Imagination

“Everything you can imagine is real.” … Pablo Picasso

Sarah: Mom, you left your grape jui-, I mean you left your wine sitting over there.

Me: I know. I’m waiting to drink it when I finish on the computer, because it will make me sleepy. Oh, and I also like it better room temperature.

Sarah: (rolls her eyes)

That conversation took place moments ago. Kwethluk is a dry village, meaning that it is illegal to buy, sell, or possess alcohol. Those of you who know me well are probably wondering how I’m doing. Let me just say that the imagination is a powerful tool! I regularly enjoy a glass or two of Welch’s Grape Juice in a wine glass and I call it wine. It is my wine. Believe it or not, sometimes I even fool myself – it actually tastes like wine to me. And, get this – I get sleepy after my second glass! Crazy? I know, right!?

I have definitely come to realize that the relaxation associated with imbibing alcohol is largely psychological, at least for me. I swear I even thought I had a hangover one morning after having 4 or 5 glasses of “wine.” I actually had to take a Tylenol!

On another interesting note, the teachers all got together tonight at Rachel and Kristin’s house (HS Social Studies teacher and 6th Grade teacher). It was a pot-luck. I brought Smoked Halibut and Cream Cheese on crackers. There were also beef enchiladas, guacamole, mashed potatoes, dried salmon, and Akutaq in addition to many other items. It was a feast! Akutaq (pronounced a-Goo-duk), in case you’re wondering, is also known as Eskimo Ice Cream. It is the orange stuff in the white bowl in the picture. It is made by mixing together salmon berries, whipped shortening, and sugar. Before you say, “Ew!” you should try it! It is surprisingly good – I had three servings!

I’m pretty sure I could live out the rest of my days eating dried salmon and akutaq and be quite content.

Journalism

\ˈjər-nə-ˌli-zəm\ the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media

One of the classes I am assigned to teach is Journalism. The school is excited at the prospect of actually having a school newspaper… for the first time in a long time, maybe the first time ever. “What an exciting opportunity!” one might exclaim. Well, yes… and no. You see, there are no newspapers available in Kwethluk other than the Delta Discovery, a locally owned and operated newspaper out of Bethel. The DD comes out once each week, is distributed free in the villages, and has only been in operation for about 3 ½ years. It has been making its way to Kwethluk for less time than that. Therefore, most of my Journalism students have had very little contact with an actual newspaper. Most have NEVER seen a large newspaper.

Add to that the fact that even though the school has one-to-one laptops (a laptop for every student), we are two weeks into the school year and the district has yet to assign the students login IDs. Therefore, there are no, zero, zip, nada computers for the students to use.

Try to teach Journalism to a group of 9th graders in a remote Alaskan village without a newspaper or a computer. Believe it or not, it can be done! I’m doing it!

The most interesting part of class right now is when we do our Journal writing. I (having a computer and projector for teacher use) project an image on the screen and have the students write about it. I tell them to pretend that they are a news reporter (some of them do have TVs and have seen news reports on television) and have just come across this scene. What’s the story? What’s going on? Answer the 5Ws and H (who, what, when, where, why, how). I tell them nothing about the picture until after they have had 10 minutes to write. Then, we discuss. These discussions have been my most teachable moments in Kwethluk thus far. Our first picture was of the new-age bus system that China is building in Beijing. It had been at the top of the Yahoo! news feed over the weekend and provided ample discussion in class Tuesday afternoon.

The next photo for class was of the Running of the Bulls in Spain. It was actually an image of a poster, but the message was the same. While the kids were writing, I had one girl ask me what kind of animal that was. She had never seen a bull. She had never seen a cow, for that matter. When we discussed, I discovered that not one student in the entire class had ever heard of the Running of the Bulls in Spain. Wow! What a teachable moment! They wanted to know what a bull was (a male cow). They wanted to know why only bulls run down the streets. They wanted to know why, why why. It was great. They were interested in class and wanted to know more.

Because of being on a block schedule, we only have class three times each week. So, when we had class on Friday, the picture that I displayed was this one of a community in an area with lots of water around it. The kids wrote furiously for 10 minutes and then when we discussed, they were all certain that it was Napaskiak (a neighboring tundra village). When I asked why, they answered that they could see the tundra and a few of them even identified relatives’ houses. I had to laugh. It was, in fact, a picture of Grand Bayou, Louisiana. Their mouths literally fell open. I explained to them that the "tundra" was actually swampland. I then displayed a map of the United States and showed them exactly where this picture was taken… down at the very southernmost tip of Louisiana – about as far away from Napaskiak as you can get and still be in the United States! Again, they were filled with questions and the discussion was exciting. I explained that the swamp was filled with alligators and people even ate alligator there. The kids all said, “Ew,” in unison and I quickly informed them that the people of South Louisiana would also say, “Ew,” at the prospect of eating seal. The students laughed wildly at this, finding it hard to imagine that people would have never eaten seal before. They loved the fact that where they live looks so much like South Louisiana and want to plan a trip there. Whew! We’ll have to see about that…

Those pictures have motivated my class to see newsworthy items where there was only blank space before. It has brought the outside world to them. It has opened their eyes to the possibilities outside of Kwethluk. Above all, it has motivated them to begin to ask questions. As for me, I've learned that there's more to teaching Journalism than meets the eye!

Mail

Moving to a bush village definitely has its challenges. Something you might not think much about is how your mail gets to you every day. Here, I’ve had a chance to give this considerable thought since I’ve received over 40 boxes here. Some were boxes that I packed and shipped to myself. Some were boxes that came from Amazon.com – I’ve taken great advantage of their free Super-Saver Shipping policy to get things like dishes, glasses, microwave, furniture slip covers, bedding, etc. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ve seen the size of the planes that come in and out of Kwethluk. Sometimes, getting the boxes on those planes is not an easy task because of the size of the cargo holds. Therefore, many boxes get smashed in order to fit – kind of like when I sit on my suitcase to get it to zip shut. I have probably had 7-8 hard plastic tubs destroyed this way – simply crushed – they come to me with holes in the sides or bottom. One tub was apparently so destroyed in transit that the post office repackaged the entire thing in a cardboard box and sent it on to me. Keep in mind that these boxes only had to travel 450 miles within the same state! That’s Alaska for ya!

If I’m lucky, the boxes don’t get shoved into a bush plane for the ride from Bethel to Kwethluk, but rather take a luxurious ride aboard the USPS Hovercraft down the Kuskokwim and Kwethluk Rivers. Yes, folks, this is the only USPS Hovercraft in North America!

It brings in shipments of supplies to our little village twice each week, Wednesdays and Saturdays, every week of the year. Now, that’s really saying something in this part of the country, where the river (it’s highway of choice) turns to solid ice in the winter.

The Hovercraft floats into the village right in front of my house and “docks” about 35 yards from my front door. I use the word “dock” loosely because there is no structure there, simply a mud embankment that has been cleared of brush.

A makeshift, man-powered conveyor belt is quickly assembled and a pick-up truck arrives to be loaded with boxes to take to the local Post Office. It took three trips with a full truck bed yesterday – lots of food supplies coming in for the school year, I suspect.

On my daily trips to the Post Office, which sits right across the road from the school, Ted is always there to greet me. He’s a super-friendly 45ish Yupik gentleman who speaks broken English, practically lives at the Post Office, and always wears a smile. I guess you would call Ted the Postmaster in Kwethluk. When I first got my Post Office box keys (the boxes are free because there is no home delivery here), I didn’t have to fill out anything – just told him my name and he gave me the keys, which are not necessary to pick up my mail – Ted will just hand it to me across the counter.

When I have boxes at the Post Office (which have arrived either by bush plane or Hovercraft), I borrow my neighbors’ 4-wheeler to bring them home. I can fit 4-5 large boxes on it in one trip and, as usual, there are always plenty of kids around to help me load and unload.

That is how I get my mail.

Welcome to My Home

As you walk up to my front door, which faces the river, you’ll see a refrigerator in the yard. I’m not sure why it ended up there or how long it’s been there. However, I think it may find a second life as a fish smoker! The house is built about four feet off the ground to account for the permafrost and occasional flooding from the river. To the right is the home of Kevin and Gina McCalla (principal and his wife) and to the left is a house that has been converted into the 6th grade classroom. The big orange building behind our house is the main school building.

As you approach the front steps and get a closer look up under the house, you will notice all sorts of treasures – mostly there are sleds for pulling behind snowgos (snowmobiles). You can see the exposed pipe because nothing is buried under ground – too wet and too frozen. There is also an abundance of driftwood up under the house from previous floods.

Here is the view from my front door – that’s the Kwethluk River, a tributary of the Kuskokwim River.

Welcome to the Mud Room. This is the first room you walk in to when entering my house – not my idea of a good first impression, but it definitely has its purpose… to contain the mud. I put the rugs down, hoping that would help, but it turns out they are only a hindrance – the rugs are coming up and we will just have a muddy floor that I’ll clean once a week. You can see our boots there, too – standard footwear here – I’ll be carrying my “cute” shoes to school in my backpack. The highlight of the Mud Room is the huge chest freezer that I intend to fill with a bush order of frozen food in the next couple of weeks.

We’re pretty well moved in, now. It took a lot of cleaning and a lot of elbow grease, but we are managing to make this house our home. The pictures in this blog were taken after much of the work was done. However, we do have slip covers coming for the living room furniture, which is very worn, fairly dirty, and horribly dated.

The TV doesn’t seem nearly as small as it looks in this picture – some sort of entertainment center to put the TV on (it’s sitting on one of my bedroom tables right now) would help, but that’s definitely not a priority around here… maybe I can find a local carpenter to make one for me.

The kitchen is great – nice and big with a large dining table, gas stove, and lots of counter and cabinet space.

We even have a stand-up freezer in addition to a large refrigerator/freezer in the kitchen! (yes, freezer #2)

My bedroom is comfortable. However, I still need to clean the dried, dead mosquitoes off the walls and ceiling before I hang pictures – thanks to the bachelors that lived here before us! LOL

I have a big walk-in closet and a large dresser. Noticeably absent is a mirror. The only mirror in the entire house is in the bathroom – about a 12x18 inch mirror over the sink. Now, I don’t consider myself vain, but I do have a mirror on order from Amazon.com to hang over my dresser. Again, no mirrors might have worked just fine for those bachelors, but Sarah and I need something more.

Our bathroom is tiny, but functional. Notice the mirror is so close to the right wall that one has to lean against the bathroom door (or the towel rack that’s on the wall behind the door) to get a full view. Oh, and a special touch is the duct tape on the toilet seat. The second time I sat on that toilet seat, it cracked in half – nice. But, thankfully, duct tape fixes everything from window screens to toilet seats.

The laundry room is a complete luxury to have in the bush and I am SOOOO thankful for mine!

So, there you have it – our new home in Kwethluk, Alaska… Yupik village of 750.

Visitors

Well, it appears that the 4th grade boys in the village have adopted us! They helped us get all moved in and unpacked during our first couple of days in Kwethluk and continue to make daily visits to see us. The actually asked to help us clean, wiping out cabinets and vacuuming the floor. We had between two and eight boys in the house at any given time during those first 48 hours.




… knock knock knock… “May we visit?” They’d call from the front door. We have to be sure to keep the door locked or else they just walk right in, as is okay in their culture. We had to lay some ground rules, especially after the knocking started at 9am after a particularly long night of unpacking. #1 – Not before noon. #2 – Not more than four kids in the house at a time. #3 – Only for two hours once each day. They are actually pretty respectful of the new rules… and I found out later that most teachers only allow the kids over for a couple of hours one day a week. However, April loves playing with the little boys, so here they come!

These quiet little Yupik boys are polite and considerate and very funny. The Yupik culture is a teasing one. When someone teases you, jokes around with you, it means they like you – sarcasm abounds. I love it!

They are also more incredibly helpful than you can ever imagine an eleven-year-old boy to be. Since they are always playing around the school, and we live right behind the school, they are always near our house. I don’t walk to the dumpster with a box of trash (the dumpster is quite a hike to get to) that a small boy doesn’t come up and insist to carry it for me. I don’t bring a load of boxes from the Post Office that I don’t have several boys helping to unload and carry them up the steps to the house.

And quiet. These boys are softspoken, seldom get rowdy in the house, and don’t argue. Wow!

Curious. As they unloaded my frozen meat cooler into the freezer that first night, Vosley asked me, “What’s this?” while holding up chopped rhubarb and Halibut filets. He had never heard of or eaten either one. Unpacking was an adventure, especially when they discovered my hockey equipment, which they promptly put on and began a game on the kitchen floor. We promised to play hockey with them as soon as “freeze-up” occurs.

Now that we're pretty well done unpacking, the kids come over to watch a movie, usually. But, often, they get distracted early on and want to draw. James is a particularly talented artist and I was surprised to see that the first picture he ever drew for us was of a very traditional-looking eskimo. That picture now has a place of prominence on my refrigerator.

“Where are the girls?” you may be asking. Well, it appears that boys dominate the gene pool in this village!


All photo credits go to April D'Water!

Off We Go...

Suffice it to say that I spent this summer working at the Bear Creek Winery in Homer and packing and shipping plastic tubs to Kwethluk. So, that pretty much sums up my summer (except for the mini-vacation we took to Seward which I will blog about separately).

We (me, two daughters, a dog, a cat, and 9 checked bags – 3 of which were coolers) flew from Homer to Kwethluk on Friday, July 30, just over a week ago. I had called Alaska Airlines ahead to make sure that we really could take three checked bags per person for free – Yes. I also double checked to make sure they knew that in addition to all of those bags, we were bringing a dog in a large kennel and a cat in a small kennel – would they have enough room – Yes. So, of course, we arrive at the Homer airport to check in and they immediately inform me that the plane is too small to accommodate all of our luggage, so I need to prioritize it and let them know which ones “have” to go now and which ones can wait for a later flight. Flustered, I began making decisions between saving my frozen Halibut and Salmon or having a change of clothes. The fish won out and we prioritized our bags. My bigger concern about this was the fact that the bags would be coming on a later flight and we had a charter scheduled to fly into Kwethluk from Bethel and I’m not sure how the rest of our bags are going to get to Kwethluk at a “later time.”

My carry-on... I babied those fishing poles on three planes!

It was about then that the weighing of the coolers revealed that my “fish” cooler was 10 pounds overweight, coming in at 60 pounds instead of the require maximum 50 pounds. I paid the extra $120 for an overweight bag, vowing that next time, I’d make sure that cooler weighed 100 pounds if it was going to be overweight (same surcharge)! Yes, in hindsight I know that I should have just given the ticket lady 10 pounds of fish (I’m thinking there is some kind of a scam running there…).

We board the small plane bound for Anchorage (open seating) and I sit in the very front seat nearest the door. Just before they shut and lock the door, the ticket lady sticks her head in the cabin, locates me, and, with a big smile, informs me that all of my bags, coolers, and pets made it on the plane. I am relieved.

Shortly after arriving in Anchorage, we head to baggage claim where we have to claim our pets and re-check them in at the Customer Service desk. Both animals are scared to death and have soiled their kennels. … remember, we’re only an hour into our adventure at this point… deep breaths… deep breaths… I remove the soiled towels from the kennels and throw them in the nearest trash bin, while April takes Nali outside to the patch of grass near the car loading/unloading to do her business. Keep in mind, Nali has never been to the city before, ridden in a plane before, been in an airport before, seen so many cars or people in one place before, and on and on. She has already emptied her bladder on the plane and cannot figure out what the point of the grassy patch is supposed to be. April brings her back in and we head to Customer Service.

There, they discover that Nali’s dog kennel is missing one of 10 bolts. After three consecutively more important Customer Service agents cannot make the decision of whether or not the kennel is “safe,” CSA #4 determines that it is not. She tells me that I’ll have to get a new kennel before Nali can fly on one of their planes. After a pregnant pause, I am flabbergasted wondering how on earth I am going to get a taxi, go to a pet store, purchase a new kennel, get back to the airport, and check in for our flight that leaves in 75 minutes. The air in my lungs is gone and I can’t catch my breath and don’t even know what to say. Then it comes to me and I ask, breathlessly, “Where can I buy a kennel?” to which she calmly replies, “Oh, we sell them here for a hundred and five dollars.” Well, why didn’t you just say so!!! These people! So, they bring out a new kennel and I gladly leave our soiled one beside the counter for them to take care of. We got the pets checked in and were ready for flight #2.

Sarah checks out the aerial view of Kwethluk in the Bethel airport.

Arriving in Bethel was like landing in a foreign country. The mountains and most of the trees were gone. All signs in the airport were bilingual – in English and in Yupik. The airport was small and crowded – one large room was the entrance, exit, baggage claim, and check-in. And, on this last Friday afternoon in July, it was bustling! We collect all of our bags, coolers, and animals (Yay! Everything made it!), call for our charter (Hageland Air) and head outside to wait on the curb for them to come pick us up in their van.

The girls board the puddle-jumper headed for Kwethluk.

Once at Hageland, they are surprised to see us and have no record on file of a reservation for a charter despite the fact that I called them earlier in the day to confirm. No worries – it’s 8:30pm and they rustle up a pilot, get our things loaded, and we’re off! As we walked out toward the plane, I called Mr. McCalla (my new principal) to let him know we’re on our way so that he can meet us at the airport. Cramped into a “207” with four seats (I’m suddenly the co-pilot), we weeble-wobble off the Bethel runway and into the sky. The noise from the engine is too loud to allow for any conversation, so we all sit in silence with our thoughts as the plane barrels into the sky. It’s beautiful and we even see a couple of moose bedded down in a field during our 10 minute flight to Kwethluk. The land is all shades of green – grasses, shrubs, an occasional stunted tree, and water everywhere – ponds, rivers, streams, marsh. We watch the winding river below us, the Kuskokwim, and notice the occasional house. Roads are noticeably absent.

The broken "OH SHIT" handle added to the ambience!

Suddenly, we can see a group of buildings on the river to the left of the nose of the plane – that’s it! That’s Kwethluk! No roads lead in or out. The plane rapidly descends to a short, gravel runway. The wings tip this way and that just before the wheels touch down and we go into a full skid – the pilot has the “steering wheel” turned as far right as it will go as we slide straight forward and eventually come to a stop.

It's an adventure, girls!

As I let the air out of my lungs, I don’t even realize that I was holding my breath. There is a 4-wheeler parked by a mountain of gravel and a couple of kids playing in the dirt. They stop to stare. There is also a Honda Pilot parked on the side of the runway and Mr. McCalla gets out to greet us. After unfolding ourselves and crawling out of the tiny plane, we greet our new principal, load the vehicle, say our goodbyes to the pilot, and make the first of two trips to our new house to unload and settle in. In the distance, we can hear the tiny plane headed back to Bethel and it is once again silent on the tundra.

Our first view of Kwethluk...