Monday, March 29, 2010

New Podcast is up

The newest podcast (Every Atom #3) is available now. Enjoy.

Friday, March 26, 2010

Back to Athol

B, E, and I are off to Athol this afternoon for a final district-wide inservice for first year teachers. The district has set it up so that it coincides with a big dance festival, so we decided to stay in town an extra night. We're leaving right after school today and will hopefully have some good pictures to share when we return.

Also, we promise to have our new podcast up by sometime next week.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

A postscript to yesterday's thoughts

I realized after posting yesterday that I was mixing up some facts and some generalizations, and leaving out some things, too.

First of all, when I say something like, "Everyone bottle feeds," that's not really a fully accurate statement. I have no idea what everyone does. I can report that I've never seen anyone breastfeeding, but what do I know? Maybe there's some cultural taboo against breastfeeding in public and maybe everyone is feeding their babies breastmilk in a bottle.

Second, B pointed out that we have little idea of what our students eat at home. It could be the case that they get mostly nutritious meals at home, and it's only at gatherings that all this unhealthy snacking is going on. In either case, it's still distressing to see a community consume so much unhealthy food, but I certainly don't have the full picture and shouldn't pretend to.

Third, the consumption of unhealthy food is a result of a number of events, most significant among those being the presence of western culture. I can assure you that no Yup'ik person ever smoked or chewed tobacco, or drank soda, or ate M&M's, before the qassaqs arrived. To me this doesn't serve as an excuse for parents to let their kids eat lots of unhealthy food, but it does create a more full context for this problem, and shares the responsibility around.

And speaking of sharing the responsibility around, we also need to look at where the food is coming from - not historically, but currently. Both stores in town sell nearly all processed foods, which includes tons of soda and candy. And guess what's for sale at the school store? Soda and candy - oh, and chips. And if it's a special event like a movie night, we'll throw in popcorn and ice cream, too. I find this especially terrible coming from the school. The stores are out to make a profit (and it's not within the scope of this blog post to tackle the myriad problems of capitalism), and candy and pop sell. The school store has a greater responsibility, to my mind. I know that trying to sell fresh fruits is a difficult if not impossible proposition here, but I'm certain we could replace chips and candy bars with dried fruit, pretzels, or graham crackers. Still processed foods, yes, but so much better. Then there's also the fact that in this state (I don't know about other states or federal law) recipients of public assistance can spend their food stamps on snack foods like soda, chips, and candy.

My point is, there's a lot of nuance here that I think I missed last night.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Yuraq

I went to a yuraq (dance) festival with M, one of our fellow teachers and neighbors, this past Sunday. Actually the festival was three nights long, but I only went for one night. M was planning to drive over each of the three nights, since the festival was only in The Bay, about 7 miles from us. She did go on Friday, and I planned to go with her on Saturday, but we had major wind gusts all day and that afternoon M came by to tell me that the temperature was dropping as low as -50, and she wasn’t going. So we went on Sunday instead. We left here at about 5:30, and got there very quickly – before 6. The ride over was a little scary, as I’ve only snow-machined to and from the post office and the airport, rides of 5 or 10 minutes each (and when I say “I snowmachined” of course you know I mean “I rode on the back of a snowmachine that someone else was driving.”) This ride was pretty fast, and in parts kind of bumpy (I think it’s especially bumpy when you’re on the back) and I don’t know, I think it being a new experience made it a little extra scary.

When we got to the school in The Bay (which is much bigger than ours, The Bay being a village more than twice our size), it was pretty empty; apparently we’d gotten the starting time wrong and were an hour early. M and I got some good seats in the gym and over the next hour it filled with people from 6 villages. Most of these villages host their own festival, and each one brings a big crowd, with some people traveling up to 5 hours to attend. Lots of kids and families from our school were there. People were getting ready with headdresses and qaspeqs, or buying snacks or raffle tickets. Around 7 things got going. Before each village danced, an elder from the village (or 2 or 3) would give a little talk. I don’t know what the talks were about as they were all in Yup’ik, but from a little translation I was able to squeeze out of the student next to me, one was about loving and taking care of your children, and another was about speaking Yup’ik to prevent it from dying out. I know that one was about religion, as there’s no Yup’ik way to say “Jesus Christ,” but other than that, the talks were lost on me. I like listening to Yup’ik though, so I didn’t mind. It’s got a rhythmic, active sound to it. Anyway, finally the dancing started, and I’m sorry to say that after about an hour I started to get kind of bored. I’m sure that if you know a lot about Eskimo dancing, each dance seems special and unique and interesting, but for the uninformed, after a few they all begin to look and sound alike.

Each village danced for about an hour, and though the evening was decidedly more formal than the impromptu dance that was held here in our village in the late summer, just after a funeral, it was still pretty casual. People from other villages could join in and drop out at any time, and the point seemed to be as much for personal enjoyment as public performance. I don’t say this as a negative thing, on the contrary I like this aspect very much and I wish more performative art were so open.

It was much more interesting for me to watch our village dance. Many of our students joined in, and now that I know a fair number of parents and other adults, I definitely felt more of a connection than I had the last time I was in the audience. Also, M was one of the dancers for our village, which is kind of a neat thing. She was the only qassaq (non-native) dancer to perform all night. I took a lot of pictures and video, which I’ll try to upload at some point, though our Internet connection is prohibitively slow for that kind of thing.

Anyway there were two main things I took away from the experience. One was this real split of emotion. On the one hand, it’s a truly beautiful thing to see an old tradition like this being celebrated and handed down and really loved by everyone – elders, grown-ups, teenagers, down to the littlest kids and babies. It’s particularly sweet to watch a pre-teen or teenage boy or girl, especially if he or she has recently mouthed off to you, completely lose their awkwardness, inhibition and practiced aloofness, and dance. Then on the other hand when I looked around, everywhere I saw the same things I always see at gatherings: everyone chewing tobacco, pounding chips and candy bars, and washing that down with cans of pop. It’s distressing how unhealthy people’s eating habits are, especially when we’re talking about tiny kids, 2 or 3 years old. You know I have never seen a baby breastfeeding the whole time we’re here? Everyone bottle feeds – how crazy is that? I can’t even begin to guess how expensive formula must be here. Anyway, the eating gets me down, and so does the chew, because it seems like a pretty straight path to bringing up a whole generation of unhealthy kids, which, if you’re trying to preserve a culture, doesn’t seem like the right way to go about it. It’s painful to see the culture being so loved and taken care of on the one hand in the form of dancing, and so callously tended to on the other, in the form of the children.

On a completely different note, the second stand-out for me was the insanely terrifying ride home. Please don’t misunderstand me, I’m certain that M is a great snowmachine driver and that my mortal terror had nothing to do with her competence in that realm. I think it was a combination of factors: the extremely late hour (about 1:30 am) and the knowledge that no matter what time I got to bed, the alarm was going off at 7; the darkness (again, 1:30 am); the cold (not terrible, but not pleasant either. Strangely, the part that got the coldest was my thumbs. Is that weird?); the bumps (hard to see coming because of the darkness); the trail (mostly okay, but in some places little more than ice over dead tundra grass); and the speed – yes, I’m a big wimp, but I’m telling you, with all those factors in place 40mph begins to feel more like 80.

Like I said earlier, the dancing did get boring after a while, but I kept reminding myself, “Very soon this will be in the past and you will probably never see anything like it again,” and that helped. In about 2 weeks B, E and I are going to Athol for a district in-service that coincides with a big, international dance festival there, and then in April our village will hold a yuraq festival, and then that’ll probably be it.

Podcasts that I Have Known

When I can, I listen to a lot of public radio. Unfortunately, there's no radio up here of any kind and you can't stream radio over the Internet because our connection is not sufficiently robust for that kind of thing. So I've turned to podcasts. Podcasts started out as a sort of "audio blog" about 12 years ago. In 2000, a program was written so that you could automatically download podcasts when new episodes came out. In the same year, the idea of a "podcatcher" (automatically downloading a bunch of podcasts that you are subscribed to) was developed. Apple's iTunes incorporated podcatching into its software in 2004. That's when podcasting took off. Fast forward to today and I've got the means to stay sane and feel somewhat connected to the rest of the world.

Here are the ones I listen to:

1. This American Life - This is an NPR show that is the most popular podcast in the country most weeks. There's not much more I can tell you about this one because you probably know it already.
2. Stuff You Should Know - This is from How Stuff Works. On the weeks when This American Life isn't the most popular podcast, this one is. The two hosts present 20-30 minute episodes with titles like, "How Do Lobotomies Work?" and "What Exactly is Facism?". Good times.
3. Radio Lab - Another NPR radio show. This is the best thing on radio in my opinion. Radio Lab is a science podcast brought to you by a science writer (Robert Krulwich) and a musician (Jad Abumrad). These guys take advantage of all of the possibilities of radio. Radio Lab is an hour long and they only do 10 or so shows per season because the shows are made with so much attention to detail. However, if you subscribe to the podcast you can hear shorter episodes that they produce in order to hold you over between regular episodes.
4. The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe - This is a podcast produced by the New England Skeptical Society. This, like Stuff You Should Know, strikes a really nice balance between being well-produced (though not with the production values of This American Life or Radio Lab) while also feeling homemade. The SGU is an hour long show about science and skepticism with the mission of fighting pseudo-science and the belief in the paranormal as well as educating the public about science. Pretty nerdy but I like it a lot.
5. Planet Money - This is produced by This American Life. It's usually about 20 minutes and comes out twice a week. These guys make the housing crisis, the economic downturn and other complicated economic issues clear and interesting.
6. Science Friday - Another NPR show that airs Fridays. A general science show that fans of science already know about, I'm sure.
7. Are We Alone? - It just keeps getting nerdier. This is produced by the SETI Institute. Rather than being a bunch of nutty UFO believers, these are scientists and skeptics who produce a show that has much less to do with ETs than you might otherwise think. It's mostly just a general science podcast. The hosts are totally willing to be completely foolish to help make the show interesting.
8. Cory Doctorow's Podcast - Doctorow is an author and digital rights activist. In his podcast he mostly reads stories and novels he's currently writing. I like his writing a lot and listening to him read his own stuff is pretty great.
9. Wire Tap - This is a radio show from the CBC hosted by Jonathan Goldstein. Goldstein is a regular on This American Life. The show features people that Goldstein says are his family and friends. Sometimes it seems like they're actually those people just being natural and sometimes it seems like they're actors working from a script. Strange and funny.
10. The Moth - The Moth is a non-profit organization that conducts live story-telling events. Each podcast is one story told live in front of an audience with no notes. They are sometimes hilarious, sometimes terrifying and sometimes sad. Each one is only 15 minutes long or so.

There are many more podcasts I listen to each week but these are my favorites. I'd love to hear about any others that I should be listening to. Of course, when we get back to Portland I'll probably go back to listening to the radio and cut down on the podcasts.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

Some Useful Companies

Here's a short list of some of the non-obvious companies (obvious being Amazon, iTunes, etc) that we have ordered stuff from in order to make this year more comfortable. You might find some of these companies useful whether or not you live in rural Alaska.

Full Circle Farm: This is a CSA from Washington that sends boxes of fresh, organic fruit and veggies to remote areas of Alaska. Every week we get a box of food that we could not get otherwise. It's not cheap and it doesn't always come on the day it is supposed (due to the weather here, not because of them) but it is always awesome.

Azure Standard: This is a bulk health food retailer. They deliver all over the western part of the US and also ship. We ordered most of our dry food from these folks: pounds and pounds of soy beans, almonds, quinoa, etc. The website claims they only ship UPS but they will ship USPS which is far cheaper (and the only option here).

Vegan Essentials: These folks carry all kinds of vegan products: shoes, food, clothes, bath & body stuff, etc. Most importantly they will ship cold and frozen food. We ordered margarine and some soy meat stuff from them.

Fred Meyer Alaska: These guys also ship cold and frozen stuff in Alaska. They tend to take forever to get it out the warehouse but we were able to get frozen fruit for smoothies, veggie burgers and frozen vegetables.

Vegan Chocolate of the Month: This was a birthday gift from S to me. Usually I'm more of dark chocolate and nothing else kind of person. But these chocolates are amazing. They also do non-vegan chocolates.

Monday, March 1, 2010

New Podcast

The new podcast is up and available. Enjoy.