I think it is officially beginning to feel like winter here. The river is freezing over quite nicely. The temperatures hover right around 32 (for now). The sun doesn't rise until close to 10 am or later. Yup, feels like winter is coming on.
I was afraid I wouldn't have anything really interesting to write about this week, but then I realized my birthday and parent-teacher conferences were both this week along with the village Halloween Carnival at the school. It was a very fun week with lots of successful events, I would say.
Our packed gym
Parent-Teacher conferences: In an earlier blog, I told you that expectations are different for parents here than they are in the lower 48. School is not seen as important here and therefore parents don't necessarily NEED to come to things like parent-teacher conferences. Normally, half or less of the student's parents show up. For my very first parent-teacher conferences, eight of my ten students had a parent show up to discuss their students progress! I was amazed, astonished, and stoked that so many came out. I even had one suggesting ways they could help their child improve at home! It was amazing and I was so happy with the results. Since the beginning of the semester I have believed that I have the best group of students in the school, and because so many of their parents showed up, I was able to brag to almost all of their parents about how great their students are. As a first year teacher to have so much success, that was definitely a self-esteem booster as well.
box full of birthday goodies!
Birthday: I loved getting packages from home for my birthday. They were awesome. It was also really neat to celebrate my birthday in such a small place. Literally everyone knew I was turning twenty-three. Every single kid came up to me at school and told me happy birthday. It made the day even a little bit more special because so many people cared. Not only that, but all of the teachers become like a second family out here. Our bush family celebrated my birthday with cake and a movie. It was just a little simple get together at a teacher's house. But to me, it was perfect. We couldn't go out to the mall, or to a restaurant, or do anything you may have done living with the normal conveniences of civilizational surroundings, but we had each other and it made my birthday the most perfect day this year.
Escaping the Haunted House at the back
Halloween Carnival: Last night was the Halloween Carnival held at the school. They had booths for games set up all around the gym, a prize room for winners, and even a haunted house in the hallways of the school. When things like that are open to the community, everyone in the village comes out to celebrate. The gym was PACKED with people! There was no entry fee, just a sweet little ticket booth selling tickets to win prizes with. I worked the free throw shot. Students would pay two tickets to get four shots on the free throw line. If they made a shot, they won a prize ticket. I picked this event because basketball is a big deal here. I figured a lot of the students would enjoy this game. I was right. Especially one of the seventh graders who isn't in my class. He kept coming back over and over again. He wasn't bad, either. Several times he made all four shots. I was impressed.
Pond frozen over
It has been a great week, but it isn't quite over. Today we are celebrating a two year old's birthday. Then, next week is Halloween. That is a big deal around here. I would appreciate prayers for next week because Wednesday and Thursday will be pretty crazy days because of Halloween. I am excited to celebrate my first holiday with these people in this village that I love so very much.
Last week was a dreadful week! Being a teacher is hardest just a few times a year, and when report cards are due is one of those times. Fortunately, I finished all of my grading and what not, but it is a lot of extra stress and worry for one solid week.
It started snowing!
On top of that, there was a volleyball tournament hosted here this weekend. It was a lot of fun, but the teachers have to do a lot of work for these things such as line judging and officiating, and score keeping. I like doing score keeping, so I did that for all the games. By yesterday afternoon when I came home I just passed out for a while, because I was so exhausted.
Ice floating down the river
I woke up from my nap and decided to go get some things from my classroom so I could get some stuff done and ran into two of the other teachers heading to the store. I caught a ride with them since it seemed like the thing to do. On our way we drove down beside the slough, and looked over to see ice chunks heading down the slough. It was beautiful. It was the real first sign of winter coming. Soon the river will be frozen over, snow will completely cover the ground, and everyone will get their snowmobiles out to play.
Soon it will be completely frozen over
I'm looking forward to it because there are many other things to do once the snow settles in. It opens a whole new world of adventures for me.
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Sorry that this post isn't very long, like I said it was a very busy week. If I wasn't in my classroom, I was in my bed asleep! Hope you enjoy seeing the fun pictures from a great weekend!
It snowed today. Twice actually, although the first time isn't really what a lot of people would consider snow. Me, being from the southwest thought it was beautiful. Then, when I saw the real snow, I realized that the first snow was dull. This was majestic. I made myself a nice cup of hot cocoa just for the occasion, even though it isn't that cold out here yet. I also took some pictures just for my wonderful readers. Ah, what a wonderful place it is out here!
This week felt so very long! By Wednesday I was ready for the weekend. Of course, each weekend seems to become shorter and shorter. Or maybe that is just the days. My roommate told me that daily we are losing five minutes of sunlight, two and a half in the morning, and two and a half in the evening. It is extremely noticeable. Back home you didn't start noticing the night getting darker until daylight savings time. I wasn't expecting it to be so much darker already in the mornings.
But it is beautiful. Every morning as I leave my house to go to work I take a moment on my steps to look at the stars. They are magnificent! I can see so many more than I could even from our farm back home. The big dipper is right above us right now, making me feel like I could be scooped up into the sky any morning. It really cheers me up when I can wake up and look at the stars and the moon. It reminds me that I woke up for a reason this morning.
Mom's famous chili... yum!
I'm not a very good cook. That is probably one of the hardest things so far about living on my own in the remote Alaskan bush. If I screw up dinner, there is only one restaurant to go and solve my problems at. Unfortunately, the restaurant closes at seven so if I make dinner after then I can't very well do anything except try again. My mom is an excellent cook. You would think I would get some of those genes, but they skipped right over me and went to my younger siblings. My mom is great, though. She sent a care package with all the things (except meat) to make her famous chili. It was the highlight of my week when I got that package. I followed her recipe to the tee and my chili turned out fabulous! I even had the other new teachers over to try some and they loved it. If I keep following my mom's recipes so well, people are going to get the wrong idea!
Probably the worst thing that happened this week was something I put a lot of effort into. My kids made awesome dioramas of things we had been learning about. I was so impressed that I decided the kids should get to show off to their parents. I made cookies and invited all the parents to come to the classroom for just a half hour one day this week. I stayed until almost 5:30, an hour after I was supposed to be done, and no one showed up. Not one parent. They didn't want to come see the miraculous things their child had done. The other teachers told me not to take it personally, and I don't. They worked so hard on those things. That is the norm here, though. We have parent-teacher conferences coming up and the other teachers have said not to hold my breath, that the parents won't show up for that, either. It's just the way of the people here. I don't understand it, but that is the culture, I guess.
Big snowflakes!
The best thing that happened this week was moving my classroom around. I don't have any pictures to put up on here. I didn't take any to show you, but let's just say it is completely reversed. I moved my desk to the opposite side of the classroom and it looks really different that way. It was a lot of fun, though. I also did a lot of reorganizing, so hopefully those two things don't add up and haunt me this next week, especially since report card info is due at the end of the week. I'm not looking forward to that, by any means!
I'll be teaching on weather, the thirteen original colonies, Alaska's original Natives, metacognition, short stories, and fractions. Maybe this last week of the quarter will be the most productive.
This week wasn't super eventful, but the students started a project last week and finished it up on Wednesday that made me think of a topic for this blog. It is something that I have been realizing more and more since being here, but never thought about before. It answers the question, "How do we know the things we know?" If all you had ever known was a small town, with a couple tiny stores, no bowling alleys or movie theaters or anything less than a plane ride away, how much would you really be able to relate to the outside world?
Here are most of the students' projects. As you can see, most of them are on white or blue paper, representing snow
In social studies we studied the different groups of Early Americans, including the original people of this area, my students' ancestors. We learned a lot about these people. As a culminating activity, I had the students choose any of these groups of Native Americans and create a diorama of the culture. All but two of my students chose the Early Americans in the north-- Their ancestors. It got me to thinking about how they really have no way to relate to any of the other cultures we discussed, even though they learned so much about them for the two weeks before we began the project. All most of these kids have ever known is hunting moose and seal and super cold winters. They've never been to the deserts of Arizona or into caves. They've never been in the woods where tall trees reach to the heavens or the plains where buffalo can roam wild with nothing holding them back. All they know is the marshy land and ice they see every year. It was a wonderful thing to realize.
This is one of two projects on a different area than North Native Americans
Even though I have been directing my lessons as much as I can to their culture, it really opened my eyes to how important it is to relate to their culture. They don't know the outside world. They've never been to a museum, a movie theater, or a Wal-mart. These things that I've taken for granted throughout my life are things that these kids have never seen. I can't just assume that because students in any other town in the lower 48 may have been to a fair or carnival, these students have only heard of them or seen them on movies. They don't know the atmosphere of a fair or carnival or the smells.
Our bonfire started off cold and rainy
One of the Black Fish caught
In other news, we had a play day at the school for the students who have been well behaved in the halls. It was a lot of fun and we had a pretty good turnout. We also had a bonfire down by the dock, which was loads of fun, even though the weather was a bit rainy and cold. We shot the guns, cooked s'mores and hot dogs, and on our way back, found a puddle with black fish. Black fish is translated into Yup'ik as emmonak, or emoniq (?). It was very interesting finding fish in a puddle. We caught two of the bigger ones, and there were tons of baby ones, too. It was a catch and release, though, they were small, even for bigger fish. One of the teacher's husbands told us the people here catch them to eat. He also said you can catch them, put them in the freezer for a few days, and then take them out and put them in water and they will come back to life. Crazy!
This is the puddle the Black Fish call home
The highlight of my week was learning how important relating to the culture is in this community. It is the best way to reach the students with information, because they don't relate to the same things you or I would. The students worked really hard on their projects, and I am so proud of the great work they did!
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.
Here I am sitting with my new friends watching the game as the men finish cutting up the moose they caught this week and I can count the ways in which my life has changed.
Akutaq, Eskimo Ice Cream. Not as bad as I was told it was, but I was told this was more fishy than normal. It usually has more crisco flavor.
1) My diet. I used to HATE fish. I mean, I really didn't like the texture, the smell, or even the look of fish meat. Now, here I am, eating akutaq (a-goo-tuck) and baked salmon and everything! I don't all of a sudden like eating fish, but my stomach handles that food better now. I also never liked tea, and last night sitting in the living room watching television drinking a cup of hot tea and actually enjoying it.
2) Hobbies. I always loved reading, but now I do a lot more of it than I used to. I also can't go bowling or hang out at the shopping areas, go get coffee, or really anything that I used to do. We don't have places to go hang out except for our houses. I enjoy reading, playing games, and watching television shows with my co-workers more than I have ever done before. It is nice, in a way, to not have places to go and be able to spend quality time with the people around me. They are pretty interesting people.
3) New Respect For Meat. We spent most of today processing the meat from the moose one of the other teachers caught. I didn't ever think about how the meat was processed. I just went to the store, or waited for my parents to take the cow down to have it cut up. Today, I helped do all the work. We even had a meat grinder and made ground moose meat. CRAZY! I never realized how much work it was. And when you take the cow to a processing plant or pick up a pound of meat from the store, it probably hasn't been done the same way as we did it today. We did everything by hand. The meat grinder wasn't electronic, the guys had to use their muscles and pump the grinder. It was a lot of work, but I'm glad I was part of it, now I'll have more knowledge of the whole thing than I did before.
Moose head from the moose we processed
4) Speeds higher than 15 MPH scare me. I am not going to lie, I have a little bit of a lead foot, but since being here, the only vehicle I have ridden on is the four-wheeler. All we have are dirt roads, so there isn't really a reason you would go much faster than that. I was thinking about how I used to drive 50 MPH coming home from college, and now that just seems way too fast.
Me eating the akutaq
5) Saying Hello to Everyone. I walked home from the restaurant the other night and almost everyone I walked past I knew and said hello to. Back home when you walk down the street or even through the store, you ignore everyone or just smile. Here, you know everyone in town, so you say hello to everyone. It is cool, and it sometimes makes me feel like a superstar. I like the community feeling here.
Despite the fact that my students have been frustrated by my lack of knowledge of the Yup'ik language (that is the traditional language of the people) and the Yup'ik teacher said that the dogs crying at night means something bad is going to happen, I'm truly enjoying it out here. It has been a great experience. I love everyone out here. I love everything I have done. And I love the lifestyle I'm living out here. I know that I am truly blessed.
The potluck part of the potlatch. Look at all that delicious food!
How should I start this blog? So many things to tell, so many things to share. What a full week we have had out here in the bush. Alakanuk celebrated early this week and then as the week went on we had an alarming tragedy. What a week!! As our new airport is supposed to be finished this coming week, the community decided to have a potlatch in honor of the airport and all the hard work that went into it. It was my first ever potlatch out here and I wanted to share about it. But then, on Wednesday there was a tragic fire in the village that has effected most people around here. Our village will be filled with people from other villages as they come to mourn the death of an elderly woman. Such a sad occasion merits some mention in this week's blog.
mm, yummy!
Tuesday we had a great time. There was a big potlatch celebration. Our new airport is almost complete, so we all got together at the tribal building for the evening to share a meal and have an Eskimo dance. Anytime we can get together to dance out here, we do. A potlatch is basically the same as a potluck, with the Eskimo added onto it, which is a lot of fun. There were tons of different foods that people brought out, and it was all delicious!
Of course, those of you who know me, know I'm not a big fish eater. But a lot of the food had moose meat instead, which is delicious, so I had plenty to eat. Unfortunately, no one brought any Eskimo ice cream, which they call something like agudik, although there is no guarantee that this is the way they spell it. It is made up of fish, berries, crisco, and fish oil. Sounds delicious, doesn't it? Well I've been holding out, waiting to taste some, but they haven't had any yet.
what a group of friend
The potlatch was supposed to begin at 5, but, of course, like everything else around here it didn't start exactly on time. The people in this culture don't really stick to time schedules like down in the lower 48. I only stayed until about 8:30, and one of the other teachers said she left about 9:30, so these potlatches last quite a few hours, but I don't think they went on much past 10, seeing as it was a school night and stuff like that.
I took a short video of the people doing one of the Eskimo dances. Hope you enjoy the video. This dance would go on for about 10 minutes, but I tried to get the main part of the dance. The part in this video would be repeated over and over again within that time frame, which may sound boring, but I dare you to watch it until you can do it yourself and tell me how long it takes. One more thing I wanted to tell you I don't know if I included in another blog is that you will notice all the women have either fans (made to look like bear claws) or gloves on. You are not allowed to dance unless you are wearing gloves or have fans. It's pretty interesting how they do things like that.
Wednesdays are our early out days. We let the students out an hour early so we can do some in-service and get things done without the students being around. As we were sitting down to start our meeting Wednesday, someone came in and notified one of the aides about something. He immediately got up and left and word was passed around the room. His grandmother's house was on fire! We sent four of the teachers to go out and help fight the fire as well.
girls playing
I know that fires are always a danger and we always need to be cautious about them, but this is more severe out here. There are no fire hydrants and no hoses or any other materials to put out big fires. Also, these houses are super old. When one catches on fire, there is not a whole lot of chance for you to stop it and get it under control. On top of that, the houses are pretty close together so when one catches on fire, you have to try to get it under control as soon as you can, otherwise whole neighborhoods could go up in smoke.
Teachers joining the dance
By the time the teachers got there, the whole house was engulfed and flames were licking out the window. The house next to it was hot on the side closest to the burning house and they were afraid they wouldn't stop it in time. Fortunately they were able to get water trucks from the construction people at the school and put out the house. The house was completely gone, there is no way it could be salvaged.
As the teachers got there, they were pulling the woman out of the house who lived there. She was an 88 years old woman, with 90% of her body covered in 3rd degree burns. Her clothes had been made of polyester, and even though she had thrown water on her before trying to head out, the fire was in the doorway, and there was no hope. She made it eight hours. They were even able to medivac her to another bigger village, but she didn't make it. They said that because her burns were so severe, her nerve endings had been burned off, so she wasn't in pain and she was even trying to sit up and talk to people.
This young lady made a bet with a teacher that she could finish that jaw breaker.... Good luck!!
There were two children in my class who were related to her. One was her granddaughter, who was pretty upset. Another one was her great-nephew. He saw the body as they pulled her out of the house. It was pretty nasty. Even the teachers said they would have nightmares. I can't imagine how it effected him, but I do know it wasn't in a good way. Thursday and Friday were terrible days for this student at school. He was constantly misbehaving and didn't want to listen to anything I said.
More Eskimo dancing
When something like this happens in the village, it effects EVERYONE! Since so many people in the village are related, one tragic death, like this one, can make everything more negative and everyone on edge. It isn't like in the lower 48 when you can escape tragedies or find something to take your mind off of it. There isn't anything to distract you out here. It is so difficult to deal with these types of things in the village. I would really appreciate prayers out here.
Last night I went to a bonfire by the Yukon River while four or five foxes were playing around next to where we were. Not many people can make a statement like this. Even though it was a tough week, I still know this is where I need to be. Even though it was hard to deal with what was going on within the community, I know I can bring a happiness and a peace to those in my class who need it. Thank you for reading, for your prayers, and for your support during my incredible journey out here in Alaska. Out here, we are all a team, we are all together here.
