As a child I got the travel bug early on. My mother and aunt carted my sister and I along with our cousin all over British Columbia and then to Europe a couple times. Then again in high school I joined the international travel club and went to Europe yet again. I had always appreciated the great vastness of the world. I come from a massive family, I have 27 first cousins. I only have one sister, but I consider some of my cousins siblings also. So, it is hard to be an individual with all of those other kids around(I am not complaining though), so being international, being one person in the middle of Paris for example was fascinating. To this day I love being somewhere where no one knows my name. From then on I was always planning my next trip. After graduating high school I bought a plane ticket to Halifax with two of my girlfriends, from there we travelled around for the next two months “roughing it” around Canada. I came back home and worked horrible jobs until I could save enough to buy my next plane ticket, South America. Travelling all around for months at a time finally brought up my love for home. I would get anxiety thinking about being home for six months, with routine, goals, and responsibilities. Somehow I got to the place where I craved a home and a stable routine with plans to stay within province and explore the place I had roots. This lead me to meeting friends in the social work field that were hard into the social justice issues. I have participated in numerous walks, rallies, and represented my First Nations band as a Youth Representative within Community Comprehensive Planning. Though I had the drive and ambition to help change the world, I realized I would not be able to help enough if I did not get my education, so this lead me to TRU.
I am strongly interested in social justice, and anything to do with language and communication. This past semester I took a Women in Global Perspectives class and my professor was absolutely amazing, and I was blown away with information. Now that I have visited a small amount of countries, I feel like I need to academically educate myself on the gender equality issues of them, from the small amount I had learned in the past four months, it is a little depressing. One thing I will never forget, if you want change, change POLICY. Spending months reading articles about Female Homicide in Central America almost made me look into Law Graduate Programs, almost. Although it is not policy, there are numerous NGOs that might need a Speech and Language Pathologist on their team, right?
Things that have shaped me into the person I am today is loss. In my short life I have experienced a huge amount of loss. What I have taken away from that is to do exactly what you want, do not waste your ability to learn, and do not waste your ability to help change the world.