Kelly Lake hearing again

Page 19

Not much has changed in Kelly Lake since the CBC did a 1993 documentary exposing hard living conditions in their community and the lack of essential services, said Lyle Letendre, president of the Kelly Lake Metis Settlement Society. Except more Elders have passed and the people who remain are more disheartened.

Until Sept. 1, that is. For two days, the Kelly Lake Metis experienced a near miracle brought about by some people from Ontario and the only audiologist in northeastern British Columbia. For a few days the Metis had some hope that something good could happen.

Frances Thornton, the B.C. doctor, travelled from Fort St. John to Kelly Lake to test 72 residents of mixed ages; the youngest was 19. Seventeen will soon receive hearing aids at absolutely no cost to them.

"Wow. That was so good. I was really happy," said Letendre. "All the Elders were there."

Provincial Hearing Consultants, owned by Martin Heinrich and based in Hamilton, Ont., is arranging for hearing aids donated by one of their suppliers and is co-ordinating all services to Kelly Lake. Although the lab work will be done in Ontario, it was a legal requirement to have a licensed B.C. practitioner oversee the hearing tests. Thornton brought an assistant with her to help with the tests, which had to be done in a private home because there was no clinic or community building.

"And it was just pouring, it was just raining," Letendre said. More would have come for tests but they had no transportation, "and the roads-I won't even go there."

Impressions were taken of the ears of people with hearing loss. Back in Hamilton the lab will make a mold, which will be matched up with the type of aid that suits an individual's hearing loss.

Erin Milward of Provincial Hearing Consultants said their staff would return to Kelly Lake to fit the hearing aids, which will be as "low-tech" as possible to do the job so that maintenance will be minimal.

Thorton said she hopes to return to the community next year when the weather improves to assess those that were missed this visit. And there have also been promises that an ear, nose and throat specialist and a dentist will visit sometime soon.

The ball got rolling because a 42-year-old Metis man studying emergency preparedness in First Nation and Metis communities at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario happens to know Letendre. Dave Bentley also works part-time in a restaurant next to one of Heinrich's clinics, where he got to know Provincial Hearing Consultants' staff. When they learned about the desperate situation in Kelly Lake, they offered to help.

Provincial Hearing Consultants are old hands at organizing hearing aid campaigns, only usually they take their services to poor countries such as Mexico and Haiti.

Kathy Peterson, general manager of Provincial Hearing Consultants, is incredulous that a community in Canada is without such basic health services.

"We'd be the first country to rush out and fix somebody else's problems if we saw the same thing somewhere else. Or try to. Give aid or something ..."

"The community is remote and access difficult," Thornton said. "I've only been working in the North for a year and I was unaware that this community existed. I'm looking into how we can deliver better services to remote communities, but as I'm the only audiologist in the northeast of B.C. it's a case of using existing resources effectively. I certainly think the two days spent at Kelly Lake was a worthwhile use of resources and I hope the community found this as well."

Government's excuse for not helping Kelly Lake is a simple declaration that no Metis community exists in British Columbia, Letendre told Windspeaker, even though the community has a documented history going back 100 years. Even though some residents can trace their genealogy back 200 years or more to French and Indian unions. And even though the Cree-speaking descendents of Iroquois were still living self-sufficientlives in the bush into the 1980s.

Over the past few years, however, life has changed. Gas exploration, with its roads and pipelines, has cut through the community's hunting and fishing areas. The ground water is contaminated and so are the animals, fish and plants. The people live with the results, even in the face of government denials. Their only decent building, a school, has been closed and they have been denied access to it. The houses are falling down from lack of repair and many of the people have to live away from the community to work.