Blizzards and Basketball

Weather has been so crazy. We’ve had 2 blizzards in the past few days and it’s not looking any better today. We’re suppose to travel for basketball today to the village of Chefornak, but now I’m not sure. But I’ve packed enough clothes for a week just in case we do fly out and get stuck there, which has happened before. Plan for the worst, hope for the best. There are snow drifts that appeared over night that are taller than I am! In the village of Kipnuk just a couple of days ago, there was a white-out blizzard and a young man of 15 was walking home, got turned around, and never made it. They found is body a mile and a half away from the village the next day. 

I’m still planning on going camping but not if the weather doesn’t improve. Grant says there is an abandoned village not extremely far from here, but you’d need a snow machine to get there. I’m thinking for safety’s sake I may go there to camp so if a blizzard does come unexpectedly, which could happen in under 5 minutes, at least there are remains of cabins where I might can take shelter in. 

So yeah, a couple of days ago our snow machine was finally fixed! I took it right out and boy, it felt good to fly again. I’m not forgetting my infamous flying incident though, being mashed by 600 pounds of metal, so I’m taking it easy. 

There is a 14 year old boy from Newtok that is still hospitalized in Anchorage from over Christmas - he was huffing propane and it exploded in his face. I sure hope he’s learned his lesson.

Wednesday afternoon I was finally able to do my laundry for the first time in 3 weeks. Plus I was able to get a shower last night, so I’m finally feeling clean! Of course, when I walked home my hair was frozen stiff and it makes it look funky, but oh well. This is the life of a bush teacher!

Last year we had constant problems with the school plumbing - the only plumbing in the village. This year has been much better, but we still have days when the bathrooms are closed and we have to send the kids home if they have to use the restroom, and get someone to watch your class if you need to run home real fast. 

We had a video conference inservice with the district office in Bethel, and they almost didn’t have it. If it’s colder than -25, school is suppose to be canceled, and it was -24 there. Of course, here in Newtok it was -30. We like to brag that we will persevere no matter what the circumstance. Heck... we’d walk to school in a blizzard, 60 below. You have to be tough to live out here. So anyway, we still had the inservice. They started it off with “fireside chats” - a video of a crackling fire behind the superintendent. They always have competitions between the villages - like, if all your staff is present, e-mail the names in and you’ll be in a drawing for donuts. Whoever wins, they’ll send donuts on the next plane to the school. It was funny though, because Tununak won the drawing, and there was no way planes were flying in that weather, so they would probably get frozen donuts in a week or two. It’s pretty funny.

My basketball team has improved dramatically from last November, but they still have a long, long, long way to go to get to where I want them to be. Their motivation is “do what you feel like at the moment.” And that’s just not acceptable. I’m trying to get them to see the big picture - you have to experience pain now, but it’ll pay off in the end. Maybe not in winning games, but at least in knowing you haven’t given up. Well, they’ll skip days of practice and we only have 3 or 4 girls most days, which angers me more than you’ll know. But what to do? There’d be no team if even one girl quits. Arg. 

Hope yall have a blessed day!

Running Non-Stop

What a crazy week! Newtok was going to host the basketball games this weekend and it feels like I’ve been running nonstop this past week... I’m down-right exhausted. But it’s the good kind of exhausted - I love staying busy, and my work isn’t suffering from it. My basketball team traveled to the village of Toksook Bay last weekend and didn’t go with the mindset of playing hard, which really angers me. I’m very, very competitive and don’t believe in giving anything less than 110%, so needless to say, it wasn’t a very pleasant atmosphere in the room that night. 

Hosting basketball games means I have the pleasure of creating the schedule, finding willing scorebook keepers, refs, and people to run the clock and take money at the door (out of a village of only 317 people), and the responsibility of feeding everyone for the weekend. I couldn’t have pulled it off without Paula and Brandi - they are amazing with handling everything and I admire them so much! I hope one day I am as with it as they are. Sometimes I wish I could just coach and not act as an athletic director and everything else, but what doesn’t kill you only makes you stronger! So we were all ready to go with the games, but it was too cold for the other schools to travel, so we didn’t even get to put all our work to use. But as I’ve said before, you can’t get hung up on what could have been - you have to be flexible here. School policy says if it’s colder than -35, students can’t travel. And it never got warmer than -40. 

So since we flew back Saturday from Toksook Bay, there haven’t been many planes flying at all, which means we don’t get mail, groceries, or can’t fly in or out of the village. In addition to flights halting, we can’t do laundry at the school because of the cold weather, and haven’t been able to for a couple of weeks. This means I couldn’t wash the girls’ basketball jerseys! So Kevin (the boys’ coach) and I were just about to start hand washing them in the school sink when he went to bang on the pipes one more time, and it started working! So we were very grateful we could machine wash the jerseys. Then it stopped working again, so I strung jerseys over the classroom to dry. 

The school’s water tank is finally full, so I’ve been packing water back and forth to catch up on dirty dishes that have accumulated from crazy work hours. We have practice everyday, and most days I wind up playing with the girls because there are only 6 of them, and they can’t seem to play at game speed until they’re in the game or unless I play with them. So when I don’t get home until 7 or 8, I’m famished. And to make life even more hectic, wild animals have been coming up and scrounging through the trash, so I’ve been cleaning up outside the house. Our arctic door has been broken for a year and a half, and it’s just now being fixed. People are getting really, really sloppy with their honey buckets too - there are spills all over around our houses, which is not pleasant in any sense. 

I still have a Skype meeting every week with my state mentor, and this week our staff had video conferencing with the district office in Bethel. Classes are going much smoother and my students are moving along at a decent rate. Looking back, I don’t know how on earth I survived last year. I like staying busy, as long as I know what I’m doing. I’ve sure learned lots - and still am - and it’s getting easier and more enjoyable. I love the feeling of coming home exhausted, plopping down on the living room floor with a sleeping bag and falling asleep to the sound of bugs bunny in the background. 

Back in the Bush

I made it back safe and sound last weekend, even though the traveling was a bit stressful! I brought back a pistol, just for safety out in the wilderness, especially when I go camping. I’ve never traveled with a firearm before so I was a little nervous about it. Somehow the time on my ticket was wrong, but I didn’t know that until my mom dropped me and my sister Audrey off at the airport. We were looking for the Alaska Airlines ticket counter, and the dude was like, “you have to go out the double doors, take a left and take the first set of escalators then go in those doors and take a right...” So we set off looking for it, and when we finally got there the counter was yelling out for any last Alaska Air passengers. I ran up to the counter and he said “You have about 2 seconds to make it!” Then he saw that I had a firearm, which held the process up even more... I had to sign a paper, then take the firearm down to a TSA guy to have him search it. So Audrey and I were sprinting all through DFW trying to get everything taken care of. It was pretty intense! Then we sprinted back through the crowd of people so I could go through security, all the time hoping the plane hadn’t left yet. I was telling people I needed to hurry! They were about to leave me! So fortunately they were understanding and let me cut in line. Typically people are not very friendly in airports. Anyway, it was a good thing I was flying first class because I could go through the shorter line. 

So I shoved my bags through the machine and did the security thing, slipped my shoes back on and took off running looking for my gate. When I got there, there were only a few people left to board so I had barely made it. I was of course worried the whole time I had missed it. I was traveling with my good friends and colleagues from Louisiana that teach in Newtok, and when I walked on the plane, the look on Paula’s face was priceless. She was my $99 companion ticket so I worried what would happen if I wasn’t there. Anyway, I had left Audrey at the security checkpoint, and said if I’m not back in 30 minutes I’ve made it. So she went to tell Mom to drive around to the right terminal. Meanwhile, I didn’t have a phone to call them with, so while I was telling the whole ordeal to my friends, the lady in front of me let me borrow her phone to let my mom and sister know I made it. So all was good. 

We spent a couple of nights in Anchorage, loading up one last time on anything we needed. I heard the weather was bad in Newtok, and there hadn’t been any flights for a few days, so since we started school Monday, I wanted to change my midday flight to the morning one to give me more chances of catching a bush plane out. So I changed that flight, made the bumpy ride into Bethel, and began the long wait at the bush plane airport, with crazy drunken people! We were calling people in Newtok trying to find out how the weather was. In the morning, the weather was good, but the runway wasn’t suitable for planes to land. So they went up to scrape the ice off the runway, and you might know... the machine got stuck in the snow. So it took a couple of hours to get it out - they were asking the village men to come help, and thankfully they did. So by the time they got it out of the snow, the wind had picked up to 50 mph. So more waiting! Around 4:30, when it gets dark, the bush people told us our flight was cancelled and we’d have to try again tomorrow.

So the four of us split a hotel room and did some shopping for groceries. On Sundays they only have one midday flight, so we were anxiously waiting, and finally we made it out. Phew. I was so glad to be home!