Saturday, November 30, 2013

Holiday Season- Anything Can Happen in The Village

My kids with their Halloween masks
I haven't blogged in a while, so I felt like taking this opportunity to talk about how we spend the holidays in the village. Halloween is a big deal to most of the kiddos. We spent the day in my class making masks and learning about where Halloween comes from. The Saturday after, there was a nice Halloween Carnival at the school, where the Natural Helpers and I set up a Haunted House for everyone to enjoy. It was a lot of fun. I found these really cool posters where elders had described Halloween when they were young. I thought that was really interesting! The first poster pictured below describes a traditional kind of mix of Halloween and Thanksgiving. The second poster pictured below explains how they received very little candy like we do now. 

My favorite part is the "Halloween Spirit" licking 
the ashes off of the person's face as they sleep.  
Halloween Carnival
Halloween Carnival
Halloween Carnvial
"Qaariitaarvik" is Yup'ik for Halloween- explaining the traditions from an elder

Flooded river
It's been an interesting few weeks. The river should normally freeze up sometime in October, but by the time November had begun, it still hadn't even started to freeze. One night, our assistant principal knocked on our door to let my roommate and I know that there was flooding happening, that we might loose water and electricity. Immediately we filled up water buckets and anything else we could find. We were getting  so much rain and snow and the water wasn't frozen yet, that it was flooding like it does in the spring when the snow and river melt. It caused quite a bit of problems. We've had to get a new water pump because of it and had a few days where the water has been turned off for a while so that they could try to fix the problems. Hopefully, they've gotten everything fixed. 
Preparing for the flood
Some of the flooding
Preparing for the flood


Snowstorm after the flooding

A beautiful sky on a nice day








Watching the volleyball team
in the Championship game
The snow has finally settled in and now the rivers are frozen enough that people are venturing out on their snow machines. I haven't gotten mine out yet, and don't really know if I will or not until after we come back from Christmas. The ice isn't as thick as it normally gets yet, and locals have said if you go out, to stick to the paths others have already made. There are quite a few spots with some overflow, which isn't too dangerous, but I would rather avoid it all together!


This week, being Thanksgiving, we had a little event called Little Dribblers for those students who are too young to play school sports. The preschool age students through third graders played ball against each other Wednesday afternoon. It was lots of fun and a lot of parents showed up. It was standing room only. I had a lot of fun talking with my kids and playing while we watched the other groups play. Now that Christmas is coming up, the Natural Helpers are planning some events and we have the school Christmas Program to prepare for. We won't be moving into the new school over Christmas break, so we won't be packing up, which is a little bit of a blessing, since I've already arranged to go to Arkansas for the break. But we still have three weeks until then and if the month of November has proven anything to me as of late, it's that anything can happen in the village!
The gym packed for Little Dribblers