Busy in the Bush

Work has been non-stop since I got here early August, but it's been nothing short of awesome. When Grant picked me up at the airport with his 4 wheeler, I was sitting on the back holding on to all my luggage trying not to fall off, hoping beyond hope that he would take me to a new house and roommate. He did! Betsy is now my roommate, which is awesome because we get along well. She teaches 3rd grade and came here a year after I did. Anyway, since I wasn't sure I would even be moving, nothing was packed up.. so I immediately started toting everything I owned by stuffing it in backpacks and empty luggage and walking the 150 yards to the new house. It's nice and spacious, but unfortunately the previous occupants were heavy smokers and the clean up "crew" didn't clean it.  We've done our best to wipe all the furniture and counters down, but the walls are just too bad. I hope I can find some paint in Bethel and try and cover it up.

I didn't have a bed the first night here so I crashed on the old one in my empty old room, completely exhausted. I woke up freezing as the heater wasn't working and spent the entire day moving the rest of my stuff, and realized I've accumulated way too much since I moved to Newtok 3 years ago. I made myself fill 5 boxes full of things to get rid of at the next market we have.

As busy as we were moving into our new house and then getting our classrooms ready for school, we managed to fit in a poker night on Friday and an afternoon BBQ on Saturday, hosted of course by the great Paula, Brandi, and Kevin.

We have 2 new teachers this year - Brandon (Boo is his nickname) is from Utah and teaches social studies and science grades 7-12. This is his first year teaching but he is 35. Eunice teaches 5th and 6th grade and is actually from another village, Kipnuk. She is originally from Maine but came to Alaska many years ago and married a native. They both are very nice and I think our school will run smoothly this year.

Unfortunately for me, this is yet another year that I am the youngest staff member and will earn dish duty at school parties and all the other lovely unspoken rules that go along with being "the kid." And when younger teachers play jokes on older teachers, that just gets you more dish duty. Haha.. totally worth it though. We have some good times up here and we put in lots of hours volunteering anyway, so it's all good fun. But I can say that I've been here longer than others, so I can now pass chaperoning and traveling responsibilities on to someone else, unless I'm coaching. Woohoo!

We've been here 3 weeks and just until a few days ago no one had been able to do any laundry. Some teachers resorted to hand-washing their clothes, but I hadn't given in to that. I don't have tons of clothes but I had too much else to do to worry about hand washing them.

Last week was the first week of class for students, and we had expected half of them to be gone for berry-picking like in past years, but only a handful didn't make it. Poor Brandon.... I remember my first year was awful! I wasn't trained to be a classroom teacher and I had NO curriculum to go by.. there were just standards I hate to teach, and it was up to me to figure out how to teach them and with what. Brandon is going through a bit of the same thing, but when class was over, he came searching my classroom for any kind of supplemental material. So we went out to the MPR building to look around for anything that might help him teach science or social studies, and fortunately we found some old textbooks. It's better than nothing, which is what I was afraid we would find!