Non-smoking in the girls’ room

ODILE NELSON

KUUJJUAQ — Kathy Snowball sits very still on the edge of one of the Nunavik health board’s tall conference room chairs.

It is just before 9 a.m. and she and her colleague, Merryll Hammond, are waiting for their workshop participants to arrive. Her folded arms rest on the meeting table beside a pile of anti-smoking materials. She is shyly recalling the time she had her first cigarette.

“I was six, with my older sister,” she says, as she repeatedly taps her index finger against her thumb. “My mother had put up a tent for us behind our house. And there was a group of kids, my sister’s friends, sitting around in a circle. The tent was full, full of smoke.”

As Snowball continues her story, she begins to mime what happened next: taking the cigarette, her first tentative drag, and then freezing as her mother suddenly unzips the tent, poking her angry face through the open flap as clouds of smoke escape outside.

Snowball slowly chuckles. Hammond bursts out laughing. But the pair is quiet when Snowball talks about the rest of her smoking history.

By the time she was 11, Snowball was stealing cigarettes from open packs left around her family home. By 16, she was buying her own, smoking 10 cigarettes a day. Now, more than 15 years later, she can’t seem to end her half-pack-a-day habit.

Which, on the surface, makes her role here as co-leader of Nunavik’s first smoking counsellor workshop for Inuit (not to mention her handling of the health board’s anti-tobacco file) seem hypocritical.

But according to Hammond, a nurse who developed the materials for the Helping Smokers Heal course, being a non-smoker is not a prerequisite for fighting smoking in the North.

Enormous pressures

In a region where three-quarters of the population smokes, what is more necessary, she says, is finding a person who can withstand the pressures of going against the norm.

“A big difference between the North and the South is you can’t choose from a pool of non-smokers,” Hammond says. “It’s lonely work. It’s stigmatized work. Tackling addictions in these communities is not a joke.”

In fact, fighting Nunavik’s smoking habit can be a little like climbing Everest with your father on your back, your spouse on your shoulders and two of your best friends holding onto your heels.

Though tobacco was only introduced to Inuit in the 1800s, its use is now widespread. Today’s health statistics are staggering. More than 75 per cent of Nunavik adults, and 80 per cent of Nunavik adolescents, use tobacco. Nearly a quarter of Nunavimmiut die from smoking-related illnesses such as lung cancer and heart disease every year.

Snowball and two of the five women at this week’s workshop in Kuujjuaq may smoke, Hammond says, but she believes this says more about the power of addiction than about the women’s ability to help others quit.

“It’s like if you have diabetes and you need treatment, but you find out your doctor has diabetes. Would you not go to him for treatment because he has the disease? No!” Hammond says. “Smoking is a chronic disease. People need to become aware of that.”

Between this workshop for the Ungava Bay region and another planned for the Hudson Bay area in the spring, Hammond hopes to eventually see 28 counsellors across Nunavik – two for every community.

But despite the fact that the training is free and the positions are paid, it was a struggle to even get participants from the Ungava region’s seven communities to attend this week’s workshop.

Nine participants originally signed on and, of those, only five from the four villages of Tasiujaq, Kangirsuk, Kangiqsujuaq and Kangiqsualujjuaq showed up for the Monday evening start.

Yet it is clear as the Wednesday session begins that the workshop participants are naturals – empathetic and good listeners.

This morning’s session is on leading support groups. It is one of a handful of skills the women will acquire before they receive their counselling certificates. By the end of the week they will also have learned to counsel individuals, deal with the media and involve whole communities in anti-tobacco campaigns.

Hammond asks Elsie Simigak to begin the day by practising “breaking the ice” and leading the group in a round of humourous stories. Simigak easily engrosses the others, Alaku Jaaka, Alice Annanack, Pasha Berthe, and Louisa Thomassie in her story. Most then begin telling a few stories of their own.

Opposition to quitting

But despite the training’s lightheartedness, the women know when they return home their communities may not welcome their services.

Berthe herself is an ex-smoker who finally quit after she and a friend made a New Year’s resolution together. She says some people simply don’t want to stop smoking because it means confronting some difficult emotional issues.

“I’ve learned here that it, smoking, goes so deep it touches your own personal problems,” Berthe says. “Cigarettes and personal problems are separate but they connect. It’s not easy for anyone with a problem to accept that.”

You can’t force help or information on people, Berthe says.

Simigak and Thomassie have additional concerns. The two, like Snowball, are smokers, and are worried others may think they have a double standard.

Thomassie hopes to avoid criticism by quitting before she begins counselling. But when she works as an elementary school teacher she sometimes sees seven-or eight-year olds scouring the school grounds for cigarette butts. This, she says, make her want to start her work anyway.

“I wish when I was younger that I had all the information. Because maybe if I’d known the reality of smoking maybe I wouldn’t have continued,” Thomassie says.

Hammond has no illusions about the challenges the women will face when the workshop is over. But she’s optimistic that, with one another’s help, these five women will manage the hurdles.

“Now Kathy has the file and these women are trained…. I would really hope that everybody here feels confident and supported enough to offer a smoking counselling service in their community,” Hammond says. “So that if and when people are ready to quit there are services there.”