CamBay wellness centre struggles with homelessness

The little centre with a big mission: Cambridge Bay’s wellness centre tries to put bandaids on the community’s painful problems, which include a lack of housing and hunger. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

House in a box. Seven of these units arrived in Cambridge Bay recently, but they won’t go far towards solving housing needs in the community, which the wellness centre says is at the core of many social problems. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

Cambridge Bay’s wellness centre started its pre-school breakfast program for kids on Oct. 4. (PHOTO BY JANE GEORGE)

CAMBRIDGE BAY — Here’s the scene: it’s 5:00 p.m. on a stormy, dark winter night, with the temperature already dropping well below -30 C, when a young couple with a baby arrive at Cambridge Bay’s wellness centre in need of shelter.

“They had nowhere to go,” remembers the centre’s manager Marie Ingram.

“But I couldn’t let them stay here. It was heartbreaking,” she added.

The wellness centre closes at 5:00 p.m. daily — and it’s not open on weekends.

But there’s a always desperate need for more social housing in Cambridge Bay, where up to four families cram into small dwellings, along with the resulting conflicts and stresses of chronic overcrowding.

And sometimes these force people to a point where they have to leave and have no place at all to go, particularly in the evening.

“People go from public building to public building, but at five o’clock, there’s nowhere to go,” Ingram said.

That’s the “brutal” lifestyle that the wellness centre wants to change.

It’s asked the federal and territorial governments for money— about $500,000, less than the cost of building two new social housing units— to make the wellness centre into a 24-7 drop-in facility which would be open all day and all night.

The centre wants to offer this service from October to May, when the temperatures are too dangerously cold to allow anyone to wander the streets or camp outside.

Under this 24-7 scheme, people could come inside the centre, relax on a comfortable sofa or chair, have a snack, take a hot shower and wash their clothes.

Ingram estimates that up to 90 people in Cambridge Bay are homeless and need this service.

Only a couple of residents are subject to the “absolute homelessness” common to many in Iqaluit and cities to the south, but, even so, many Cambridge Bay residents lack a home to call their own.

Only seven new single-family social housing prefabs are going up in Cambridge Bay this year, a drop in the bucket for this community of 1,350.

The lack of social housing is this community is its major problem, Ingram said.

“If we could build more housing, we could solve some of the other problems,” she said.

Most people who live in comfy warm homes can’t imagine what it’s survive, stuffed in a house with 10 other people where you can’t sleep and there’s never enough food to go around.

“When people have control [over their living situation], you can see the changes happening,” Ingram said.

Hunger is among the other problems which the wellness centre tries to alleviate, with its aboriginal diabetes community breakfast program, school breakfast program and food bank, which helps feed 70 adults and about 80 kids a month.

“People come here and say: I have nothing to feed my kids,” Ingram said.

According to figures that a high-ranking Government of Nunavut official once gave to her, only five per cent of children in the territory know that they will eat an evening meal.

The lack of money for food can come from mismanagement of household money— with too much spent on drugs, alcohol or gambling— but that’s not the children’s fault, Ingram said.

“The kids have no control over their situation,” she said. “You always have to look out after the children because they didn’t ask to be hungry or cold.”

As for sharing, the traditional way of providing food security, that’s out of the question when there’s nothing to share except some soya sauce in the fridge to use on country foods when they’re available.

Among the other wellness centre projects designed to improve conditions: a six-month life management course for young women, to prepare them for jobs and a similar pilot course in the works for men in addition to Alcoholic Anonymous and Ala-teen meetings.

This month, the wellness centre’s two-bedroom women’s shelter reopens after closing last March due to a lack of money. Now thanks to GN support, the shelter will open again, Ingram said— or at least until March 31, 2011, when the one-year funding runs out again.

The wellness centre has so many programs and projects on the go that Ingram says she can’t count them all. But all are paid for project-by-project, application-by-application.

Money provided from the hamlet keeps the lights and heat on.

Donations also keep the centre stocked: laundry soap for the washers comes from the DEW line site, the clothes that the centre gives away as well as food bank stocks are all donated.

But to provide for the rest, Ingram has to scramble. She and the centre’s other three employees are only on year-to-year contracts that offer no stability.

“It’s crazy,” she said: everyone talks about the need for wellness programs, but no one wants to provide a place like Cambridge Bay’s wellness centre with the core funding and stability it needs to help people.

“All we can do is offer band aids,” Ingram said.