'It gave me the confidence that I could live nearly anywhere and survive.'

In October, 1978, 15-year-old Luc Bélisle left St. Catharines, Ont. for a youth exchange trip to Broughton Island, the community now known as Qikiqtarjuaq.

Bélisle says the experience changed his view of the world and of his own strengths.

"It showed me I could survive. It gave me the confidence that I could live nearly anywhere and survive, as they did," says Bélisle, who now works for a weekly newspaper in rural Quebec, the Low Down to Hull.

Twenty-nine years ago, Broughton Island had only the strict basics of comfort: there was electricity, but no television and no indoor plumbing.

The community's only flush toilets and running showers were in trailers, which then served as the school.

"People talk a lot about poverty, but we don't look at our own country sometimes," Bélisle said. "But when you realize that it's your own country, and you see deprivation like that…"

The daily work of survival centred on seals. In the morning, the men went off to hunt seals – and the students also learned how to hunt along with their host families.

Seal meat and Arctic char were the only foods eaten at home.

The group of students from Ridley College, a private boarding school, had left St. Catharines, where it was still 20 C. En route to Broughton Island, their plane landed in Frobisher Bay, now the city of Iqaluit.

"That's when we realized we were really in the North because there were no trees," Bélisle says.

In Broughton Island, their cargo-loaded Hawker-Siddley 748 landed on an airstrip, which from the air looked just like a white line in the snow. There was no terminal. "When we got out of the plane, they took everything off right there."

Bélisle and the other students then went to the school where teachers introduced them to the students who would be their host "brothers" and "sisters" for the duration of their stay.

Bélisle's host brother was younger than him – and with the passage of time, Bélisle no longer recalls the boy's name, but he retells details of the arrival at his host family's home as clearly as if they happened yesterday.

"When we went in and the mother of the house was working on a sealskin in middle of the floor and I said, ‘what's that!' It was part of the daily life there, but I'd never seen that before," he says.

The next day he went out seal hunting. And the hunters showed him what to do – to shoot the seal as it surfaced at the breathing hole, then pull it out and butcher it on the ice.

They hunted mostly for the sealskins, which they sold for a few dollars, Bélisle says.

The work was long, cold and hard.

One seal was reserved for eating. All the country food was served frozen and uncooked, and this was a shock to a teenager who was used to chips, hamburgers and casseroles.

"It took me three days to eat anything. I had a sack of peanuts with me, after that I started eating with them. It wasn't easy, but I had to eat."

And then there was the cold. One day the group went by snowmobile to visit a nearly DEW line site.

"No Inuit wore gloves or hats and it was -20," Bélisle remembers. "For them it wasn't a problem."

The Broughton Island students had their turn to suffer culture shock when they came to St. Catharines in mid-November of 1978, visiting the sights of the region, such as the CN tower and Niagara Falls.

"They found it hard. It was a huge shock for them – even more for them than for us," Bélisle says. "For one thing, they found it too hot. They were sweating."

But he's sure the kids from Broughton Island also remember the 1978 exchange in positive ways.

"I am sure it gave them hope, and more drive to learn what there was to learn at school. And it probably inspired them to think about other possibilities, knowing that there was a world beyond the island, that they could do something else somewhere else if they chose to."

Many of the Broughton Island students had never left the community before the exchange, and Bélisle guesses they were more interested in learning English after returning from the trip to Ontario.

"It's fine to teach a second language, but a young person needs to know what it's used for. If you don't know it's useful, it seems to me you aren't so interested in learning it," he says.

Bélisle also hopes the students from Broughton Island also found their way to happiness – because he's sure the alcohol abuse and solvent sniffing he saw even then were a reflection of the hard living conditions he saw.

After the exchange, the students wrote a couple of letters to each other, but bridging the distance and the lack of a common language was hard.

In addition to nearly 30-year-old memories and an album of somewhat fuzzy photos, Bélisle has carvings he purchased in Broughton Island. And he says his sister still wears the parka he brought home for his mother – a gift from the life-changing student exchange.