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.