Achieving Big Results with Limited Resources

August 3, 2024

Mackenzie Pope, AVC 2025, travelled to Nain and Postville as one of the student participants on the Chinook Project. As part of the experience, the students craft various pieces of writing.

The Chinook Project provides free veterinary care to remote communities in Canada’s North without access to veterinary care. Some challenges communities without access to veterinary care face are overpopulation, dog aggression and increased spread of diseases and parasites. The project aims to assist both people and animals by helping address these challenges. This year, we traveled to the communities of Nain and Postville, in Northern Labrador. Stadiums and community centres turned temporary clinics; an ice rink into an operating room, a supply closet into a pharmacy and changing rooms into exam rooms. Here, we provided surgeries, medicine appointments, vaccinations and parasite control.

We performed 80 surgeries on folding tables propped up on paint cans and around 150 medicine appointments in changing rooms, hallways, on the side of the road and everywhere in between. To practice medicine this way was all at once challenging and beautiful, calm and chaotic. It’s hard to find words to describe how much I learned and how it felt. It was much like the rugged landscape; the tranquility felt amongst the towering cliffs and crashing waves, or sweet berries found throughout the thick boreal forest.

The clinic was busy, we had a lot of patients to see in little time with little resources – and for most of us, little experience. After 3 years in the lecture hall the Chinook Project was one of our first clinical rotations of 4th year. We were stepping into the unfamiliar and at full speed! In the challenges and in the chaos, there was kindness and teamwork, there was laughter, there was learning about medicine, surgery and culture, there was peace and meaning.

I loved every minute of my time on the Chinook Project and I’m so proud of how far we came and all we were able to accomplish together with the communities of Nain and Postville. It would not have been possible without the incredible help of community members and volunteers. We felt so welcomed from the moment we stepped off the plane, when a community member took notice and immediately offered us (and our many boxes of supplies) a ride to the clinic. There was never a shortage of help, hard-work, delicious meals, gratitude or encouragement. I feel so fortunate to have been a part of this incredible team, to have grown in my surgical skills and to have helped so many animals and people, all in the province I call home.