Arrival in The Village

B described Athol a bit in his last post. It was strangely like a beach town in winter – the long grass and the house on stilts and the flat landscape. It reminded me of being in Baja in February, weather wise. It was actually pretty sunny off and on, but chilly, and breezy. Our three days of training there were rather brutally boring. Lots of information that would be most useful to brand new teachers, and poorly presented, too. It’s tough to have to sit through three hours of reading strategies when you’ve been teaching it for several years already. The last day was a little more interesting because it focused on cultural information about the Yup’ik people, but we were both glad when it was over.

We flew out of Athol that afternoon with E, our next-door neighbor, also a new arrival here, as well as OFL and his wife K (you understand, we’re trying to be super careful about confidentiality here – not so much for our principal or neighbor, but for the kids and families.) Between the five of us, the pilot and our bags, the tiny charter plane was completely full. B and I sat in the back. I had my eyes firmly shut for the takeoff, but eventually I was able to look out the window a bit. The river delta is amazingly beautiful – first of all the tundra, it’s mostly flat with small hummocky hills here and there, and when you look out at it you can’t believe how many shades of green there are. Then the river off in the distance, and everywhere pools, lakes, ponds, streams, so that it’s hard to tell where the river actually ends and the land begins, or if what you’re looking at is land with water in some parts, or water with areas of land in it. So everything is green, and blue, and then the clouds of course, and as you look out the window of the plane you can see the clouds moving over you in the sky and under you in the watery stillnesses.

So anyway, I was doing okay, keeping the nausea at bay with mint gum and mind control, when OFL said, “Look – musk ox.” The pilot decided to help us out by circling around the spot, making sure we all got to see. That did it – I was over the line into complete misery, alternating between feeling like I was going to hurl and like I might pass out. I tore yet another piece of gum out of the package, unzipped my jacket, tried to squeeze my head down between my knees, and managed to avoid both.

We landed in The Village (yes, that’s how we’ll be referring to it, that confidentiality thing again) after about an hour of this torture. Actually, by the time we got close enough to see it from the air, I was feeling pretty good. The Village is sort of a Y-shaped area, with the right side (if you’re looking at it from the Bering Sea) on a spit of land with the sea in front and the river behind, and the left side moving upland and inland. It’s in a small bay, with hills curving out on either side into the sea. Altogether there are about 350 people here, 110 of whom are students at the school. The houses are mostly pre-fab, rather dreary looking. In fact the nicest building by far is the school, which dominates the view here. It’s a big, bright blue building up on top of the hill with a large cupola (which OFL tells us has been an engineering disaster). Directly down the hill, accessible by a long flight of wooden stairs, is the teachers’ building, which used to be the school when it was run by the BIA. Our apartment does have a sort of classroomy feel to it, probably due mostly to the large chalkboard in the entryway and the brand-new carpet, which is identical to the carpet in both our classrooms. It’s nice enough though – it has a fridge and a giant freezer, a brand-new stove and couch and bed, and more than enough space, three bedrooms in fact. Which is useful, because it means we get a room to share and then each get our own space too, something we got used to back in Portland.

Thursday night we were busy unpacking all our boxes (well, not all, we’re actually still waiting for a few) and I couldn’t believe it when B told me it was 9:55. To look out the window you might have thought it was 5 or 6pm. The sun didn’t go down until about 11:30, and it wasn’t fully dark until well past midnight. It’s made it hard to go to bed our first couple of nights here.

Friday we came up to the school for a while (which is where we are now, it’s the only place we can get good internet access at the moment) and checked out our rooms. The school is nice, and I say that relative to other schools I’ve worked in, not relative to my expectations of what bush school would look like. Like any school, the classrooms have a sort of disorganized, summery feel to them, the result I’m sure of teachers packing up and moving from one classroom to another. My classroom is at the end of the elementary wing, with two small windows that look out over the north side of town and the ocean (I think it’s north. I’ll have to confirm). Because it was the music room at one time, it also has a soundproof practice booth, which I am still trying to figure out how to use (suggestions welcome). B’s room isn’t really a room yet, he’s waiting for some walls to go up, but I’ll let him tell you about that.

Yesterday we also took a walk around the village with E and our other neighbors, H and G. H is a teacher at the school and G is her husband, he’s from another village not far from here. The kids came running from around the village to meet us. We walked to the post office, on the far end of town, where there were a few more packages waiting for us (including one from my parents – thank you!).

We were invited to dinner at H and G’s, and afterward we all walked up the hill in the other direction, away from town, to where the stone people are. They don’t really look like people, just big cairns, but they’re imposing nonetheless. They’re near the edge of the hill, and the wind is wild up there. We stopped along the way to pick tiny berries (they call them crowberries or blackberries, but they don’t look like our blackberries back home). From the cliff you could see how much farther the sun still had to go before it would set.

Later last night we tested out our new soymilk maker (round one was failure as B put in two whole cups of soybeans rather than use the cup that came with the machine, round two is cooling in the fridge as we speak, I’ll let you know) and again got to bed too late. However this morning I slept till ten, so I’m feeling well-rested for the first time in about a week.

There’s more to say but I’ve gone on for a while, and I want to let B say some of it. We’ll try to post pictures soon. We’re doing well. We miss Portland for sure and already last night I was feeling the stirrings of wanting to go out and do something. Only there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do. Trying to plan for that so it doesn’t make me crazy. It helps that this place feels foreign and new, and that it’s beautiful.