Encounters of the best kind

Strathmore High School     

 

Just over a year ago, my life was changed forever. A horribly cliché statement, I know, but a one hundred percent true statement, nonetheless. Because a year and a month ago I experienced the Encounters With Canada program, and as anyone who has ever been on Encounters will tell you, that’s all it takes.

Encounters With Canada, or EWC for short, is a program that brings young adults from all across Canada together in Ottawa for about a week, to experience things about their country and its people that they most likely would not have had the chance to experience otherwise. This was the case for me, anyway. Every week of the school year, roughly 120 to 150 teens from across Canada are sent to the Terry Fox Centre in Ottawa, where they live for a week and partake in different activities based on the theme of the week that they chose. For example, my week’s theme was Journalism and Communications, so we were given an inside tour of the CBC Radio Canada building in Montreal, and got to use their studios to create and record a radio show, and television news broadcast. Needless to say, I was overjoyed.

But the real magic (or whatever you want to call it) of EWC, the thing that makes anyone and everyone who participated in it blubber like babies on the last day, and pay absolutely no attention in class the week after they get back because all they’re doing is wishing they were back in Ottawa, is the people. The people I met on EWC were unlike anyone I had ever met before. Despite the fact that we were from all over the country, and had had very different life experiences before that point, all one hundred and two of us connected almost immediately. Everyone I met was as excited, and enthusiastic about what we were doing as I was, they were all interested in the same kinds of things that I was, and although we only had a week together, I felt like I had more of a connection with them than some of the people I’ve gone to school with since kindergarten.  

I’ve dubbed this phenomenon “EWC Syndrome” and I’m seeing it all over again, with this year’s participants. I have a few friends that went on EWC this year, and all of them were just as amazed as I was at how quickly you connect with people. When I asked Tamara Adamschek, who attended the Sports and Fitness program in September about why she thought this was, she said that it because “you meet people who have the same interests as you, which I think creates a quick friendship, but one that lasts far longer than the time spent at EWC, because of the real, true connections that you make with people.”

Lauren Zandee, who also attended the September Sports and Fitness week, added that the biggest thing she took away from EWC was “how amazing it was that a group of people who didn’t even know each other, were thrown together and just automatically got along so well,” and she feels that for her this “will be helpful in the real world someday.” 

There were actually quite a few things that I, and many others, experienced on EWC that have pretty solid real world applications. Learning to get along with and bond with a group of people that you’ve never met very quickly is a pretty impressive feat on its own, but throw in the fact that a little under half of those people speak a completely different language? Not going to lie; you feel pretty accomplished. The language I speak of is, of course, French. And while it is taught in our curriculum for a few years, and whenever you go to Banff you see it on the signs, there isn’t really a whole lot of French used around Alberta, so I never really viewed it as anything other than just another language that exists somewhere. That changed after EWC. I got to experience Montreal and Gatineau, and their culture and people, and it really helped me in realising how little I really knew about that part of Canada and being Canadian, and how much more I wanted to learn. I’d never interacted with anyone my own age from outside of Alberta really, and I was so awed and impressed by some of my friends, who on the drop of a dime, switched back and forth between languages like it was nothing. It made me want to be bilingual like no school class had done before. Zandee said that she had much the same experience, and that It definitely helped her “in a futuristic aspect because everything is bilingual and it really made me want to become bilingual even more!”

Shayla Kopp,  a girl after my own heart who attended the Journalism and Communications week this past March, probably put it best when she said “I would one million percent recommend this to anyone who is seeking a life-changing amazing week! I definitely think some of those kids could change the world or Canada because I know they changed my life. I definitely think the experience has opened my eyes to all sorts of types of amazing people, cultures and viewpoints about Canada. And when you make amazing friends like that it touches your heart. EWC friends touch your heart in a way that I think no other people can; everyone there are just so genuine, and they have such huge hearts!”  Zandee and Adamschek wholeheartedly agreed.  Adamschek added that “the biggest thing EWC did for me personally was that it opened up my perspective on what it means to be Canadian. I never before had the opportunity to interact with people my age from all over Canada at the same time, and I would one hundred percent recommend the trip for anyone. I know if you asked anyone who has gone on the trip if they would every go again they would in a heartbeat.”  As someone who now finds herself with the strong urge to call up my EWC friends and look back over my pictures from my life changing week in Ottawa with some maybe not-so-dry eyes, I can attest that truer words have never been spoken.