding of the students who come to her classes from rural backgrounds, and the sorts of environments in which they’ve grown up. In fact, she’s made a personal commitment to visiting as many small communities in New Brunswick as she can. And more than ever, she is convinced that a narrative curriculum requires developing activities that focus on students’ own stories, that support them in getting to know themselves better, and that allow instructors to appreciate the persons behind the faces in the classroom. In a caring profession such as nursing, a narrative curriculum provides ways for teachers to care for students as individuals with unique experiences, and for students, in turn, to care for patients’ unique experiences through respect for their stories, an approach that lies at the heart of “narrative medicine” (Charon, 2006) and, more broadly, of “narrative care” (Bohlmeijer, Kenyon, & Randall, 2011; Noonan, 2011). Among our many challenges in writing this book has been, not just that our three core themes – rural, helping, and narrative – are immense in themselves, not to mention immensely overlapping, but also that relating them to different fields (nursing, teaching, social work, etc.) is no small order. What is more, as our research has unfolded, our understanding of rural helping itself has kept on changing. It has been an evolving narrative in itself, which has meant that, in composing every section, we were forever revising our earlier drafts. As we have repeatedly discovered, however, learning and research based on narrative are highly cyclical and reflexive processes, not linear or sequential. Plus, they are personally transformative. When we listen closely to the story of someone who lives or works in a small community, that story becomes part of our own. We come away changed. Rural helping is a never-ending story. Not only do we ourselves change as rural helpers, both personally and professionally, but the individuals and families whom we serve are continually changing as well. So, too, is the community itself, plus the wider world in which it is set and by which so much of daily life within it is affected. For these reasons, this book boasts no neat conclusion that ties everything together. It has no ending as such. Rather, as the poet puts it, in our end lies our beginning.

Appendix An Annotated Bibliography

While few of our participants referred to particular books, in the course of composing this book, we have drawn on a wide range of sources in developing our narrative model of rural helping. Reflecting the many fields in which that model has relevance, such sources explore the very sorts of themes which rural helpers should delve into, we believe, as they seek to weave a narrative perspective into their practice. Summaries of some of these sources we are pleased to offer here. Baldwin, C. (2005). Storycatcher: Making sense of our lives through the power and practice of story. Novato, CA: New World Library. Full of personal anecdotes, quotable quotes, and questions for reflection, this highly autobiographical book is an extended meditation on the centrality of storytelling to every aspect of our lives – our values and relationships, our cultural and religious heritage, our innermost identity as individuals. “Story is the narrative thread of our experience,” the author writes; “we constantly weave life events into narrative and interpret everything that happens through the veil of story” (p. xi). At its core, the book invites us (whoever we are and whatever our place in the world) to become “storycatchers.” Storycatchers “come whenever we are in crisis to remind us who we are. Storycatchers entice our best stories out of us ... [they] invite the stories we most need to come forward into the community” (p. xiv). Banks, K., & Mangan, M. (1999). The company of neighbours: Revitalizing community through action-research. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. This book recounts the authors’ action-research in the small town of Hespeler, Ontario – a town under threat of “dying” due to changing conditions in the broader socio-economic context. Its core concept is that each such

202  An Annotated Bibliography community has a complex “community narrative” that it behooves us to appreciate if we would assist the community to survive – and thrive – amid the challenges (political, economic, etc.) of an ever-changing world. Equally essential is identifying and/or fostering the creation of “narrative communities” – i.e., groups (often “hardly worth mentioning”) of community members who have a sense of the community’s history to date and who, through sharing stories and comparing notes, can weave a more positive vision of what it might be in the future. Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 11–32. In this article, considered “seminal” by many narrative scholars, psychologist Jerome Bruner starts with the idea that human beings are capable of two broad modes of cognition: logical thought and narrative thought. Narrative thought is what we engage in every day of life as we make sense of our experiences and communicate them to others. In fact, life and narrative are so intensely entwined that “we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (p. 15). Drawing on research he and his colleagues conducted into how, in families, “life stories ... mesh ... within a community of life stories,” he analyses the different yet comparable versions with which four members of the same family talk about their lives. Within the family, he says, we learn “ways of telling and ... conceptualizing” that “become so habitual that they finally become recipes for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into memory.” Indeed, such structures “get laid down early in the discourse of family life” and can “persist stubbornly in spite of changed conditions” (p. 31). Charon, R. (2006). Narrative medicine: Honoring the stories of illness. New York: Oxford University Press. Written by the director of the Narrative Medicine Program at Columbia University, this book will be of interest to doctors, nurses, and other health care professionals – in rural and urban contexts alike. Drawing on insights from literary theory and narrative psychology, it lays the foundation for a more truly human approach to caring than the “medical model” which has dominated health care to date. Such an approach proposed is rooted in a narrative perspective on human life and in the understanding that “patients” or “clients” are not merely collections of physical or mental symptoms but people with full, rich stories. Perhaps the book’s core insight is that “patients and caregivers enter whole – with their bodies, lives, families, beliefs, values, histories, hopes for the future – into sickness and healing, and their efforts to get better or to help others get better cannot be fragmented away from the deepest parts of their lives” (p. 12f).

An Annotated Bibliography  203 Cheers, B. (2004). The place of care: Rural human services on the fringe. Rural Social Work, 9, 9–22. This article is the keynote address delivered by a leading figure in rural social work at the first International Rural Human Services Conference, held in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 2003. It is a meditation on the complexity and uniqueness of helping in rural “spaces” and “places.” Among the key points it makes is that “all communities have many narratives,” indeed, five kinds in particular: dominant narratives, secondary narratives, subversive narratives, latent narratives, and emergent narratives (p. 11). In effect, “A community of place is where [these] narratives meet” – indeed, where often they compete. Furthermore, the work of rural practitioners themselves can be categorized in terms of seven “narrative domains”: the structural domain, the professional domain, practice fields, practice wisdom, the personal domain, society, and community (p. 14). An appreciation for these intertwining narratives and domains is viewed as vital to effective rural practice. Clews, R., Randall, W., & Furlong, D. (2004). Research notes on interdisciplinary stories by rural helpers. Rural Social Work, 9, 189–198. This article summarizes insights into rural helping expressed during a session attended by 20 rural helpers from a variety of professions and countries. The session was part of the International Rural Human Services Conference held in May 2003 in Halifax. Participants were invited to share their responses to three broad questions: What is it like to practise in a rural community? How did you learn the knowledge and skills needed to practise effectively? And how can human service educators prepare their students for effective rural practice? The article is organized around the more provocative phrases participants came out with in responding to these questions. These include: “Assume everyone’s related,” “The Code of Ethics doesn’t work,” “Ruralness is in their souls,” and “Work in a rural setting is ‘real’ social work.” In fact, the world “real” (genuine, authentic) surfaced several times throughout the session, leading to the conclusion that “rural helping is about real helpers interacting with real people ... in the context of a real relationship” and requires “real knowledge” – knowledge rooted “in the living ethics of the community” (p. 196f). Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. In this soulful book, the author – a social scientist, political activist, and by training, psychiatrist – reflects on the power of fiction, and stories in general, to teach, inspire, and heal. One partucularly vivid chapter, entitled “Stories

204  An Annotated Bibliography and Theories,” is devoted to when he was doing his residency at Massachusetts General Hospital. In the course of learning how to diagnose patients accurately so treatment could begin as soon as possible, one of his mentors, a senior psychiatrist deemed on the unit to be “an affable old gent ... over the hill” (p. 5), kept cautioning him not to be in a hurry to identify the symptoms, but instead to listen to the patient’s story. “He urged me to be a good listener in the special way a story requires: note the manner of presentation; the development of plot, character; ... and the degree of enthusiasm, of coherence, the narrator give to his or her account” (p. 23). “Their story, yours, mine,” the man advised him, “– it’s what we carry with us on this trip we take, and we owe it to each other to respect our stories and learn from them” (p. 30). Collier, K (2006). Social work with rural peoples (3rd ed.) Vancouver, BC: New Star. This short book has been a classic rural social work text for three decades. Collier resists the temptation to provide a “how to” manual but provides tools that will enable rural social workers to understand the lives of Canadian rural people and the communities in which they live. He emphasizes the need to understand the unique characteristics of each rural community. By exploring the relationships of economic phases to the development of helping relationships, Collier shows how remote communities differ from rural communities adjacent to major centres of population, and how communities based on hunting and gathering differ from rural agricultural societies. Drawing upon stories from social work practice in various parts of Canada, Collier concludes that key tasks for rural social workers are to observe and analyse communities, interpret what is observed, and then construct relevant practices. He calls upon social workers to respect the communities in which they work and resist attempts to “develop” these communities in ways that mirror urban communities and argues against individual and family work that assumes an urban culture and mindset. Connelly, F.M., & Clandinin, D.J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5): 2–14. This article focuses on the use of narrative forms of inquiry to examine life experiences that are educational. Throughout life, stories are constructed and reconstructed to give coherence to the characters who have influenced who we are. Tools of narrative inquiry include autobiography, oral history, and metaphor. Qualities of narrative inquiry include the temporality of stories: the beginnings, middles and endings that create a narrative unity for the storyteller. Methods of narrative inquiry include fieldnotes of shared experiences,

An Annotated Bibliography  205 storytelling, letter writing, and other narrative data sources (rules, principles, philosophies, etc.). Narrative, like other qualitative research methods, relies on scholarly criteria of examination, such as reliability and validity, but in narrative they are called apparency and verisimilitude. Generalizabilty is not the focus in narrative studies since one story can offer a rich depth of insight and knowledge. The particular rather than the general is significant. Narrative inquiry entails a back and forth presentation of stories told about an experience in one’s life and about how that experience has changed due to the passage of time. Thus the notion of temporality is more appropriate, as are other hermeneutic principles. Narratives are “plurivocal” – i.e., laden with multiple “I’s” as we recall the many narratives and stages of growth our lives have known. One of the risks in narrative research is the “Hollywood Plot” where happy endings are the norm and real life does not always provide happy endings. Crago, H., Sturmey, R., & Monson, A. (1996). Myth and reality in rural counselling: Towards a new model for training rural/remote area helping professionals. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 17, 61–74. This article links three different perspectives on issues and dilemmas that can be involved in counselling in rural and remote communities. Common issues identified include survival in isolation, deprivation of resources, visibility, boundary maintenance, rural conservatism, and rigid gender prescriptions. All of these are considered from the perspective of structural determinants, Bowenian systems theory, and holistic practice informed by a commitment to personal growth and integrity. Recommendations are presented for the selection, training, and effective utilization of counsellors who work in small communities. David, J. (2004). Story keepers: Conversations with Aboriginal writers. Owen Sound, ON: Ningwakwe Learning Press. In this book, journalist Jennifer David offers the stories of 10 Aboriginal authors from rural locations across Canada. She writes, “Before the 1970s, aboriginal literature in Canada was virtually non-existent.” David originally began the project as a television series but was unable to find the funding. Yet, in her conversations with the authors, she learned that stories find a way to be told. “All Aboriginal people are storytellers,” Maria Campbell, one of David’s authors said. These stories share common characteristics; stories can heal, wound, or create. Generational and community stories shape lives. Storytelling is a revered process by Aboriginal peoples; it bridges the spaces between persons throughout time and differences. Stories carry the wisdom

206  An Annotated Bibliography of the elders and the wisdom of the land. For Ruby Slipperjack of the Ojibway Nation, “The land is like the air we breathe ... the land holds our history. Everything about our family happened on that land and every spot of land has a story” (p. 25). David goes on to say, “How I am in the city is not how I would be growing up back home” (p. 30). When she went back home, she learned that it wasn’t the community that had changed; it was her. Gregory Scofield, from rural British Columbia and Saskatchewan, wrote, “I’m a story keeper. I’m a keeper of the stories from my history. I am a keeper of the medicines from those stories” (p. 37). Dunlop, J., & Angell, G. (2001). Inside-outside: Boundary-spanning challenges in building rural health coalitions. Professional Development: The International Journal of Continuing Social Work Education, 4, 40–48. Trends within the world of human services challenge social workers to become effective “boundary spanners.” As governments implement strategies of decentralization and devolution, social workers interested in leadership roles need to understand how to manage the “multiple external organizational relationships created by coalition building.” This article presents a conceptual framework for understanding boundary-spanning functions and issues, applies this framework to rural health coalitions, and offers guidelines for community practitioners, as boundary-spanners, to be more effective in managing the institutional and interpersonal relations involved in coalition building. An understanding of the dual roles social workers play both inside their organizations and outside – as members of coalitions – will help social workers in rural health settings to play a major role in building collaborative networks. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield. In this autoethnographic text, Carolyn Ellis shows how autoethnography can be used both in research and in the classroom. Defining autoethnography as “research, writing, story, and method that connect the autobiographical and personal to the cultural, social and political” (p. xix), she shows how it forms a bridge between autobiography and ethnography by making the self both the subject and the object of research. She advocates a method of “thinking like an ethnographer and writing like a novelist.” Ellis turns students in her class into a cast of characters that live and speak in her book. In doing so, she demonstrates how autoethnography zooms from self-exploration to culture and then back to self-exploration in both research and the classroom. The book is very practical. Ellis illustrates “doing” autoethnography in interview

An Annotated Bibliography  207 research, in fieldnotes, in the classroom, and in writing. Each of these uses of autoethnography is illustrated by exercises, charts, and guidelines, as well as by descriptions of her work. Flynn, D. (1991). Community as story: A comparative study of community in Canada, England, and the Netherlands. Rural Sociologist, 56(1), 24–35. This article highlights the richness of a small community when viewed as possessing its own unique story. The author draws on a study of three distinct communities, each set in a different cultural-historical context (Kingsville, Canada; Havon, England; and Uitberg, the Netherlands) to compare what people tell themselves about the origins (and future prospects) of their community in terms of the main characters who figure in its history, the pivotal events in that history, and the underlying themes that feature in the versions they recount. Key themes are that communities need a past in order to have both a present and a future and that individual members of the community reaffirm their existence through the community’s history. In effect, personal stories are shaped by the community’s story; indeed, are chapters or subplots within it. Among the provocative quotes contained in the article are: “to the extent that the story is in common, is shared, then a single community exists” (p. 30); “When the origin-myths are known to all, when famous people are honored, when events are celebrated together, then residents know who they are and outsiders know this community-as-story is coherent” (p. 31); and “when my community no longer is a story, then I lose part of my own existence. I become storyless” (p. 33). Freedman, J., & Combs, G. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. New York: W.W. Norton. This book offers an overview of the theory and practice of “narrative therapy,” a unique approach to counselling that focusses on the underlying stories by which people define their identities and, by extension, conduct their lives. Although narrative therapy is used primarily in working with individuals, the concepts and strategies that inform it, such as thick vs. thin stories, story deconstruction and re-construction, externalizing conversations, and ­re-storying, have also been applied in working with groups of people too – from families and couples to whole communities and cultures – to move beyond the limiting, problematic, dysfunctional narratives by which life within them is guided towards more open, more growth-affirming narratives instead. Fulford, R. (1999). The triumph of narrative: Storytelling in an age of mass culture. Toronto: Anansi.

208  An Annotated Bibliography In this book, Canadian journalist and CBC Massey Lecturer for 1999, Robert Fulford, explores how storytelling is in fact central to human life at every level: from everyday gossip and conversation to “the news” to literature per se, and from the fictions that we tell ourselves about who we are and where our lives are going to the “master narratives” that, for better or worse, shape the ways entire cultures view the world. A key theme of this accessible investigation of “the narrative impulse” (p. ix) is that “a story that matters to us ... becomes a bundle in which we wrap truth, hope, and dread” (p. 9). As he puts it, “Stories are how we explain, how we teach, how we entertain ourselves ... And for those reasons, they are central to civilization” (p. 9). Hill, E., Darling, C., & Raimondi, N. (2003). Understanding boundary-related stress in clergy families. Marriage & Family Review, 35(1-2), 147–166. In their important work with individuals, families, congregations, and communities, many members of the clergy report high levels of stress due to their demanding responsibilities and hectic schedules. The study presented in this article sought a more in-depth understanding of boundary-related stress and coping resources of clergy and their families. Focus groups of clergy and spouses revealed a number of boundary-related stressors affecting quality of life for both clergy and their families. These have to do with issues of time, mobility, congregational fit, space, role expectations, isolation, and intrusions. To cope with such stressors, clergy and their families report using a variety of methods to buffer the impact of boundary intrusions. Recommendations are provided for clergy families and congregations – whether in rural settings or in urban ones – to better deal with this multifaceted challenge. Hopewell, J. F. (1987). Congregation: Stories and structures. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. This book will be of special interest to those who serve in small communities as ministers, priests, or pastors. Its central premise is that each congregation is, in effect, a complex, ever-changing narrative structure. The author, formerly a professor of theology at Emory University, draws on concepts from literary theory – e.g., setting, characterization, and plot – plus case studies of particular congregations, to examine the storied dimensions of congregational life (its history, internal dynamics, culture, underlying “genre,” etc.) and to argue that a deep appreciation for such dimensions is essential to insightful practice. King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto: Anansi. In this often humourous, deeply insightful book, University of Guelph English professor and 2003 CBC Massey Lecturer Thomas King draws on his

An Annotated Bibliography  209 experience growing up as a person of Native American descent to explore both the light and the dark side of stories. “Stories are wondrous things,” he reminds us, “and they are dangerous” (p. 9). Throughout the book, King not only recounts numerous stories but reflects on the role that stories themselves play in our lives – as individuals, as communities, as cultures. His focus is on the deep ties to storytelling of Native culture in particular, yet on how no other North American culture has “been the subject of more erroneous stories” (back cover). Perhaps the theme that resonates most through every chapter is captured by this observation: “The truth about stories is that that’s all we are” (p. 9). Lischer, R. (2001). Open secrets: A memoir of faith and discovery. New York: Broadway Books. This movingly written memoir of a novice pastor starting out in parish ministry is a must-read work for seminarians raised or trained in urban settings, yet assigned to serve in rural ones. Among its many insights into the subtleties of ministry with rural people are its observations on “the double-edged quality of gossip” (p. 97). “In our town,” the author notes, “every life was gossiped by all, and all were gossips” (p. 96). Yet, rather than regard this reality as unredeemably negative, he probes its positive potential. “Gossip,” he writes, “is the community’s way of conducting moral discourse and, in an oddly indirect way, of forgetting old offenses” (p. 96). It is also “our common discourse” on what constitutes “decent farming, honorable business ... or effective parenting” (p. 96). As such, it functions as “continuing education.” Overall, the narrative incestuousness of small communities is less a minus than a plus. “When I first came to [this parish],” he concludes, “I fretted about all the gossip going on in the church – until I realized I couldn’t carry on a decent ministry without it” (p. 102). Martinez-Brawley, E. (2000). Close to home: Human services and the small community. Washington, DC: NASW Press. Drawing on stories from small communities in northeastern United States, Martinez-Brawley applies sociological concepts such as gemeinschaft/gesellschaft to explore life in small centres of population. She examines institutions that can be cohesive in developing ties that bond communities – institutions range from religious organizations to local media, and she shows that these institutions can also be destructive. Processes that can lead to domination of the community by powerful individuals and patterns of exclusion are also considered. A variety of ways of exerting leadership and power in the community are described. Patterns of caring – including positive effects of community gossip – are explored. Finally, Martinez-Brawley examines ethical

210  An Annotated Bibliography issues that must be addressed in community-oriented human services in small places. Noonan, D. (2011). The ripple effect: A story of the transformational nature of narrative care. In G. Kenyon, E. Bohlmeijer, & W. Randall (Eds.), Storying later life: Issues, investigations, and interventions in narrative gerontology (pp. 354–365). New York: Oxford University Press. This essay discusses a unique innovation in the realm of “narrative care” with older adults. The author, the director of Therapeutic Recreation in a large nursing home in central New Brunswick, outlines the process by which individual residents – many of them originally from small communities in the same region – are interviewed concerning the story of their life. Interviewers are family members, staff or volunteers from the institution, or students from one of the local high schools or universities. From the interviews, a full-length book is compiled, plus a 15- to 20-minute DVD depicting the highlights of the resident’s life. Both are presented to the resident at a “narrative ceremony” attended by as many as 50 to 100 people. The success of the program testifies to the power of story in general; in particular, to how intentionally honouring the stories of one’s elders creates a climate of respect concerning the history of one’s community and, by extension, the uniqueness and value of each of its members. Randall, W. (2004). If I knew then what I know now ...: A narrative perspective on rural ministry. Rural Social Work, 9, 170–179. The author reflects on his experience as a Protestant minister in rural communities in western Canada and outlines certain concepts that rural human service workers might keep in mind when endeavouring to bring a narrative perspective to bear upon their practice. These concepts include narrative knowing, narrative environment, co-authoring, the novelty of lives, types of stories, and levels of stories (i.e., outside, inside, inside-out, and outsidein). Although the perspective outlined is applied to dynamics and dilemmas involved when working in the context of organized religion, a unique type of narrative complexity is integral, it is argued, to rural life in general. Moreover, an appreciation for such complexity is deemed essential for effective rural helping in other professions as well, not ministry alone. Randall, W., & Clews, R. (2001). The tales that bind: Toward a narrative model of rural helping. Rural Social Work, 6(2), 4–18. This article explores the potential of a narrative model to assist social workers and other helpers who practise in rural communities. The authors introduce

An Annotated Bibliography  211 the idea of rural helpers as “midwives of stories,” and then outline two overall “meta-narratives” that can be entertained about rural communities, often by rural people themselves (i.e., as places to “escape to” or “escape from”), and argue that neither of these narratives convey the richness and diversity of rural life. As an alternative, the authors propose that a model characterized by four “angles” – namely, the poetical, the hermeneutic, the therapeutic, and the political – can enhance helpers’ awareness of the unique qualities of the rural communities where they practice. Reamer, F. (2003). Boundary issues in social work: Managing dual relationships. Social Work, 48(1), 121–133. Social work literature demonstrates clearly that ethical issues related to boundaries are among the most problematic and challenging that social workers face. Such issues arise in circumstances where social workers encounter actual or potential conflicts between their professional duties and their social, sexual, religious, or business relationships. This article provides an overview of boundary issues in which dual and multiple relationships are involved; presents a “conceptually based typology” of such issues; and offers guidelines to help social workers manage them in the course of their practice. While little mention is made of rural communities specifically, the article is helpful with respect to boundary issues in general. Richardson, L. (1990). Writing strategies: Reaching diverse audiences. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Richardson shows the importance of using both literary devices and social science methodologies in ethnographic research and writing. A key component of her work is metaphor, because it links things together and forms the basis of theory generation. Indeed, without metaphor writing is spineless because “metaphors are everywhere” — including in such social science terminology as “functionalism,” “social structure,” “role” theory, and “labeling” theory (p. 19). For its part, narrative gives meaning. People understand and explain their worlds narratively by linking events together in “five socially significant ways: the everyday; the autobiographical; the biographical; the cultural; and what I term the collective story” (p. 24). Narrative makes sense of everyday life by providing temporal markers (when an individual event occurred) and also a social order (how people explain their lives to others). Autobiography confers meaning on experiences by ordering and organizing them temporally. In a similar way, biography provides us with temporal sense of the lives of others – of contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. Cultural stories provide and support a social world through embedding stories

212  An Annotated Bibliography in the lives of people, thereby illustrating phenomena such as enslavement, victimization, social class, home, community, and humankind (pp. 24–25). Finally, collective stories narrativize “the experiences of the social category to which the individual belongs.” As such, they “are comforting” because “by moving beyond the individual story, people realize they are not alone ... collective stories can break down the isolation and alienation of contemporary life” (pp. 25, 26). Sacks, O. (1990). The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. New York: Harper Collins. Sacks recounts the many stories of individuals suffering from neurological disorders resulting in memory loss of their past and the significant persons who played a role in their lives. These persons had been forgotten by society and left to dwell in worlds of isolation and alienation. We learn through Sacks’ book that some things need to take priority in our lives – restoring patients to personhood and to a respected place in humanity through their stories. Shifting from stories of disability, impairment, and dysfunction is needed and can be transformed through knowing the person behind the label. Sample, T. (1994). Ministry in an oral culture: Living with Will Rogers, Uncle Remus, and Minnie Pearl. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. This volume will be of interest to those serving small communities as ministers or priests. A professor of theology, the author claims that many who occupy the pews of religious congregations, especially rural ones, participate in a predominantly oral – vs. literate – culture. And “an oral culture lives by storytelling” (p. 4). Reflecting on his years growing up in rural USA, he admits, “I had come out of an oral culture. My world was not one of discourse, systematic coherence, the consistent use of clear definitions, and the writing of discursive prose that could withstand the whipsaws of academic critique ... it was a world made sense of through proverbs, stories, and relationships” (p. 3). His central argument is that an appreciation for the fundamentally oral component of congregational culture is pivotal to effective pastoral practice. Transken, Si. (2004). Dancing with diverse diversities: Creativity and social work professing in small/rural northern communities, Rural Social Work, 9, 118–134. In this autoethnographic article, Transken shows how, unintentionally, she brings into her work as a social work educator and researcher “the ghosts and complications of colonialism, the divides between academia and

An Annotated Bibliography  213 community activism, and the best and worst of social work’s profession history/herstory.” She points out that the “packaging” of social work into neat parcels does not help the practitioner who has to deal with the overlapping relationships and permeable boundaries that characterize small and rural communities. Transken argues for a creative, flexible, and an interdisciplinary approach to social work to liberate individuals, organizations, and communities. She believes that rural social work students can be encouraged to find their voices through exercises to develop creative writing and thinking.

This page intentionally left blank

References

Baldwin, C. (2005). Storycatcher: Making sense of our lives through the power and practice of story. Novato, CA: New World Library. Baldwin, C. (2013). Narrative social work: Theory and application. Bristol, UK: Policy Press. Bamberg, M. (1997). A constructivist approach to narrative development. In M. Bamberg (Ed.), Narrative development: Six approaches (pp. 89–132). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Bamberg, M. (2006). Biographic-narrative research, quo vadis? A critical review of ‘big stories’ from the perspective of ‘small stories. In K. Milnes, C. Horrocks, N. Kelly, B. Roberts, & D. Robinson (Eds.), Narrative, memory, and knowledge: Representations, aesthetics, and contexts (pp. 1–17). Huddersfield, UK: University of Huddersfield Press. Banks, K. (2004). Hardly worth mentioning groups and the informal community. Rural Social Work, 9, 34–41. Banks, K., & Mangan, M. (1999). The company of neighbours: Revitalizing community through action-research. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bickle, J. (2003). Empirical evidence for a narrative concept of self. In G. Fireman, T. McVay, Jr., & O. Flanagan (Eds.), Narrative and consciousness: Literature, psychology, and the brain (pp. 194–208). New York: Oxford ­University Press. Bohlmeijer, E., Kenyon, G., & Randall, W. (2011). Afterword: Toward a narrative turn in health care. In G. Kenyon, E. Bohlmeijer, & W. Randall (Eds.), Storying later life: Issues, investigations, and interventions in narrative gerontology (pp. 366–380). New York: Oxford University Press. Bohlmeijer, E., Westerhof, G., Randall, W., Tromp, T., & Kenyon, G. (2011). Narrative foreclosure in later life: Preliminary considerations for a new sensitizing concept. Journal of Aging Studies, 25(4), 364–370.

216 References Boudreau, M., Toner, P., & Tremblay, T. (Eds.). (2009). Exploring the dimensions of self-sufficiency for New Brunswick. Fredericton: St Thomas University. Bruce, A. (April, 2013). To be perfectly Frank: From shale gas to civic responsibility, tough talk from New Brunswick’s favourite son. Atlantic Business Magazine, 16–25. Bruner, J. (1987). Life as narrative. Social Research, 54(1), 11–32. Bruner, J. (1990). Acts of meaning. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bruner, J. (2002). Making stories: Law, literature, and life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chaisson, H. (2009). A culture of wonder, absence, claiming, and identity: Acadian history in New Brunswick. Paper delivered at annual conference of Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education. Fredericton: University of New Brunswick. 19 June. Charmaz, K. (2006). Constructing grounded theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Charon, R. (2006). Narrative medicine: Honoring the stories of illness. New York: Oxford University Press. Chatwin, B. (1986). The songlines. Macclesfield, UK: Franklin Press. Cheers, B. (2004). The place of care: Rural human services on the fringe. Rural Social Work, 9, 9–22. Cheers, B., Clews, R., Powers, A., & Carawan, L. (2004). Beyond geographical and disciplinary boundaries: Human services in rural communities. Special issue of Rural Social Work, 9. Clews, R. (2000). Enriching anti-racist social work curriculum: Sensitizing concepts from New Brunswick. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Memorial University of Newfoundland. Clews, R., Newman, K. (2005). Multiple learnings about identity for narrative research: Canadian war-brides as teachers and catalysts. McGill Journal of Education, 40(1), 80–94. Clews, R., Randall, W., Baines, B., Christopher, J., & Cougle, C. (May, 2000). The drawing board stage: Planning a cross-disciplinary qualitative research study. Seminar for 17th Qualitative Analysis Conference. Fredericton. Clews, R., Randall, W., & Furlong, D. (2004). Research notes on interdisciplinary stories by rural helpers. Rural Social Work, 9, 189–198. Coles, R. (1989). The call of stories: Teaching and the moral imagination. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Collier, K. (2006). Social work with rural peoples (3rd ed.). Vancouver, BC: New Star. Commission on Post-Secondary Education in New Brunswick. (2007). Advantage New Brunswick: A province reaches to fulfill its destiny. Fredericton: Department of Education, Training, and Labour.

References 217 Connelly, M., & Clandinin, J. (1986). On narrative method, personal philosophy, and narrative unities in the story of teaching. Journal of Research in Science Teaching, 23(4), 293–310. Connelly, M., & Clandinin, J. (1990). Stories of experience and narrative inquiry. Educational Researcher, 19(5), 2–14. Connelly, M., Clandinin, J., & He, M. F. (1997). Teachers’ personal and practical knowledge on the professional knowledge landscape. Teaching and Teacher Education, 13(7), 665–674. Conrad, M., Dubé, N., Northrup, D., & Owre, K. (2010). “I want to know my bloodline”: New Brunswickers and their pasts. Journal of New Brunswick Studies, 1, 1–28. Crago, H., Sturmey, R., & Monson, A. (1996). Myth and reality in rural counselling: Towards a new model for training rural/remote area helping professionals. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, 17(2), 61–74. Crites, S. (1971). The narrative quality of experience. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 39(3), 291–311. Cupitt, D. (1991). What is a story? London: SCM. Damasio, A. (1999). The feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. San Diego: Harcourt. David, J. (2004). Story keepers: Conversations with Aboriginal writers. Owen Sound, ON: Ningwakwe Learning Press. Dewey, J. (1938). Experience and education. New York: Collier. Dorie, J. (2012). All gone now. On album Ghosts of Pictou County. New Glasgow, NS. Dunlop, J., & Angell, G. (2001). Inside-outside: Boundary-spanning challenges in building rural health coalitions. Professional Development: The International Journal of Continuing Social Work Education, 4, 40–48. Ellis, C. (2004). The ethnographic I: A methodological novel about autoethnography. Walnut Creek, CA: Rowman & Littlefield. Flynn, D. (1991). Community as story: A comparative study of community in Canada, England, and the Netherlands. Rural Sociology, 56(1), 24–35. Freedman, J., & Combs, G. (1996). Narrative therapy: The social construction of preferred realities. New York: W.W. Norton. Freeman, M. (1993). Rewriting the self: History, memory, narrative. London: Routledge. Freeman, M. (2010). Hindsight: The promise and perils of looking backward. New York: Oxford University Press. Freeman, M. (2011). Narrative foreclosure in later life: Possibilities and limits. In G. Kenyon, E. Bohlmeijer, & W. Randall (Eds.), Storying later life: Issues, investigations, and interventions in narrative gerontology (pp. 3–19). New York: Oxford University Press.

218 References Fulford, R. (1999). The triumph of narrative: Storytelling in an age of mass culture. Toronto: Anansi. Furlong, D. (1994). A song of love: A narrative inquiry into caring in teaching and learning. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. University of Toronto. Furlong, D. (2004). Medicare myths. Saint John, NB: Dreamcatcher. Furlong, D., Clews, R., & Randall, W. (May, 2007). Autoethnographry and fictionalization in reporting qualitative research. Paper presented at Qualitative Analysis Conference, St Thomas University, Fredericton. Gold, J. (2002). The story species: Our life-literature connection. Markham, ON: Fitzhenry & Whiteside. Goldberg, M. (1991). Theology and narrative: A critical introduction. Philadelphia: Trinity Press International. Goudy, A. (1990). Geomorphological techniques (2nd ed.). London: Unwin Hyman. Grumet, M. (1988). Bitter milk: Women and teaching. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Hanson, T. (August, 2012). Towards a common vision for community transportation in New Brunswick. Report prepared for the Economic and Social Inclusion Corporation of New Brunswick. Hardy, B. (1968). Toward a poetics of fiction: An approach through narrative. Novel, 2(1), 5–14. Hauerwas, S., & Jones, L.G. (Eds.). (1989). Why narrative?: Readings in narrative theology. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. Hill, E., Darling, C., & Raimondi, N. (2003). Understanding boundary-related stress in clergy families. Marriage & Family Review, 35(1-2), 147–166. Hinchman, L., & Hinchman, S. (Eds.). (1997). Memory, identity, community: The idea of narrative in the human sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Hopewell, J.F. (1987). Congregation: Stories and structures. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Hopkins, R. (1994). Narrative schooling: Experiential learning and the transformation of American education. New York: Teachers College Press. Hunt, D. (1987). Beginning with ourselves in practice, theory, and human affairs. Cambridge, MA: Brookline Books. Hunt, R. (2005). What is inkshedding? In E.M. Sargent & C. Paraskevas (Eds.), Conversations about writing: Eavesdropping, inkshedding, and joining (pp. 134– 141). Toronto: Nelson-Thompson. Kenyon, G., Bohlmeijer, E., & Randall, W. (Eds.). (2011). Storying later life: Issues, investigations, and interventions in narrative gerontology. New York: Oxford University Press.

References 219 Kenyon, G., & Randall, W. (1997). Restorying our lives: Personal growth through autobiographical reflection. Westport, CT: Praeger. King, T. (2003). The truth about stories: A native narrative. Toronto: Anansi. Lischer, R. (2001). Open secrets: A memoir of faith and discovery. New York: Broadway Books. Lopez, B. (1986). Arctic dreams. New York: Random House. Maritime Provinces Higher Education Commission. (2013). Annual report: 2012– 2013. Fredericton, NB. Martinez-Brawley, A. (2000). Close to home: Human services in the small community. Washington, DC: NASW Press. Mattingly, C. (1991). The narrative nature of clinical reasoning. American ­Journal of Occupational Therapy, 45(11), 998–1005. McAdams, D. (1988). Power, intimacy, and the life story. New York: Guilford. McAdams, D. (2006). The redemptive self: Stories Americans live by. New York: Oxford University Press. McAdams, D., Josselson, R., & Lieblich, A. (2006). Identity and story: Creating self in narrative. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. Moyers, B. (30 April, 2010). Interview with Barry Lopez. Bill Moyers Journal, PBS Television. Nelson, H. (2001). Damaged identities: Narrative repair. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. New Brunswick Self-Sufficiency Task Force. (2007). The road to self-sufficiency: A common cause. Fredericton: Province of New Brunswick. Noonan, D. (2011). The ripple effect: A story of the transformational nature of narrative care. In G. Kenyon, E. Bohlmeijer, & W. Randall (Eds.), Storying later life: Issues, investigations, and interventions in narrative gerontology (pp. 354–365). New York: Oxford University Press. Passaris, C. (2012). New Brunswick’s perfect demographic storm. Journal of New Brunswick Studies, 3, 1–13. Plummer, K. (1995). Telling sexual stories: Power, change, and social worlds. London: Routledge. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Polkinghorne, D. (1988). Narrative knowing and the human sciences. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Priestley, P., & McGuire, J. (1983). Learning to help: Basic skills and exercises. London: Tavistock. Randall, W. (1995). The stories we are: An essay on self-creation. Toronto: ­University of Toronto Press. Randall, W. (1999). Narrative intelligence and the novelty of our lives. Journal of Aging Studies, 13(1), 11–28.

220 References Randall, W. (2004). If I knew then what I know now ...: A narrative perspective on rural ministry. Rural Social Work, 9, 170–179. Randall, W. (2012). Composing a good strong story: The advantages of a liberal arts environment for experiencing and exploring the narrative complexity of human life. Journal of General Education, 61(3), 277–293. Randall, W. (in press). The narrative complexity of ordinary life: Tales from the coffee shop. New York: Oxford University Press. Randall, W., & Clews, R. (2001). The tales that bind: Toward a narrative model of rural helping. Rural Social Work, 6(2), 4–18. Randall, W., & Kenyon, G. (2001). Ordinary wisdom: Biographical aging and the journey of life. Westport, CT: Praeger. Randall, W., & McKim, E. (2008). Reading our lives: The poetics of growing old. New York: Oxford University Press. Reamer, F. (2003). Boundary issues in social work: Managing dual relationships. Social Work, 48(1), 121–133. Richards, D. (30 October, 2009). Allan Legere’s living shadow. Globe and Mail. Richardson, L. (1990). Writing strategies: Reaching diverse audiences. Newbury Park, CA: Sage. Rosen, H. (1986). The importance of story. Language Arts, 63(3), 226–37. Sacks, O. (1990). The man who mistook his wife for a hat and other clinical tales. New York: Harper Collins. Sample, T. (1994). Ministry in an oral culture: Living with Will Rogers, Uncle Remus, and Minnie Pearl. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press. Sarbin, T. (Ed.). (1986). Narrative psychology: The storied nature of human conduct. Westport, CT: Praeger. Stone, E. (2004). Black sheep and kissing cousins: How our family stories shape us. Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. Tannen, D. (1990). You just don’t understand: Women and men in conversation. New York: Ballantine. Tönnies, F. (2001). Community and civil society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Transken, S. (2004). Dancing with diverse diversities: Creativity and social work professing in small/rural northern communities. Rural Social Work, 9, 118–134. Tremblay, T., & Rose, E. (2011). Last shift: The story of a mill town. (DVD). Fredericton: A Golden Girl Production. Turner, M. (1996). The literary mind. New York: Oxford University Press. Vanier, J. (1998). Becoming Human. CBC Massey Lecture Series. Toronto: Anansi. Walker, J. (2010). The once and future New Brunswick free press. Journal of New Brunswick Studies, 1, 64–79.

References 221 Wall, S., & Arden, H. (2006). Wisdomkeepers: Meetings with Native American spiritual elders. Hillsboro, OR: Beyond Words. Walls, M. (Ed.). (2006). New Brunswick book of everything. Lunenberg, NS: MacIntyre Purcell. White, M., & Epston, D. (1990). Narrative means to therapeutic ends. New York: W.W. Norton. Zapf, K. (2001). Notions of rurality. Rural Social Work, 6(3), 12–27.

This page intentionally left blank

Index ­

abuse, 103 – 4 Acadians, 105, 142 – 9, 182; expulsion of the, 22, 90 activism, 99 – 106, 181 aging, as biographical process, 50 – 1 ambulance services, 123 – 4, 127 – 8, 165, 168 – 9, 179, 181 autoethnography, 206 – 7 back story(ies), 14, 158, 161, 178, 194 balance, 125, 128, 167 Baldwin, Christina, 201 Banks, Ken, 201 – 2 begats, the, 50, 52 bilingualism, 148 bootlegger, 75 bottom-up vs. top-down, 159 – 60 boundary(ies), 47, 124 – 5, 127, 159, 160 – 2, 166, 206, 208, 211. See also dual relationships Bruner, Jerome, 202 burnout, 165 – 7. See also stress case study, 18, 189 characters, minor or main, 185, 196 Charon, Rita, 202 Cheers, Brian, ix, 203

Clandinin, Jean, 6, 153, 204 Clews, Rosemary, xiv, 37 – 45 co-authoring, 12 code of ethics, 117, 161, 168. See also ethics coffee shops, 158. See also Tim Horton’s Coles, Robert, 203 – 4 Collier, Ken, 204 “come from away,” 45, 100, 105, 156, 181 community: development, 99 – 106; history, 197; narrative, 175 – 9, 195 – 7, 202, 203; policing, 77; ­remote vs. rural, 204; storian, 49, 177; story(ies), 11, 76, 154, 175 – 9, 185 – 6, 195 – 7, 207. See also narrative communities; rural confidentiality, 117, 125, 161 congregations, stories and, 208, 209. See also ministry; religion Connelly, Michael, 6, 62, 153, 204 contextuality, 18 conversation, 7 – 8, 12, 172, 198 – 200; as cornerstone of rural helping, 172, 198 – 200; and curriculum, 198 – 200; narrative nature of, 199

224  Index ­ counterstories, 16, 182 Creemore, Ontario, 47 – 8 Crites, Stephen, 18. See also sacred story curriculum, 60, 61, 153; based on stories, 153; and conversation, 198 – 200; implicit, 177 – 8; ­informal vs. formal, 57, 61; living, 54; narrative, xii, 153 – 5, 173. See also ­narrative curriculum David, Jennifer, 205 – 6 death, 126 de-storying, 180 diversity, 162 – 4 dual relationships, 160 – 2, 169, 211 Ellis, Carolyn, xii, 65, 206 – 7 empathy, 66 Equal Opportunity, 70. See also Acadians; Robichaud, Louis ethics, 66, 166; common sense, 167 – 8 expertise, 168 – 9, 199 Extra Mural Program (EMP), 32, 88 – 9, 91 – 2. See also nursing family: history, 48 – 9; story, 203 First Nations, 21 – 2, 70, 72, 77, 104, 116 – 21, 157, 168, 176, 205 – 6, 208 – 9 Flynn, David, 180, 185, 207 funerals, 125 – 6 Furlong, Dolores, 53 – 62 Furlong, Edward, 54 – 5 Gandhi, Mohandas, 182 gemeinschaft, 163 gesellschaft, 163 get involved, 158. See also volunteering Gil Eannes, 55 – 6

gossip, 14 – 15, 209. See also open secrets; rumour Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan, 47 Grumet, Madeleine, 198 Harvey Station, 45 – 7 helping: as learning, 52; Bill’s experience of, 46 – 8; difficulty defining, x, 163; Dolores’ experience of, 53 – 62; patronizing aspect of the term, x, 51, 99, 147, 163; Rosemary’s experience of, 43. See also rural; rural helping Hespeler, Ontario, 201 – 2 hidden knowledge, 61 – 2 history, xiii, 197 home, 169 – 70, 193 hospital closures, 33, 103, 179 houses, 187 Hunt, David, 155 Hunt, Russ, 187 – 8 Indian Affairs, 120. See also First ­Nations inkshedding, 187 – 8 insider vs. outsider, 72, 156 – 9 International Conference on Rural Human Services, 7, 203 Internet, 97 Irving, 24 isolation, 135 – 6 King, Thomas, 208 – 9 larger stories, 73 – 4, 179 – 83 learned helplessness, 119 learning vs. schooling, 112 – 15 listening, 72 – 5, 78, 92, 105, 124; between the lines, 73 – 4; for ­metaphors, 178, 181; for stories, 15 – 17, 52, 178

Index ­  Lopez, Barry, 124 Loyalists, 22 Mandela, Nelson, 182 Mangan, Michael, 201 – 2 Martinez-Brawley, Emilia, 15, 209 – 10 master narratives, 12, 50 McLean, Stuart, 26 Meals on Wheels, 145 meaning: and narrative, 11 – 12, 153; humans as makers of, 153 medicine, 122 – 33, 161, 202, 204 Memorial University, 59 memories, trolling for, 184 – 5 mentoring, 122, 169, 199 meta-narratives, rural, 6, 194, 211 metaphor, 178, 181, 211 mill closures, 70 – 1, 103, 132, 179 ministry: rural, 107 – 15, 161, 210, 212; stress in, 208. See also congregations; religion Mother Theresa, 182 narrative: agency, 14; Bill’s experience of, 48 – 51; care, 11, 87, 200, 210; code, 177; defined, x – xi; development, 11; disruption, 180; environment, 11, 12; foreclosure, 11, 180; gerontology, 51; inquiry, 62, 204 – 5; intelligence, 10; knots, 11; knowing, 10; literacy, 155; medicine, 200, 202; meta-, 6, 194, 211; neurology and, 12; practice, xii; reasoning, 10; repair, 11; Rosemary’s experience of, 41 – 3; theology, 50; therapy, 11,181 – 2, 207; thought, 202; turn, 11; unconscious, 176; unities, 173. See also story(ies)

225

narrative communities, 195, 202 narrative curriculum, xii; for rural helping, 153 – 4 Narrative Matters, 7, 62 Neighbourhood Watch, 15 networking, 119, 162 New Brunswick, ix, 13, 18 – 35, 66, 179 – 83; aging population of, 32f; as drive-through province, 28, 29; education and, 30 – 2; health care and, 32 – 4; history of, 21 – 5; illiteracy in, 31; self-sufficiency and, 21, 31; tourism and, 28 – 30; transportation and, 25 – 8 nursing, 88 – 98, 189 – 91; extramural, 88 – 9, 91 – 2; ER, 93 – 5; public health, 94 nursing homes, 87, 135, 210 “one size fits all,” ix, 138, 146, 162 – 4 open secrets, 176, 209. See also gossip; rumour oppression, 164 – 5 origin myths, 194, 196 Parent Effectiveness Training, 164 paternalism, 148 plot, contaminated, 11 Plummer, Ken, 154 – 5 police work, 68 – 79 policy, rural-(un)friendly, 171, 180 poverty, 83, 104, 140, 143, 145 power, 164 – 5 preacher’s kid (PK), 45, 107 privacy, lack of, 73. See also boundary(ies) professional distance, 124 – 5. See also boundary(ies) public transportation, lack of, 27 – 8, 96 – 7, 139

226  Index ­ racism, 104, 117, 119 – 20 Randall, Bill, 45 – 52 recurring themes, 156 – 71 religion, 132 – 3. See also congregation; ministry resilience, 35, 97, 131 – 2; stories of, 181 restorying, 11, 12, 179, 183; helpers as agents of, 15 Richards, David Adams, 76 Richardson, Laurel, xii, 211 – 12 Robichaud, Louis, 70, 72, 182 Royal Canadian Mounted Police, 68 – 79. See also police work rumour, 161. See also gossip; open secrets rural: Bill’s experience of, 46 – 8; ­difficulty defining, x, 134 – 5, 162 – 4; Dolores’ experience of, 53 – 62; meta-narratives of, 6; Rosemary’s experience of, 43; and remote, x, 169, 205; vs. urban, ix, 163. See also community; rural communities rural communities, oral vs. literate nature of, 14 rural helping: a narrative curriculum for, 153 – 5; as real helping, 203; urban models of, ix, 148 – 9, 174 – 5. See also rural Sachs, Oliver, 212 sacred story, 18, 177 secrets, 156, 176, 178, 209. See also gossip; open secrets; rumour self: urban sense of, 175 self-care, 140 self-knowledge, 174; narrative nature of, 174; as essential to rural ­practice, 175 – 6

self-sufficiency, 21, 31, 166, 169 – 71, 179, 181 – 2 seniors, 135, 139 – 40 signature stories, 196 snakes and ladders, 188 social work, 40 – 1, 134 – 41, 161; in First Nations communities, 116 – 21 songlines, 176 SSHRC, xiii St Andrew’s, 88 – 91 St John’s, Newfoundland, 53 – 7 St Thomas University, 6 stoicism, 131 – 2 story(ies): back, 14, 158, 161, 178, 194; counter-, 16, 82; likely, xii, 65; vs. principles or theories, 65, 173; ­social nature of, 43, 154; two or more sides to, 74 – 5. See also ­community; narrative storycatchers, 17, 201 storykeepers, 17, 49, 176 – 7, 180, 182, 194 – 5, 205 – 6 storyotyping, 14, 160 stress, 134, 137, 139 – 41, 165 – 7, 208. See also burnout survival, 169 – 71 tacit knowing, 177 Tannen, Deborah, 15 teaching, 80 – 7. See also New ­Brunswick, education themes: identifying our own guiding, 189 – 91; recurring in rural helping, 156 – 71, 185, 196 theoretical insufficiency, 8 Tierney, Tom, 186 Tim Horton’s, 69, 177 transformation, 199 – 200 Transken, Si, 212 – 13 turning points, 189 – 91

Index ­  Underground Railway, 23 unlearning, 118, 121 volunteers, 99, 106, 108 volunteering, 170, 180 – 1

walkabout, 41, 186 – 7 war brides, 38 wisdom, ordinary, 172 – 3 wisdom keepers, 176 working from within, 159 – 60

227