A World Of Change

It's a whole new world for Meagan Duhamel.
And not just on the ice, where she's working on a new pairs career with former world team member Craig Buntin.
Duhamel grew up in Lively, Ont., a small town of "about 1,000-1,500 people" near Sudbury. But when she decided to team up with Buntin, it meant moving away from home for the first time. And to a city, Montreal, where the population is largely French-speaking — a language that, despite her last name, Duhamel neither speaks or really comprehends.
"I understand some, but I can't conjugate verbs or anything like that," said Duhamel, 21.
Nobody is more impressed about Duhamel's moxie in making the move than her partner, for whom the former Canadian junior women's champion has truly been a career saver.
"What can't I say about her?" said Buntin, 27, of North Vancouver, B.C. "She's more than I could have hoped for. She has no friends in Montreal, she's living in a community where she doesn't speak the (predominant) language, she lives alone, she works 40 hours a week and trains on top of that ... and she brings a smile to the rink every day
"Then she comes out here (at HomeSense Skate Canada) and performs like a champ. She's unbelievable."
It's certainly quite the mix of cultures, to be sure. Duhamel's mother is Finnish, so she has a Scandinavian upbringing. Now she works in an Italian bakery (or boulangerie) 10 minutes from the rink where she and Buntin train in St-Leonard, Que.
The language spoken there is "mostly Italian and English," Duhamel said, "but if I have a shift, there's always somebody who speaks French there in case I run into trouble. Or I just talk with my hands."
A far cry from home, to be sure, where the Duhamel clan is literally everywhere.
"My sister lives in Oshawa, but my parents and my brother, every one of them, and my uncles and aunts and cousins and grandparents, they live in Lively," said Meagan.
"We take over the whole town."
Duhamel and Buntin wound up sixth at Le Colisee. Unless there's some sort of an ISU rule change to allow them to fill in for a couple withdrawing from a future Grand Prix event — as a new team, they have no world ranking points — then this was pretty much it until the Canadian championships in January in Vancouver.
"We've decided to do the Eastern Challenge (in December in Mississauga, Ont.), just to have another competition under our belts before then," said Buntin. "But we're crossing our fingers (about the Grand Prix events)."