An Interesting Friday

Friday was a tough day for the students, which means it was a tough day for me.  Normally, Fridays are half days.  The students will ask me as they line up for lunch, “Lunch go home?”  This Friday, though, was a full day to make up for the half day we had on Tuesday for the funeral.  By the time lunch came around, the students were thoroughly confused as to why we aren’t “lunch go home” today.  They were restless and antsy. 

After lunch we came back to class, and I was reviewing with the students how to write a sentence.  I kept reminding them that a sentence starts with a capital and ends with a period.  One of my first-graders apparently was reminded of something she had heard before as she listened to the lesson.  She raised her hand, and when I called on her she looked at me sincerely and said, “I have a period.”  Asked her what she meant and she said, “I have my period.  I want to go home.”  I asked her where she heard that and she said, “My mom has her period.  She came home from work.”  I had to laugh.  Kids remember everything! 

Finally, when we had reached the 3:00 dismissal time, the students put up their chairs, got their papers and put on their coats and backpacks.  As they lined up, one of my students came up to me and said, “Are we going to lunch?”

After school, one of my students and her sister invited me to go to her birthday feast.  I agreed, and she said she would come to my house to get me when it was time for the feast.  At 5:00, I heard a banging on the door.  As I opened it, 4 kids rushed in and started exploring my room, saying, “It looks like Bethel in here!”  After their tour they told my roommate and me that it was time to go, and we rushed over to their house.  Inside were almost 50 people, with more filtering in.  I found a spot on the floor by the couch.  By the time they started to say grace, almost all the adults in the village were crammed into the house.  After grace, the kids started handing out candy and little gifts, like washcloths and plastic bowls.  They were stepping over people to get to everyone.  Next, the adults started handing out dinner.   They brought around paper bowls filled with moose stew and seal stew.  I had the seal, which was very dark, tough and oily.  As I ate, I had what people here call “Eskimo ice cream” balanced on my knee that I covered as people stepped over me.  The recipe is Crisco, sugar and berries.  It gets more delicious every time I eat it.  The seal will take some getting used to, though.  

A Wet Day at School

This week there was a death in the community.  An elder passed away on Saturday, so people were visiting the family on Sunday and Monday.  They bring food, or they come to eat and sing and view the body.  The body was laid out on the floor and people sat around.  In a room off to the side, several people were singing.  Others filtered in as time went by.  The tradition here is to sing all the time until the body is buried. 

Because the funeral was set for yesterday at 2, school let out early.  Everyone was at the funeral in the church.  Some sat on the floor inside, where the body rested in a coffin.  Others, like me, stood around in the entryway or outside the doors.  The church is Russian Orthodox, and the service was done in song.  At the end people took turns saying goodbye to the body.

Today is another rainy day in Akula.  My co-teacher and I decided that the change in scheduling yesterday, the weather and the full moon today created a perfect storm of antsy kids.    All day, our students were fidgeting and day-dreaming.  I was exhausted by 10:00 when we took them to gym.  After gym I had my first-graders sitting on the rug while we did an exercise on sliding letters to make words.  The first thing I remember seeing was a drop of liquid seeping into the knee of one of my student’s pants.  As my eyes traveled upward, I saw his hands cupped in front of him and then his wide eyes staring at me.  His hands were full of saliva, but I didn’t make the connection in time to catch myself from asking “what’s in your hands?” so that he help them out to me obediently.  The knee of his pants was soaked, and I walked him to the sink so that he wouldn’t touch anything as he went.  As I walked back to the rug to resume my lesson I was thinking about all the possibilities of what had happened- did he seriously save up saliva in his mouth and spit it into his hands?  I sat down again and looked at my students, just as one of them let a drop of mucus fall from his mouth to the carpet.  It sat on top of the carpet like jell-o while he went to get a paper towel to clean it up.  I was trying to keep my teacher face on, but I had to laugh. 

I am about to go to the post office, which is a 30 second walk from the school.  The road is muddy on a clear day, but with the rain it will be a swamp.  Sometimes kids follow me over, hoping I’ll get a package with food in it, but today they’re all inside.  That will give me a chance to recharge for tomorrow morning.  Who knows what could happen then.

Berry Picking by the Air Strip

This week was our first week of school, and even though it was only 3 days, it felt like forever.  Learning the ropes in a new school takes a lot of energy and time.  I decided to take a break on Saturday to go berry picking and unwind before Monday.

 Above is a picture of our school and playground.

 Snowmobiles wait in the mud all summer for the ground to harden, while 4-wheelers and pickup trucks wait under the snow all winter.

 The only church on our side of the river.

 Swampy grass with the graveyard in the distance.

 The sewage lagoon smells really awful on a warm sunny day.  This is where people dump their "honey bucket" toilets.

 Looking back on the village as we walk towards Fox Lake.

 Cranberries and little round black berries that you can also eat.

 Some kind or carcass.

 Little tiny raspberries.

 A plane about to take off- we were picking right by the airstrip.

Some Pictures

Here is the plane I flew in on, some houses in Akula, and fresh-picked wild raspberries and blueberries.

The Night Before School

First day of school tomorrow, so I'm really busy getting ready!  I spent my day making name tags for cubbies, rearranging 21 desks to fit in as small a space as possible, and scanning chapter books to make sure they're appropriate for 1st and 2nd graders.  I think we'll start with Mr. Popper's Penguins tomorrow. I put up a bulletin board with lots of pictures on it from the Marshall Islands.  Even my co-teacher said she's excited for me to talk about it. We just found out our permanent principal is coming on Friday so it will be interesting to meet him.  

Here people throw "feasts" for events like birthdays or funerals.  We were invited to a feast today at the 5th and 6th grade teacher's mother's house to commemorate the 5 year anniversary of her mother's death. It was in Akiuk, the other half of our village that's on the other side of the river, so we all piled in little tin boats and sped up the river for about 5 minutes.  There were lots of smoke houses for fish, with dried fish hanging out. When we passed the Akiuk  school, they told me it was built to be moveable.  It can be taken apart into 3 pieces so when the river comes too close they can move it.  They haven't had to move it yet but they expect to soon.

When we arrived, we went to see the other teacher's house first.  Moose season opened a few days ago, and her son had just caught a moose.  He was in the process of butchering it over a plastic tarp on their kitchen floor.  The head was in the middle, huge with fuzzy antlers.  Around it were various parts- ribs, a leg, the liver in a plastic tub, and a pile of dark red meat.  They were cutting it up to share with the elders and other family.  I wished I had brought my camera (we left straight from school and I only found out last minute).  If I had, I would have been sending along a picture of the moose head with a bullet hole in the top and it's tongue hanging out.  My roommate brought her cell phone, though, so I'll have to get the pictures from her.

At the feast, we sat around while the family passed out bowls of food.  I had moose fried rice and Akuda (sp?) which is a favorite local dessert.  Originally it was made with animal fat, but not the recipe has been updated to Crisco, sugar, and whatever berries you have on hand.  Ours were salmonberries, which look like orange raspberries, and little round, black berries that had crunchy seeds.  

After the feast we headed back, and now I'm back in my classroom getting last-minute things done before the kids come in the morning.  I'm sure I'll have lots more to tell you 24 hours from now, but I'm not sure I'll have the energy to tell it!  Wish me luck.

Where am I?

I spent the last year teaching English on a remote tropical island in the Marshall Islands (boosurvivingparadise.blogspot.com) and now I'm ready for my dose of winter.  I arrived in Bethel, Alaska less than a week ago.  From there, I hopped on a 4-seater plane and took off over the tundra to Kasigluk, Alaska.  The population here is somewhere over 500 people, but Kasigluk is split in half by a river.  I am living and teaching on the Akula side, where the population is a little over 300.  The people here are Yupik, and they speak both English and Yupik.  As a 1st and 2nd grade teacher, I'll be a co-teacher in a new "dual language" program that merges both Yupik and English in the classroom.  My co-teacher is Yupik, thank goodness.  Her and I are taking on a classroom that juggles not only 2 languages, but 2 grades.