Kevin Wilson
Northern News Services

Iqaluit (Sep 10/01) - Sometimes, it's better to have never lost at all. Just ask anyone who has ever had to operate a lost and found.

Wherever people congregate, they wind up being parted from their valuables. You know the pattern. Kids lose their mitts at school, grownups forget their cell phones in a restaurant.

While many of us might not shed tears at someone's effects giving them the slip, we all probably remember what it feels like to lose something.

That means creating a space in a closet or corner where missing items can be held until their owners come looking for them.

With the school year getting underway across Nunavut, educators are preparing corners in their schools for the inevitable flood of books, pencil cases, Pokemon cards, and assorted personal effects gone AWOL.

In Taloyoak, Netsilik school Principal Gina Pizzo says the lost and found there is currently bare, touch wood.

Nevertheless, Pizzo says the school's janitors and teachers invariably collect piles of "mittens, sweaters, the usual."

By year's end, some of the lonely unclaimed items have one last chance to be reunited with their young charges.

"Periodically through the year, we announce that there's unclaimed items in the lost and found," says Pizzo. Parents are then informed at year's end if items are still wanting for owners.

If they're unclaimed, says Pizzo, "we usually donate them to the church or some other organization."

Likewise, Tori-Lynne Evans makes sure that kids who might feel a chill come winter time don't leave the Iqaluit Centennial Library without going through the overstuffed lost-and-found box in the cloakroom.

"The pile will start going down once the weather starts to get cold again," says Evans. Though she's only been on the job for one week, Evans knows the library intimately as a patron over the last year-and-a-half.

Ooraika Iseemailee, a summer student from Pangniqtuuq working at the Centennial Library, says she's found "letters written to me" in the box, but the strangest item she or Evans has seen appeared in the drop box where books are returned after hours.

"Someone put a dog bone in the box," says Iseemailee.