The Road to Freedom... continues...

Monday morning, I dropped Sarah off at school, ran around trying to find a house to rent, and spent an hour and a half at the auto shop waiting for some tire-rod-thingy to be fixed that was making a knocking noise. (I had the car exactly 36 hours before it went in to the shop for the first time - thankfully, the dealer paid for the repairs! Yippee Skippee!) Then, I stopped by the Homer News, my new employer, to fill out new hire paperwork and then I was off to take a drug test at the hospital - Homer News requirement. That was a new experience. I was horrified that they'd have to watch me pee or something. That was not the case, but there was blue dye in the toilet for some important reason that I was afraid to ask about.

I spent the rest of the afternoon househunting and furniture hunting both in person and online, using the "guest" computer in the lobby of the Driftwood Inn. Since my stupid Dell hasn't worked for over a month, I feel a bit like my right arm is cut off. They had the nerve to tell me that I needed to gather a screwdriver and an external mouse and then call them back so that they could lead me through disassembling and reassembling my computer. Well, since I didn't have those laying around the hotel room, getting it fixed wasn't an option. Argh!

Househunting in Homer is not an easy thing to do. There are very few rentals available and NONE of the ones currently available accepted pets. None of them! I was flabbergasted. I was disheartened. I was downright worried. The local property management companies told me that they had some rentals coming available in May. May? May! No way can we wait until May!

Sarah and I went to the grocery store when she got out of soccer practice and bought enough frozen meals to last several days, along with a gallon of milk, some Diet Coke, whiskey (of course!), and a cooler with ice to keep in our already terribly small hotel room. We microwaved our dinners in the hotel lobby and feasted as we indulged in the joys of satellite TV! ... for the first time since Christmas, for me!

Tuesday was my first day at work and I had arranged for Homer Hounds (seriously, you must look at their website at www.homerhounds.com) to pick Nali up from the kennel in the back of my car in the parking lot at Homer News (because I had nowhere to keep her during the day), have her in their Doggy Daycare all day (which includes an hour long walk on the beach with her doggy-friends, also known as "Play Group"), and then return her safely back to the kennel in my car at 5pm on their way home (since I work until 5:30 and can't pick her up before then). They are truly angels - those folks at Homer Hounds. As a matter of fact, I have realized that Homer is overflowing with Angels! When I called Tory (Homer Hounds owner) that evening, she told me that she know of someone who was moving out of town and her 2 bedroom place would be for rent. As a matter of fact, she was to leave town the very next day! The best part is that she had a dog and so the house was "dog friendly."

I called the woman immediately and we got along grand over the phone. I went out to see the place - beautiful, clean, safe... in a word, perfect. It even had a dishwasher (on Sarah's list) and a washer and dryer (on my list). Jane was leaving the next day and I paid her for half a month's rent (she had already paid it through April something), we shook hands, and it was a done deal! I was in the house for 400 smackers and could not have been happier. She moved out the next day, Wednesday, and we moved in, checking out of the Driftwood Inn (great people, by the way).

However, there is a little catch to this story (isn't there always). You see, the owners of the property live in a log home on the same property but they are out of town (vacationing in the Cook Islands, to be exact), and so they have no idea that Jane has moved out and we have moved in. She was only on a month to month lease and I'm friends with their best friends, so I'm sure it will all work out. But, it does feel a bit sketchy at the moment. They are due back home April 11th... so we'll see.

Meanwhile, Sarah and I spent the next week stopping at the storage unit to pick up shipping tubs (all 54 have now arrived from Kwethluk) - as many as would fit in the car each time. Everytime we went to go home, we'd have to drive right back the storage unit, so we'd stop and fill up the car and unload and unpack them at home. It's been a long process. But, all tubs and boxes that were shipped are now at home and we are going to pick up some furniture, that I bought from some nice folks in Anchor Point, on Sunday. ... that's an interesting sideline. I'm buying a sofa and loveseat from a woman who owns a hair salon in town that is for sale. She met a man who lives in a bush village outside of Dillingham (he is a teacher-turned-pastor). She is selling everything - her business, her beautiful log home, and most of her furnishings - to move to the bush with the love of her life, after they get married this Saturday. I'm skeptical, to say the least! LOL. But, I'm getting a great deal on furniture.

I'm hoping that by Sunday evening, we'll begin to feel settled into our new place. We've been there over a week, now, and my new job is going great. I LOVE working with adults. My boss is extraordinarily supportive, my co-workers are friendly, and the work is exciting. For those of you who don't know, I'm the new Advertising Sales Rep for the Homer News. My name is in the paper every week! Many of my clients, I already knew from my previous life as a teacher. I get to be out and about in Homer and I already feel connected back to this community.

In my previous blog posts, I usually sugar-coated my experience in Kwethluk. If not a sugar-coating, I was at least surely leaving out much of the bad for fear of retribution in the village. I'm sure I'll write some future posts about the true experience - but you may have to wait for the book! Obviously, it had to be pretty bad for me to break my teaching contract and risk never being hired to teach in the state of Alaska again. Let me tell you, it was worth it!

Oh... and YES, of course I passed the drug test! :)

The Road to Freedom

I'm sitting in the Homer Public Library watching the timer tick away (I have 17 minutes left) before I'll be kicked out of the computer because my allotted 45 minutes will be finished. This does not make for a very creative setting to put my thoughts out there. I'll give it a try, but I may come off as kind of "newsy." Such is life.

Ahhh, where to start? I think I'll start from where I am and go back and fill in the blanks as time allows. Yes, I'm back in Homer. I just finished my 6th day as an Advertising Sales Representative for the Homer News (great! a "session time warning" just popped up to alert me that I have only 15 minutes left. I'd better start typing faster.) Okay, I think it makes more sense to start from the beginning...

Kwethluk was a nightmare - simply put. Life out there was beyond hard, it was ridiculous. The outright shunning that I experienced was the hardest thing I think I've ever been through and I didn't even know it at the time. Shortly after I sent Sarah back to Homer on February 8th, to finish out the school year, I started checking out the help-wanted ads in the local Homer newspapers. To make a long story short, I was offered a terrific opportunity at Homer News and I took it, hungrily! When it came time for me to let the school know that I would be leaving, the Dean (who was the closest thing to a friend that I had, but even then really wasn't) asked me if I had told the other teachers (or anyone out there for that matter).

"No. There's no one for me to tell. I mean, I don't have any relationships with anyone so it would be weird to just walk up to them and say, 'Hey, I'm leaving next Friday.' It would be awkward, like 'so what?'"

It's strange to admit that I actually lived someplace for 8 months and there was not a soul to even tell I was leaving when it came my time to go. It's even stranger to think that that happened in a village of 700, not New York City. That's just not me. It's not who I am. I'm the one who gets along with everybody. It made me question myself, question my own validity, question my very existence. Did I really matter at all? It makes me flushed to think those thoughts even now.

I borrowed a fellow-teacher's snowmachine, and carted my tubs one load at a time until I had taken all 53 plastic tubs (rubbermaid totes) and boxes to the post office. It took 10 trips. I moved it all 100% by myself. I didn't ask for help and no one offered to help. Fellow teachers even stood outside the school chatting with one another as I made trip after trip past them to the post office. The dean waved.

That pretty much sums up my existence out there. The lawlessness left me breathless. In the end, I was sleeping with my outside doors barricaded and a loaded .357 magnum on my bedside table. I never dared let Nali run loose for fear of her being shot or attacked by another loose dog. It all came to a head over the "Power of Words" blog post. Villagers were terribly angry that I had told the world that they used honey buckets and were English "challenged." My safety was threatened and I couldn't stay there any longer. Believe you me, I was heavily editing my words on this blog while I was in Kwethluk. But, even that wasn't good enough.

So, Thursday, March 17, was my last day teaching at Ket'acik Aapalluk Memorial School in Kwethluk. I paid the husband of a teacher to drive me, Nali, and Reggie, up the Kuskokwim River Ice Road Friday morning so that I could catch the 9am flight out of Bethel to Anchorage. The Yupik man who gave me a ride in his bright red, extended cab, Ford 4x4, was a friendly chap by the name of Alexie. Tall for a Yupik, he stood over 6 feet tall. This broad-shouldered, dark skinned, middle-aged man had quite a story to tell. The ride was about 40 minutes long with gave him plenty of time to tell me about growing up 100 miles away, at the base of the Kuskokwim Mountains. Looking at Nali reminded him of his own dog that he had as a boy when he and the dog would go moose and she-bear hunting in the mountains. He was never afraid when he was out with his dog.

When I asked him how much longer before the ice road would start to break up, he replied, "Oh, about April 18th or 19th." I smiled to myself in the dark of the cab as I thought of how specific he had been. Not April, or even mid April... but April 18th or 19th. He was a man who knew the seasons out there well.

It was still dark when we arrived at the airport at 8am, but we had made it without incident, driving the narrow 2-lane, plowed, bumpy-like-a-gravel-road ice road out on the Alaskan tundra. I paid Alexie and he wished me luck as he helped carry in my luggage to the small, one-room terminal for Alaska Air. I had given Nali a Benadryl just before I left home, hoping to calm her down some for the trip. It hadn't phased her a bit. She was friendly and perky while I checked in, and I got many compliments, as usual, on what a beautiful dog she is. (Reggie had howled from inside his pet carrier most of the way to Bethel - poor kitty) Nali had gotten to ride with me, sitting on the cramped floor space by my feet on the passenger's side of the truck cab. She's such a good pup.

We got all checked in and I said "goodbye" to the pets as they were taken out to the cargo hold and I loaded into the cabin of a large plane - a 747, I think it was. It was the biggest plane I'd ever flown out of Bethel, but it was over half empty that Friday morning as I settled in to my own private row of three seats to myself and read The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo on my Kindle all the way to Anchorage (about an hour flight).

The rest of the trip was uneventful, though I did fly on a terribly small plane in to Homer (4 passengers, the pilot, and the cargo hold was simply in the rear of the cabin). I actually got to sit in a seat right behind Nali's kennel so that she could relax and see me the whole way. It was interesting to see that she didn't really mind flying at all, just curled up and napped away the 40 minute flight from Anchorage to Homer.

Then, the real adventure began.

I had bought a 1997 Subaru (sight unseen) from someone I knew (or thought I knew) and they were meeting me at the airport with it. Really, it seemed like an ideal situation... until I actually got in to the car. I had also rented a 2 bedroom "cottage" in town (again, sight unseen) that was supposed to be "cute." You can see where this is going. So, I got into the car and the folks I bought it from were going to follow me over to the cottage. As I drove the car, my heart sank. Yes, it had black leather interior... but, the doors were held together with black duck tape. The engine light was on. The brakes scraped. There was a 3 foot long crack in the windshield, and the steering wheel pulled hard to the right. I wanted to scream by the time I had driven it the couple of miles to my new abode! When we got there, I simply told them that I couldn't take a car like that. I listed off all of the things that were wrong with it and they looked at me like, "Damn, she's not a dumb broad! What now?" They agreed to give me back the money I paid for it and they drove it home.

It was just about then that the landlord showed up and unlocked the front door. I moved myself, my pets, and my luggage into the empty space and sighed heavily as the landlord shut the door behind him to leave. It was filthy and falling apart and reeked of fuel oil. There were rat turds in the cabinets. The floor was muddy. The windows in the bedrooms had broken locks and so could just be pushed open from the inside (or pulled open from the outside). But, the fuel smell - that was the real clincher. I stood in that empty house without a car and took a deep breath to keep the tears at bay. Sarah was down the road at the house where she had been staying with friends for the past 6 weeks. Did I dare even call her to let her know I was here? I made the call and asked her to get the number of a local cab for me - thinking that I'd take a cab to a car rental place and at least get a car for a few days. Her "adopted" father, and a true friend of mine, offered to let me use one of their cars for the next couple of days. So, we got the car, she moved her personal belongings in to the house, I had a queen bed and dining set delivered that I had bought from someone else I knew in town, and we settled in for the night. There was no hot water in the shower, but we stayed up late talking at the dining table by candlelight. Because there were no window coverings in the house, we didn't want to turn the lights on for everyone to watch our every move.

The next morning, we awoke at 5am, 6am, and 7am to a rooster crowing for about 3 minutes at a stretch. He lived next door. As a matter of fact, there were also goats next door. There were 5 single family dwellings on that lot. I found out later that the landlord is known as the local slum lord. We got up early, went for coffee, and headed to Soldotna to go car shopping. I found a terrific 2004 Chrysler Pacific (silver with black leather interior) that I bought on the spot. Since Sarah can't drive, we went back to Homer, met up with another friend of mine who drove us back to Soldotna that evening so that we could bring the car home. Yes, I actually have friends in Homer! What an amazing place to live!

When we got back to the "cottage" that evening around 10pm, the fuel fumes were so overwhelming that they made my eyes water within a few minutes of being in the house. I was determined not to spend a second night in that slum - even though there was now hot water in the shower. I must have called six or seven hotels and finally found one, The Driftwood Inn, that would take pets and rent by the week. $400/week for a room modeled after a ship's cabin, which meant a full-size bed pushed into a corner with a twin bunk hanging over it, tiny TV mounted on the wall and a bathroom small enough to shave your legs in the shower while sitting on the toilet. But, it was clean! We settled in for the night and then spent the day Sunday moving the rest of our things out of the "cottage." That included getting a storage unit and moving the bed and dining set into it (thanks to a friend, once again - the same one who moved it in to the cottage the day before!).

Well, this library computer has let me type away, giving me many extra 15 minute segments. But, it is now set to shut off in 3 minutes. So, the story will have to be continued later... (rest assured that we have a wonderful place to live, now).

Ramblings of a Frustrated English Teacher

It's hard to believe that in the United States, there are public schools that teach in a language other than English. I understand the argument that they are trying to save the Yupik culture by saving the language, but at what point did culture education become the school's responsibility and no longer the family's responsibility? Are we to teach religious education, too? We are certainly required to teach character education (morals/values). The lines between parents and teachers have become blurred. Add to that that teachers are expected to teach those things, but not have a public opinion on them. Teachers spend so much time teaching what kids should be learning at home, that there's not enough time for formal education and that's causing test scores to suffer.

Because of being taught in Yupik for the first four years of school, by the time my students get to high school they are (you guessed it) four years behind. As an English teacher, this is insanely frustrating. Their vocabulary is minimal, grammar usage is poor, and use of punctuation is spotty, at best. They don't even speak in complete sentences.

Here's an example. A student raises her hand and I go to her desk. She points to a question on her study guide and looks at me. After appropriate wait time (we are told to give Yupik students plenty of this), I ask, "Do you have a question?" She points again to the study guide and replies, "This one."
"What is your question?" I ask.
"Character?" she responds.
"Ask me a question in a complete sentence."
"Who are the characters?"
"The question asks, 'What are two characteristics of myths?' It's not asking about characters. A characteristic is a trait, an example of something that shows you it's a myth."

It is because this situation occurs over and over again that often I institute my "Ask 3 Before Me" rule:
1. Read the directions, again.
2. Ask a student.
3. Write the question down using a complete sentence.
By the time they get through number three, they have either gotten their question answered or they have a clear idea of what they want to ask. Either way, it helps tremendously!

My high school students don't know what paraphrase, significant, or stereotype mean, along with hundreds of other terms. And yet, I'm instructed to prepare them for the SAT, which I do.

Just now, I had an 11th grade boy ask me, "Do the loud of the snowgos bother you?" Then, another boy walked in to class, 65 minutes late (it's his 9th unexcused absence this semester - at 10, he automatically fails), and I told him that we were having a work day to work on the vocabulary packet, papers and powerpoints that are due next Tuesday. He asks me, "What powerpoint?" I laughed (sometimes I just can't help it) as I replied, "The same one I had to re-explain to you on Tuesday when you came to class an hour late."

I'm at the end of my rope. I've had three students fail the semester already due to unexcused absences. One had signed a contract with the U.S. Army last year to go to work for them upon graduation (they sent him to Basic Training last summer). He will not graduate and will be dishonorably discharged... before he even got started. Another of the three... well, his father is the local priest. The third is a 21 year old (Did you know that you can attend public high school until you turn 22?) who has just used up his last chance at public education. I have a fourth student in Bethel having a baby.

Teach? I don't feel like I get to do much of that. I prepare lessons. I grade a few papers. Mostly, I babysit. I heard tell of tale in the Elementary side yesterday where a student needed to be sent home because of behavior (first, the parent/guardian needed to come to the school). But, an office worker said that this student lived with her Grandma who was taking care of her baby (office worker's baby) and Grandma couldn't come to school because then the office worker would have to go home to the baby. She told the teacher/administrator to just deal with the unruly student at school. That happens... more than the administration would like to admit.

I feel like we are trying to force round students into a square hole out here. The regular public education system just doesn't fit their needs. Because of that, the village doesn't support the school and the students don't find any applicability for it. They come only because it's the law. We have nothing they want, except free food and a warm place to hang out. Speaking of which, it's amazing how many people just come "hang out" on the bench by our office. Every day, I walk past the 10 foot long, wooden bench on my way to the bathroom and see three, four, or even five people sitting there. Adults. I'm not sure what they're there for, but they'll be there for an hour or more sometimes. It feels kind of like a bus station out by the office sometimes.

This has become my normal. Not really. It feels as foreign to me today as it did when I moved out here in July.

Word Wall

My study hall students created a word wall for me in my classroom at the beginning of the school year. They determined that these were the Yupik words that I needed to know. To be honest, qanikcuk (snow) is the only one I truly "know" at this stage of the game. Yupik is a language far different from any language I've ever attempted to learn, including Ojibwe (another native language). It has a mixture of gutteral sounds that make is sound like a form of Russian. Here are the basic rules for pronunciation:
1. C sounds like "ch"
2. Q sounds like a gutteral "k" (kind of like you're hacking up something in your throat)
3. A sounds like "ah"
4. I sounds like "ee"
5. E sounds like "ay"
6. U sounds like "oo"
7. Double letters, like II or AA, mean for you to draw out that sound for an extra beat.

Other than that, it's pretty straight forward. Once you know those few rules, you can pronounce any Yupik word. They have fewer letters in the alphabet and way fewer sounds than English.

Here is the list of words that I have been trying to learn this year:
Elitnaurista (teacher)
Elitnaut (student)
Yuut (people)
Waqaa (hello)
Piura (bye)
Arcaa (be quiet)
Caa (What?)
Aqumluci (sit down)
Cayugcit (What do you want?)
Ciin (Why?)
Namell (I don't know)
Caliluci (Go to work.)
Wangkuta (all of us)
Naqiluci (read)
Igarci (write)
Wiinga (me)
Uksuq (winter)
Qanikcaq (snow)

My students occasionally speak Yupik among themselves and we have one Yupik teacher in the high school (the other English teacher, believe it or not!) who switches back and forth between Yupik and English when she's teaching like it's all the same language. It's really amazing to watch. Otherwise, high school is strictly an English forum.

However, it is not like that in the Elementary side of the building. All students are taught in Yupik from Kindergarten through 3rd grade. Then, they have a second year of third grade, called 3T (or transition), when they are taught in English and Yupik. The students are then taught in English from 4th through 12th grade. So, all students spend two years in the 3rd grade, meaning that they are already a year behind the rest of the country by the time they hit the 4th grade (and they've only been speaking English in school for a year). Then, the state standardized tests hit and the failure rate is incredibly high.

It's hard to believe that in the United States, there are public schools that teach in a language other than English. I understand the argument that they are trying to save the culture by saving the language, but at what point did culture education become the school's responsibility and no longer the family's responsibility? Well, that's another blog post...

"Their Culture"

At lunch today, I was discussing curriculum ideas with two other teachers; we’ll call them Suzie and Sally. Suzie discussed an upcoming unit that she’s going to do using the Athabascan Indian legend Two Old Women. She also asked me if I’d ever read When the Legends Die, another Native American story written by Hal Borland.

“Yes. In fact, I’ve taught it a number of times,” I replied, adding, “I’ve always taught more Native American literature in non-native cultures as a sort of exposure, I suppose. Like when I taught in rural south Louisiana to half-black classes, I taught a lot of Native American and world literature to expose them to the broader horizons of the rest of the world. We spent very little time on African American literature. Since it was a 9th grade literature class, it was supposed to be a smattering, a survey of literature.”

I asked why they thought it was different in this culture, that such heavy emphasis was placed on teaching Native Alaskan and Native American literature. They both said that it was to get the students to “buy in.” They explained to me that if the students couldn’t see any immediate, direct connection to them and their lives, then they wouldn’t be interested in learning the material and once there is that “buy-in,” then other literature can be taught.

My only question was this, “When does that buy-in occur if not before 9th grade?”

Understandably, Suzie got very defensive and Sally backed her up when I suggested that we introduce new cultures and new ideas to students in a public education setting. At what point do we, as teachers, get to do that here without being accused of trying to change the village?

I’m in a quandary over this. As I bring magazines from different parts of the country into my classroom, I’m hit with the response from students, “That’s not about my culture, so I don’t care.” Are we fostering an attitude of separatism among these young people by trying to gear our lessons so much toward “their culture”? – a culture to which few them regularly prescribe, at least in the traditional sense. They munch on candy bars and chips, not dried salmon. They listen to modern teen tunes on their ipods, not traditional drumming. They wear designer sneakers with their Carharts, not sealskin boots and soft, hide leggings. They speak English out in the village much more than Yupik.

I’m just thankful that the courses that I’m teaching this year have a strict curriculum to be followed (it's a pilot program) – a curriculum which mirrors the British literature and world literature that I was teaching in Homer. Unfortunately, teachers here have been so busy trying to teach within the parameters of this culture that often the students are not getting the basic information that they need.

There was a question on my British literature study guide today that asked, “What historical event on the timeline is related to Darwin’s ideas? (evolution)” The evolution hint was right there and still these juniors and seniors could not answer the question because they did not know who Darwin was. Needless to say, I did some quick background teaching.

And, so it goes…

March Madness

“'But I don’t want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
'Oh, you can’t help that,' said the Cat. 'We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.'
'How do you know I’m mad?' said Alice.
'You must be,” said the Cat. 'or you wouldn’t have come here.'”
... Lewis Carroll

The Regional Basketball Tournament was held this weekend in Bethel. Our school’s 4-day weekend known as Spring Break is scheduled every year around this tournament. The school shuts down, much of the community heads to Bethel, and the games begin.

The school district office even sends out e-mails to every employee district-wide as each game is played, offering news of the winners, an attachment of the most up-to-date bracket rankings, and even a camera schedule so that people can watch the games via VTC (video-teleconference) at the outlying schools. I received 15 such e-mails between Wednesday and Saturday.

To say that high school basketball is important out here on the tundra would be the understatement of the year. The school literally revolves around gym schedules and tournament dates. Teachers are expected to volunteer to supervise, sell tickets and concessions, prepare food for visiting teams, drive teams to and from the airstrip, and anything else you can imagine. Parent involvement is sporadic, at best. But, you can bet they’ll be at the games! (that’s another post topic)

Let me digress for a moment. The district grading system is 90-100 A, 80-89 B, 70-79 C, 0-69 F. There are no D’s here. The district powers that be simply deem a D as unacceptable. Okay, I’ll buy that. However, that only applies to report cards, not to sports eligibility. There is a 60-69 D added in just for sports eligibility, to make sure there are enough players to make a team. That seems to be a pretty glaring glitch in the system.

Many of the players have NBA dreams, obviously because the sport is so heavily emphasized in the community and the schools. Keep in mind that the average height of a Yupik female is 5’0” to 5’2” and the average height for a Yupik male is 5’4” to 5’6”. It is very unusual to see a male over 6-feet tall. I have yet to meet a woman as tall as I am, 5’10”. When I look at the facts, it seems odd that basketball would be where the emphasis is placed out here. Add to that the fact that the only basketball courts outside (which is where the kids play all summer) have to be on raised, wooden platforms because of the permafrost in the tundra and this seems like a very illogical way to spend money and time.

I understand the argument that basketball is a diversion to keep teens out of trouble.
Academics, public speaking, Battle of the Books, theatre, dance. There are any number of more feasible routes for this energy and money that would produce more longstanding results with skills that would be valuable for their rest of their lives. As far as sports, what about track and field, wrestling, or even hockey. This place is frozen a good seven months out of the year with frozen rivers and ponds everywhere and there is not a hockey team anywhere around.

Instead, Eskimos are encouraged to play basketball. Will this lead them to college scholarships? Will this earn them a living on professional teams? History says, “No.” So, why does the school system so adamantly support such a project?

***Oh, and by the way, the Kwethluk Girls' Team won and are headed to State. There was no Kwethluk Boys' team this year because there weren't enough academically eligible boys to make a team.***

The Silent Killer

Bullying is the number one problem in our school, according to the students. My previous blog on suicide led me to naturally think more carefully about bullying. Actually, suicide, bullying, sexual and alcohol abuse are all very closely linked here. It’s difficult to talk about one without mentioning others.

One female student in my class has a brother who is currently incarcerated for raping the sister of another student. When the rapist’s sister transferred to our school at the beginning of the second semester, bullying ensued. I did not witness it, but was told by an administrator that it was going on. The girl who had been raped had moved to a neighboring village.

Rumor has it that some students don’t even play on the sports teams because of the bullying involved.

So, how does the school deal with it? Student Council puts up posters that define bullying as name-calling and physical confrontation. To be frank, I have never seen that at our school in Kwethluk, though I have seen it first-hand at every other school in which I’ve taught. So, what’s the big deal? There is no obvious bullying going on. How bad can it be? Well, the students being bullied claim that they are being looked at in a bad way by the perpetrators. Huh?

As strange as it may sound, this is the most insidious, deadly type of bullying. Bullying here defies the untrained eye. One must look closely, very closely. The Yupik culture is a lot about facial expressions with less emphasis placed on oral language. Therefore, it only makes sense that bullying in this culture would follow the same precept. Here is what bullying looks like in Kwethluk – a harsh look (furrowed eyebrows), a shoulder turned away, silence. That’s enough. It’s bullying at its peak – complete isolation, even shunning, of the victim with no evidence for the victim to report. In an isolated village in the middle of the Alaskan tundra, could there be a worse feeling that that of complete and utter separation from the few people in this remote location? The animosity that the victim feels all around them becomes unbearable. The looks come from every direction, looks filled with hate and disgust, pursed lips and glaring, dark eyes. People who once spoke to them freely now seem to carefully choose their words and speak only when absolute need arises. Shoulders are turned away from the victim as they walk past, along with a sharp glance.

That kind of treatment would reduce most adults to tears. Imagine what it does to a 16-year-old. There is no escape. Well, sadly some do find the escape hatch.

How do I know what this feels like? Ever since I sent Sarah back to Homer a month ago to finish out the school year, I’ve encountered those looks, those shoulders, that silence. Whenever locals ask me about Sarah and I tell them that I sent her back to Homer, they immediately look at me like I’m the devil. Their entire countenance changes from inquisitive to accusing. Their one world reply is, “Oh,” and that’s all they say. No one asks why she went back or if she’s doing okay. Truthfully, I’m glad they don’t ask, but I still find it odd.

Last Monday, teaching contracts were passed out for next year. Teachers have 30 days to sign the contract, committing to come back to this school to teach for another year. I will not be signing mine. I have had a few people ask me if I’m coming back next year and when I tell them that I’m not, I get the devil look. They look at me as if I’m a traitor. Some ask if I’m going back to Homer and I tell them that I am. That’s all they ask. From then on, I’m shunned. It’s truly the strangest thing that I’ve every experienced. I’ve never lived anywhere where when you tell people you are moving, they treat you like a traitor. It’s almost cult-like. This place has more social problems than I would have ever imagined about a community that is part of the United States of America. Yet, should someone choose to leave the community, leave behind the social problems in search of a better quality of life, they are immediately labeled as a traitor and treated as such. To say that it’s bizarre is an understatement.

So, for my first seven months out here, I was simply ignored. Now, I’m obviously disliked, even avoided by some. I guess I should have just been a good Gussack and kept my mouth shut – not spoken out about the social ills that exist here, not searched for solutions, not offered to help.

Now, I get it. It’s an insight that I never would have gotten had I not been a part of it. I get the bullying issue here. I get the overwhelming depression and feelings of helplessness that sweep over the victim. I get the extreme feelings of loneliness and the total throwing of hands up in the air saying, “I give up!” Only, I’m not giving up by taking my life out of this world. I’ll take my life and go back to Homer - beautiful, friendly, civilized Homer.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave a piece of my heart out here for those who didn’t have the option that I did of leaving. For those victims of bullying, I will not be silenced.