This Intern’s Life: By Jennifer Shenouda

This week’s column is dedicated to celebrating my beat: I’m into real deal, down and gritty girl power; I am fascinated by female alliances that have the gusto to shape and change the world, or at least somebody’s perspective. And if a particular femme fatale is wearing pink while she works her womanly magic, well that’s just fabulous.

Week two of this intern’s life will forever be engrained in my psyche as a monumental, stupendous, blur. Blame it on all the fast paced action I experienced this past weekend-and I am not talking about extra curricular activities, but rather the sports story I covered last Sunday. You may think, what’s a fluff & puff reporter doing covering a sports story?

What if she gets bowled over on the sidelines or worst yet gets a splash of mud on her stiletto heals? To which I feverishly reply, “Rugby! I covered teenage girls’ rugby!”

Now I’ve played a sport or two in my life, but never with the kind of impact or resolve that these young girls displayed. At the age of 16, which is the median age of the girls I covered for the article (see “Rams day unites junior girls’ rugby teams” in our July 23 issue) the only real exercise I got was walking up and down Gouin Boulevard to frequent Twist and Cream for rhubarb froyo. Subsequently all that expanded was my waistline; well my self-confidence was that of a usual teen, non-existent.

Yet these fierce rugby girls, in the prime of their teen years, were quite a different story. They were all about confidence and communication. Only in retrospect do I now realize how much team sports actually equip you with skills beyond the physical realm. That’s the kind of girl power this intern reporter is hurdling over daisies to cover.

Coincidently that same weekend, with The Chronicle/Cités Nouvelles office still on my mind (since I recently femme-ified my workstation by adding some pastel colors to it and a calendar with sunflowers) I drove to Ottawa with a minivan full of females for one of the most important lessons in girl power I’ve ever learnt. This was a Saturday afternoon like no other, one I sacrificed hanging out with my girlfriends for, to spend countless hours in a senior residence home in Vanier, Ottawa. The mission was this: To reunite my grandmother Jeanette (75) who is suffering these days from memory problems with her oldest and youngest sisters Rita and Nicole respectively. My grandmother, who is widowed like her sisters, sat in the backyard of the home on pristine benches (perhaps I am idealizing the event a bit; the benches were actually kind of rickety) discussing almost a century worth of wisdom, joy and sorrow. The day was surreal, one minute I would be by their sides, the next playing tag with my two littlest cousins Kathryn (7), Janice (3) and my female Yorkshire terrier, Roxy (2). I was surprised at how much my grandmother recalled (in the face of dementia) in the presence of her sisters and daughters (my mother Geraldine and Aunt Patricia), and granddaughters. I vowed I’d find a way to weave this –

magic into some sort of written account. And as a firm believer in intergenerational girl power, I stuck to it!