Coming Home

Dixon Entrance

We're on the M/V Taku, coming into the open waters of Dixon Entrance. Here, before Ketchikan, the Inside Passage breaches itself and lets the Gulf of Alaska push its way in. You can feel the ocean swells start to lift the bow ever so slightly.

We must be about to cross the international border, leaving British Columbia for Alaska. The land offers a familiar sight. Low clouds obscuring the horizon, to where sea and sky end and then begin. A few rocky islands with scraggles of trees somehow survive the open waters. The pale light of a setting sun breaks through the clouds somewhere and then reflects off the water.

We're coming home.

This morning in Prince Rupert a wolf bounded in front of me down a path through the woods. Was he beckoning me homeward? Or is that some silly romantic notion from my youth? The day I first left Alaska, my first summer out of college, I heard the wolves howl near my home on the Toklat River. To me, their howl was saying goodbye. But I am older now, and less given to such notions. But part of me still wants to think this rare sight of a wolf is somehow meant to reconnect me to this land.

It feels like we've been gone a while. And the journey back reminds me of just how far we've gone. We stretched out the road home a little, with a trip to Buffalo, NY en route. I had to speak at the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada annual convention in Toronto, and we took the opportunity to visit Jessica's family in upstate New York and across the border. When we got back to our car in Seattle, we drove up to Vancouver, BC, and spent a few days there. Then we took a short ferry over to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and drove up the island to Port Hardy. Another BC Ferry took us to Prince Rupert yesterday and we left Rupert this evening. After another 42 hours or so aboard the Alaska Marine Highway, we'll land in Auke Bay and drive on home.

Now you can really feel the lift and fall of the bow.

The ferry offers a good time to reflect, when one isn't chasing toddlers around. I'm hoping it will also be as conducive to sleep as the last boat we were on. For the first time in I don't know how long I took not one, but two, two-hour naps yesterday on the BC Ferry. I guess that shows how much this trip home has involved sleep deprivation. Going to the east coast and back, sharing rooms with small children, and early morning flight and ferry queues have had a cumulative impact on us all.

As I look back on the last six months, it's still hard to fully process the experience. It feels like I won't really know what this experience has meant until I am able to sleep in my own bed again, get back into my old routines, and sit back in my desk at the office. I guess maybe it feels a bit foreign still, and won't become part of me until I can relate it to my everyday world a bit better.

Preparing for my talk in Canada gave me a good chance to think about what I've learned these past six months, though. My talk was about how to use external research articles in the context of youth mentoring. So as I thought about what I would say to a group of my peers on how to use research, I figured I could only tell them what I had learned. In the end, I think one of the main things I learned was how to critically read a research article. So I tried to give them a few pointers on how they could become critical readers of research themselves.

I also found myself coming back to the limitations of research. In the end, I've come to believe that as good as the research is, it doesn't give us any final answers. External research adds important information into the dialogue, but it's not the only information. I think it should be considered along with intuitive knowledge gained from practical experience, data used in daily program management, and other information. There simply isn't enough research to answer many of youth mentoring's important questions well. What findings are there give us good information to use in guiding our programs, but they also provoke a lot of other questions.

In my mind, as a youth mentoring practitioner, one of the best uses of external research is to help us think critically about how we manage youth mentoring programs. By helping us think like a researcher, reading research can inspire us to consider our programmatic questions with the critical rigor of a scientist. Reading research can also open up additional questions to us, which we then must seek to find an answer. And maybe most importantaly, research can cause us to challenge our assumptions. We may have assumed that a program was working, or that there was a reason why we did things a certain way. But when we actually see some data that confound our assumptions, it can cause us to think more critically, more rigorously, about our work.

And this, I believe, is essential. The work we do, bringing strangers into the lives of fragile youth, and trying to create nurturing relationships between them, is frought with challenges. And frankly, while we like to talk about the life-changing power of our program, our matches don't always work out. If we want more children to experience this promise of life-changing relationships, we have to think more critically of our business. Surely we need to tell ourselves and others our wonderful stories. But just as much, we need to tell ourselves the not-so-nice stories, and look under the hood of these matches to see if we can fix them. Only by asking the tough questions will be able to improve our programs so more children can benefit from a one-to-one mentoring relationship with an adult. And asking tough questions is just what research can, and should, inspire us to do.

Now even the reflection of the sun is gone. In front of our bow, the waves disappear into fog. It makes one wonder where one is heading. But that is the subject for another posting...