Stephanie McDonald
Northern News Services
Published Monday, November 26, 2007

CAPE DORSET - Eighteen-year-old Lisa Jaw got a taste of southern living this past summer as a participant in the Northern Youth Abroad Program.

She travelled from Cape Dorset to North Bay, Ont., where she lived with a host family and volunteered at the North Bay Indian Friendship Centre.

"The environment was different," Jaw said. "It was really moist, the air."

While in Ontario, Jaw had the chance to do things that most Nunavut teenagers don't get to do.

"I got to see Our Lady Peace, live!" she said.

Jaw also went shopping, attended a heritage festival, and hung out on the beach with a friend from Nunavut who was also participating in the program.

"I wanted to see what it was like to live down south for a while and gain the work and travel experience," Jaw said of why she applied. "That was my first time being away from home for that long and I got a little bit homesick. That was hard for me."

She is happy to be back in the place where she grew up, she said, for now anyway. She gets to spend time with her family; she has two sisters and a brother. In her spare time she enjoys hanging out with friends and spending time with her nephew. In the winter she can be seen driving a snowmobile around town and fishing.

Jaw, a graduate and valedictorian of Peter Pitseolak school last June, still has travel in mind, though. She's in the process of applying for the international component of the Northern Youth Abroad Program. She will find out next month if she has been accepted to travel to South Africa as a participant of the program in the summer of 2008.

College is also in her plans, she said.