Friday, February 26, 2010

Lightening up

Yes, both my schedule and the days are getting lighter. Basketball is finally over, for which I am grateful. It was a lot of fun (even though we lost ALL our games) and I would definitely do it again, but it was exhausting, especially the three weekends in a row of traveling. But now that it's over my afternoons feel a lot more open. I'm getting my classwork done earlier and last night I didn't have to work at all - just went down the hall to watch the Olympics with some neighbors.

My 3 classes end in about two weeks, and then I'll have a whole week off - no classes! I don't even know what I'll do with myself that week. Maybe start playing guitar again, which I pretty much haven't done since the current term started. Then at the end of March my last term starts, which is only 2 classes, one of which is a practicum. I don't know for sure but I'm assuming the practicum will be a lot of in-my-classroom projects which I'll then have to write about. That'll be a lot of work but at least it won't eat into my evenings too much. My other class is children's literature K-12 which should be a lot of fun. Then I'm done with grad school, finally! I think my next step will be to try to become a nationally board certified teacher - but that's at least a year or two away.

In a more literal vein, we're gaining sunlight at an incredible rate these days. Just before we left for winter break, we were getting about 4 1/2 hours of sunlight a day - from almost noon until around 4:30 or so. These days the sun is coming up around 9:15, 9:30, and not going down until almost 8. It's hard to believe we're just a few weeks away from the equinox.

Also B and I both want to say we're sorry about the podcast - we're going to try our best to have it up by Monday. This month has just been really crazy, with me being busy and B being sick for over a week. Plus trying to pin down OFL for an interview has proved impossible so far.

I promised B that when his stomach was better I would bake him something tasty, so I'm looking forward to a weekend of good snacking, movies, guitar, hanging out, and sleeping in my own bed.

Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Healthy Again

I spent all of last week sick. From Monday afternoon until this past Monday I had a variety of symptoms that I won't go into because it would be impolite. And really I'm not yet 100%. However, I'm substantially better with regular sleeping and eating habits (minus coffee - which has been hard). It's so nice to be well again. I don't get sick very often but when I do I'm a big wimp about it. Combine that with the fact that I haven't been sick for that long since I was a kid and you had a really discouraged B for a couple of days.
The sickness required a trip to the clinic which reminded me of clinics downstates (which is notable because most places up here don't remind me of their downstate correlates). The clinic was clean and orderly. There are no doctors or nurses or even physician assistants - just a health aid worker who looks up your symptoms in a book, asks the questions and runs the tests she finds and then reports to a doctor. She was very nice.
Being really sick did make me worried and frustrated about the isolation here. It would have been nice to see a real doctor in town. And I really didn't want to have to fly to Athol in part because a lot of the expense would not be covered by insurance. Fortunately that wasn't necessary.
Hopefully I can stay healthy for the rest of our time here. And hopefully I can start drinking coffee again really soon.

Monday, February 15, 2010

More basketball

We traveled to another village this weekend, here's how it went:

10:00 The secretary comes into my classroom and tells me, "Your plane will be here in about an hour and a half."

10:20 She returns to my room to tell me, "Your plane will be here in 10 minutes." OK then. Hustle, get all my gear on, make sure all my sub plans are set (this time I was much better prepared and had plans for Friday and Monday ready to go), and meet up with E and the kids by the school door. G, our custodian, and OFL drove us to the airport.

10:40 Takeoff. "Can we do roller coaster?" "No."
11:10 Land.

12:30 Eat lunch.
1:00 Walk to store. Load up on pop and candy.

4:00 First game. We lost.
6:00 Second game. We lost again.
10:00 Third game. Yet another loss.

12:00 Force girls to go to bed. As I'm laying down to sleep, hear the crack/hiss of a can of pop opening. "Girls: NO POP. Go to sleep."

8:36am Wake up wondering what time it is...oh, man. Game at 9:00am. Wake up kids FAST, eat a quick breakfast, jerseys on. Lost our last game.

12:30 Call the airline, find out our whole island's on weather hold. Spend the next 4 hours calling and calling, but the fog wasn't clearing, and by 5:00 we knew we weren't getting out that day.

5:00 The host village coach brought his team back, and we mixed up and played again. E coached one team, I took the other, and the host coach kept score. My team lost but only by a point.

7:00 The cook came back to make us dinner, then we took another walk to the store for yet more pop and candy.

8:30 The host coach stopped by to make sure we'd eaten, and mentioned there was some Eskimo dance happening at the Bingo hall. We walked over to watch for a while.

10:00 We start watching the movie "Jack" which holds the kids' attention for about 15 minutes, after which all but 1 return to the gym.

10:30 Roller skating party in the gym, complete with terrible pop music blasting out of the gym speakers. When E discovered a cache of roller skates in the ball room off the gym, he was pretty much set on a roller skating party. The kids had fun and didn't even fall that much.

11:30 4 on 4 barefoot basketball with E and I playing. Super sweaty afterward.

12:30 Bedtime

9:00am Wakeup, not rested. Two nights on the floor is a little too much for me now that I'm getting up there in years.

I'll spare you the excruciating boredom of the next several hours, but we finally flew out around 2:30. Our home village never looked so good.

Monday, February 8, 2010

Musk ox, basketball, thinking about community

1. Musk ox

Our neighbor G, a native man from a village not far from here, shot and killed a musk ox last night. To do this he had to stand on line for several days to get a permit - one of I think 30 that are handed out in this area every year. Each year a village hosts this permitting process, this year it was our village's turn. Apparently there's a lot of potential rancor around this process, not least because of outsiders and downstaters who come up and get a tag and shoot a musk ox just for the fun of it, when on the other hand you have locals and natives who want that tag so they can have meat all winter. Alaska state laws prohibit Fish and Wildlife from making any distinction among subsistence and non-subsistence hunting in their policy making, which seems like a poor decision to me, exactly because of situations like these. In any case, G got his tag and yesterday there were some musk ox right up the hill near the rock people, so while we (and maybe you) were watching the Superbowl, he went out to get one. A little before 9 H, G's wife, came by to tell us that G was back with his musk ox, and we all went out to see it.

The first thing that struck me was how small it was - it wasn't small, of course, but smaller than I expected. I've only ever seen them at a great distance, so it's hard to gauge how big they generally are, but G estimated that this one was 3 years old. It was a female - the permits state which sex your musk ox must be. It was lying on its side in G's snowmachine sled. We all walked up to it, and I put my hand into its fur, which was incredibly thick and long. Its stomach felt massive and very firm. After a few minutes G, E, and our other neighbor D all worked together to tip it out onto the snow, where G took out his ulu (a curved knife) and began removing the skin.

I was really curious as to whether this would be hard for me to see - as a vegan I'm obviously opposed, in a sort of general way, to eating animals. But there are lots of different reasons to be vegan, and my reasons don't stem from any sort of overall argument that humans in general should not eat animals at all. Rather, my problem is with the way that animals are raised for mass human consumption, and the effects this causes on the animals, our environment, and our health. I don't have any philosophical problem with people eating animals for a subsistence diet. Still, having not eaten animals for so many years, I wasn't sure what kind of emotional reaction I would have to seeing a dead animal right there in front of me. I was surprised to find that my reaction was rather muted. On the one hand it was definitely sad to see such a beautiful and strong animal just lying there dead, and particularly so when G said, "I think it's pregnant." On the other hand, that was greatly tempered by knowing that a)this animal lived out what life it had in its ideal environment and was never mistreated by humans (before being killed by one, obviously) and b)nearly every scrap of this animal will be put to use - the meat will be eaten, the hide will be tanned and used for clothing or some other purpose, the bones, if desired, can be carved or sold to someone who will carve them, several of the organs will be eaten, and those that won't can probably be given to someone's dogs if desired. The head, I guess, will be the only part not used - not counting the tongue, which is apparently being cooked this evening.

I think in a way my animal-loving side felt grateful to have a chance to see such an amazing creature close up, to get to feel its fur and its muscles and horns, and also to see that the relationship between human and animals, even when not a peaceful one, doesn't have to be disgusting. There was nothing (in my opinion) disgusting about this, the way there is about an industrial pig farm or a slaughterhouse. I don't think I'll be eating any musk ox, but if I do, you'll be reading about it.

2. Basketball

This past Friday E and I accompanied the basketball team on our first away game, to a village about 20 minutes away by plane. Traveling around these parts for athletic or extra-curricular events is no joke. First come eligibility sheets and permission slips, then the night before a big packing job, because on the one hand I'm packing for an overnight, and on the other hand I'm keeping in mind the team that got stuck in another village for 9 days last year, and I'm calculating how many instant boxes of pad thai and clif bars it'll take to keep me alive that long. Then on Friday the weather was pretty bad, so I was kind of thinking we wouldn't go, but halfway into my writing block I got the message: plane coming in half an hour. The sub arrived, I hastily threw together some last-minute plans for her (I hadn't realized I'd be leaving so early), and E and I and the team climbed into the snowmachine sled and headed to the airport. 25 minutes later we were on the ground in the host village. We played 3 games that night (lost 'em all) and one the next day (yep, lost that one too). It was kind of frustrating, not to lose (though I do HATE to lose) but just to see our kids give up - each game we were doing so well in the beginning, and then the kids just kind of poop out and lose. The first 2 games we only lost by 7 points each, and we definitely could have won them both. So E and I have been talking about how to get our kids ready for the next two weekends of travel, this weekend and next. Then again, we may not even have to worry about it, depending on the weather.
The traveling part of the experience was so-so: not as bad as it could have been, but not my favorite thing, either. The sleeping arrangement was me, my 3 girls, another chaperon and about 4 girls from a different school on a classroom floor. I was in a sleeping bag I'd borrowed from a neighbor, which was nicer than nothing but not as nice as my bed. The water at this school is not too good, not okay for drinking, so they have jugs all around with potable water, but it still didn't taste great, so I was rationing my water bottle. And also it just got boring. When we weren't playing, there was nothing else to do except watch other teams play. I brought a deck of cards and some books, but I couldn't really just chill and read because I had to be responsible for the kids. We walked to the store, but it was just like the store in our village. The worst part was Saturday morning: waking up un-refreshed after an uncomfortable night on the floor, no breakfast to speak of, no shower, feeling greasy and sweaty and old. When we first heard that our whole area was on a weather hold I was just miserable, I could feel a cold coming on and I just knew we'd be stuck. Luckily, thankfully, we got out around 3. B and D picked us up at the airport and I was in a hot shower as soon as humanly possible. Two more weekends of travel coming up and then basketball season is over.

3. Thinking about community

A few days ago I needed to get to the post office and didn't want to wait till Saturday, so I asked GK, one of our custodians, to drive me down there right after school ended. Usually either he or another custodian goes to pick up the school's mail. On this day he was going to make a trash run to the dump, so he drove me down on the snowmachine, dropped me off, and came back for me about 10 minutes later. While I was waiting for him outside (I finished my stuff quickly and it was beautiful day - cold, but clear and sunny) I saw about 4 people I know coming and going from the P.O. Not people I know like I'm close friends with, but enough to say hello how are you. And I just enjoyed that feeling, one that I haven't had here very often, of being a part of this community. As much as I enjoy the dorm-y feeling of the BIA, it does cut us off from the rest of the community, geographically (our building isn't really part of either of the two residential sections of the village) psychologically, and logistically (when you have a bunch of neighbors right there, you don't really go out much to see your slightly-further-away neighbors). It made me wish that we had made more of an effort during these past 6 months to be a part of the community. I think we were waiting for invitations instead of taking the initiative to just show up at things: yuraqs, church, bingo, fiddle dances, whatever - and now it feels like it would be weird to start, especially with the end so close. And I think that was a part of that feeling, too: I think I'm starting to feel sad about leaving. I know it's still a ways off, and the majority of what I feel is anxious to leave and happy for each day that brings me closer to being done - but suddenly I also have some sadness about that too. I feel caught off guard by the very obvious fact that the relationships I've built so far, as small as they may be, are still real and will still end in a very sudden and real way in just a few months. I feel selfish, and a little guilty, for seeing this whole experience as just that: an "experience" for me to have, without considering how my desire for that experience would affect those for whom this experience is just life. And I feel like slowly, gradually, the community is beginning to open up to me just the tiniest bit - and if I stayed, there would be a point at which I might really feel at home here. Don't read this the wrong way - there's not a single part of me that's considering staying. But there is a significant part of me that's starting to feel sad about that.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Things I learned today

For some reason my classroom often turns into drop in and hang out central. Two of the custodians regularly stop by when they're picking up the garbage to shoot the breeze. A member of the school board also drops in sometimes to sit down and tell me about life in The Village. I don't know why this is. I think it looks like I'm not working because I spend a lot of time working on paperwork on the computer (the life of a special ed teacher). Today I even had a student in my room trying to get a writing assignment done when someone came by to chat. It's nice to talk to these folks and I often learn interesting stuff but I'm trying to get my work done in a reasonable amount of time. You know?

I've had two visits today - one of the custodians and the school board member - and I see now that the other custodian is vacuuming my side of the building. I'm to finish this up quick so I can get some more work done before the chatting starts up again.

What I learned today:
- you can "call" for seal by scraping a shovel on the ice. This apparently mimics the sound seals sometimes make.
- you can trap lots of fish by going to a hole in the ice and sinking a 5 sided trap (a cube with the top removed). You put a tarp over the hole to block the light. Wait a while so the fish return. Remove the tarp and fish swim away from the light and into the trap. Pull the trap up.
- in bad weather use pieces of wood to point in the direction of the place you're heading in case you get lost on the tundra and have to turn back. This is supposed to be useful since we don't have trees to mark the way. I'm not sure where you're supposed to get the wood from though.
- you can also use chew to mark your way. Just spit on the ground every once in a while and then use the black marks on the ground to trace your steps
- you can give directions by iceberg: "Go past three icebergs then turn left." I'm not kidding.

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

Not much going on. Can you tell?

We don't have all that much going on right now. S will be traveling with the basketball team three weekends in a row (weather permitting) and I will not be (let's hope). Zora is recovering though she has a cone on her head, a bandage around her torso and socks on her feet (to prevent getting the bandage off). I'm looking forward to seeing a picture. The weather has been extremely mild for this area with temperatures between 10 and 20 and next to no wind.

Since we down to four months here we're trying to eat through all of our bulk food amounts. Here's what we've got left eat:
20 pounds soy beans
20 pounds black beans*
25 pounds chick peas*
20 boxes of cereal
20 cans of crushed red tomatoes
17 bottles of jelly*
20 pounds of flour

* unlikely to be finished
NOTE: Amounts above are approximate.