Village Visits

Thursday and Friday of this week we had district wide in-services, which means that every teacher from every school got together depending on if they were high school or elementary to learn something new. The high school people (which is the group I am in) went to Mountain Village, where the District Office is and where we learned a lot about something called Constructing Meaning. I learned a lot, and it was great to reconnect with some of the other teachers I met at New Teacher Orientation, but I think the best thing about the in-service was getting to go to a new village. It was vastly different than my own village. 

If you look closely, you can see their cemetery on the side of the hill

By the water's edge, lots of boats, pretty hill

Probably the biggest difference between their village and my village was the mountains. I wouldn't, under normal circumstances, call them mountains, but that was the difference. If you haven't noticed from my pictures in the previous blog, the land here is very flat. However, Mountain had massive hills. I heard one of the other teachers say that when she was walking back to the school from the store she thought she was going to pass out because of how steep the hill was. I didn't think it was really that steep, but after walking on extremely flat ground for such a long period of time, it did make my legs a little sore. I grew up in the Ozark Mountains, so I wasn't expecting that to be difficult at all. 

A view from the hill- The tall building is the church

Another pretty big difference was their store. We have three stores, and they are all very nice. However, in Mountain Village, they have two stores, one of which was extremely nice! They had couches and movies and cook ware. I was even able to buy sleeping bag straps there. Plus, they have a whole long wall full of freezers stuffed to the brim with frozen dinners and such. They had fresh vegetables and even store bought cakes and donuts!  It was like a dream compared to our stores. I felt like I was in a Wal-Mart. 

Part of our village, very spread out housing

The last difference I will talk about today is the set up of the village. I wish I had my camera out when we were flying over the village. I was able to get pictures coming back into our village, but not of Mountain. Our village is a total of three miles wide. It is all spread out along that three miles. Their village is all compacted together. The school is at the center. The houses and stores and everything is all wrapped around the school like a tight little ball. 

View of the water

Furs they sell in their stores

Seeing the differences between my village and someone else's made a huge impact. I'm excited to see the other villages, like Kotlik, where they don't have any roads, just board walks. We also got our first sticking snow, although it didn't last long. I woke up yesterday morning to see snow clinging to the board walks. By the time I left the house a few hours later to get work done, it was all melted. Life sure has been different out here in the bush. Lots of thing have changed my viewpoint of life from living out here. I have learned so many things and I hope that my students have learned as much from me as I have from them. Life in the bush has definitely been interesting for me, a small town girl from Northwest Arkansas. I hope those of you reading this have enjoyed hearing about it as much as I have enjoyed living it.