Robert Pogson

This week, I am packing for teaching at Shamattawa. This is a fly-in community in northern Manitoba and freight is expensive. My employer pays for me and 1000 pounds of freight, so it pays to pack carefully. I will sort through all my stuff and include only what is necessary. Most importantly, I will skip lots of over-packaged items and items with lots of water content. Water is inexpensive at Shamattawa…

I usually teach in the North with a year’s supply of groceries shipped in. Some places will have a sweet deal with groceries coming along on group charters and the like, but otherwise, there are no bargains. By dehydrating my fruits and vegetables and curing my meats, I can save quite a lot of money on freight. For example, in the summer in Winnipeg, I can buy a 50 pound bag of onions for as little as $7 sometime. I paid $18 this year which is 36 cents a pound. Consider that the freight on some of my fly-in communities can reach $5 a pound and you can see the benefit of removing the water which is 90% of the weight of fresh onions. Of course, I do spend a couple of days slicing and dicing onions… I use a warm air food dehydrator. My son, who came shopping with me one day, pointed out that, considering time, electricity and so on, I might be better buying onion flakes at Superstore’s bulk foods department. Their flakes looked like shredded onions… Anyway, that 50 pound bag of onions ends up fitting in a couple of large Ziploc (TM) bags and weighing only a few pounds. A handful in a pot of soup is wonderful. I also use the flakes in pizza and pasta. I dehydrate green bell peppers, onions, carrots and mushrooms. The carrots and peppers need blanching before dehydrating so it can be a bit of work, but teachers have time in summer. Where frozen food can be kept frozen on the trip, I bring a bunch of frozen veggies, too, although I can buy frozen baggies and dehydrate them.

I end up with a cardboard box full of dehydrated stuff with raisins, dried pitted dates and nuts. The other dried produce I bring up include dried peas, beans and rice. A sack of each costs only a few dollars at the Wholesale Shoppers Club and lasts me about a year. I like cooking these in a pressure cooker for speed and to save energy, but boiling in a pot works, too.

I like to bake my own bread and bring yeast, sugar, 50 kg whole wheat flour and canola oil.

I also enjoy pasta and bring 20 kg of pasta.

I buy lean ground beef and make it into salami. The curing preserves the meat in case refirgeration fails. I buy 5 pound tubs and add 1 cup water, 1 tablespoon of pepper, 1 tablespoon of garlic powder and 3 tablespoons of Morton’s Tenderquick(TM). I mix well, make into small loaves, wrap in Saran(TM) wrap and bake at 300F for 1 hour. Holes poked in the wrap permit fat/water to drain away into a pan underneath the rack. I keep this frozen until needed. At Christmas when turkey is specially priced and I am home, I buy and roast a few and bring the frozen meat with me on my return leaving the bones at home.

The only canned food I bring is catsup, 12 large cans will do me a year. I use it diluted as tomato juice, in soup, on pasta, and pizza. I often add oregano and basil to give it a more mature flavour.

I travel with a few 500g packages of spices for my cooking:pepper corns, cinnamon, oregano, basil, allspice, paprika, and garlic.

One of the essentials of life is about 64 rolls of toilet paper.

Summer, winter, indoor and outdoor clothing is the next largest item in my goods. I have winter clothing that allows me to survive indefinitely at -50C and stuff to make fire. I combine that with knowledge of how to build shelters out of snow, logs and branches to stay alive. I have taken survival courses and once survived hypothermia after falling through ice, stupidly, while hunting… I use Helly-Hansen bib pants and long-johns, Canadian military mukluks, mits and parka, facemask, and fur hat. Combined with a couple of sweaters, I can stand out in a howling wind for long periods with no discomfort. Walking can be difficult in this rig, though.

I used to carry a winter sleeping bag, but it was too heavy to ship out of the Northwest Territories one year and I have not replaced it yet. Something like a Wood’s or Trekk five star bag is useful if the heat goes off whereever you are.

For normal warm weather I wear hiking boots, wool socks, wind-proof and waterproof layers and I carry several means to make fire (flint and steel, wooden matches, candles, knife and bootlace).

For my refrigerator I pack several empty/squished 2L pop bottles for storing cold water in case the supply is interrupted. Melted snow can be used but can be contaminated by windblown sand, dirt and stuff.

I used to pack cheese and powdered milk but I am overwieght and I also have decided to boycott dairy products that are over-priced because of the milk marketing board. They require milk production quotas to be auctioned and the price per cow can be tens of thousands of dollars which is a justifiable cost consumers must pay. In 1997, when I first started teaching in the North, I paid $8 for 2.5kg of milk powder. Now it is $24. Along the way, independent family farms were squeezed out of the dairy business because they did not have the capital to buy the cursed quotas. What is wrong with supply and demand? It works for most things…I pack calcium and vitamin supplements and use the beans/peas and canola oil to supply most of the nutrients the milk products could supply.

On the other hand, I cannot live without computers. Shamattawa has Internet wired into the teacherages so I am bringing a laptop to use at home. I will bring my 64 bit server to the school to use in the lab for providing software and data to students and teachers. I use Linux on both and use LTSP in the lab with all kind of web applications. When most teachers are setting up their classrooms, I configure my LAN and servers. This year, I intend to use “TeacherTool”, a lab management system often used in K12LTSP setups. I run Debian but TeacherTool should work. It used VNC to allow the teacher to peek at students’ screens and even control their mouse to help them out. I will also use Moodle for high school students courses and my own web pages to keep track of students’ names and faces. I will use auto login and present icons on the dekstop for each grade level to help automate the process. I can also run scripts for each student to reconfigure their dekstops or to get them ready for an activity. Should be fun. I will teach 300 diffferent students, K-8 for general education using IT and 9-10 for IT courses.

I bring a few pots and pans, sometimes as little as one knife, fork and spoon, but a set is more sociable, a few books (many thousands on my server), candles, pictures of family, headset for VOIP/music and fishing equipment. A few changes of clothes makes up the package.

With this simple setup I am good to go all year. I depend on the Internet to keep me connected and to provide information resources for the job. The Manitoba Department of Education website does its best to present the curriculum, along with bulky things that get in the way, like “Curriculum Navigator”, but the documents I need are all there. I have two copies of Wikipedia with me, a working, de-loused snapshot from 2005 and a current complete text-ony dump from 2007. That is many gigabytes of text and images I can use. Did I mention I will bring a digital camera? That allows me to snap mug shots and to record images relevant to the kids and useful wherever local content is required.