Christopher Andrews
Northern News Services
Wednesday, July 11, 2007

ARVIAT - Grade 12 students at John Arnalukjuak high school in Arviat took on a new project this year. The Aulajaaqtut class completed module 4 about being a global citizen.

April was cancer awareness month and we decided that our project would be to raise money for the Canadian Cancer Society.The money would go towards cancer research.

In order to do a project of this magnitude, it took a lot of effort from the students. The class brainstormed ideas of the types of fundraising that would be best suited for this project.

The class came up with a few ideas.First was a community walk that took place on April 5, in support of cancer research.The walk was followed by a raffle with a variety of prizes coming from the school, Calm Air, and some community members.

May 11 was a karaoke night at the school, and the raffle draw took place to determine the winners.

The class chose to raise money for cancer research because cancer is a disease that has affected everyone at some point or another in their lives, either personally or family.

In our school alone everyone was affected when we found out that our teacher Danette Rookes was diagnosed with a very rare cancer.

After spending a year and a half away from teaching she recovered and returned as our teacher again, to everyone's delight. She is in full support of this project and is helping to get everything up and running.

The class discovered that in this small community there are many people who have been affected by cancer. Statistics show that you have a 50 percent chance of developing some form of cancer in your lifetime.

It is a guarantee that you will know someone who will be affected by cancer.

Cancer research is very important in helping develop new medicines and treatments to help cancer patients. This project has not been solely a class project, but also a community project where everyone got involved.

It has been challenging to see how much money can be raised by such a small community. As our project moved along, it really picked up.

As a final fundraiser, we all sponsored our teacher Mike Pickles to get his head shaved June 14 on the last day of school.

We were able to raise $2,825 in all of our fundraising efforts.

(Christopher Andrews is a student at John Arnalukjuak high school in Arviat)