On The Road With The Rippers: August 2011

Tuesday, August 23, 2011

Unalakleet: New Teacher Training

Less than 24 hours after landing in Shishmaref we loaded our luggage onto the school truck, drove to the airport, and boarded the plane to Unalakleet for new teacher training. We teach in Shishmaref School in the Bering Strait School District in Alaska. There are 15 schools in the school district and they are all along the coast on Alaska. This is a video the district made and showed us during the interview. It shows a little about the school as well as zooming into where Shishmaref on the map; http://wiki.bssd.org/index.php/Shishmaref_Overview. There are about 20 teachers on our staff plus a lot of aids who come in to help. There were five new teachers at our school this year which was a unusually very high turnover for our site. One school had 15 new teachers!

Our plane from Shish to Nome. This is how they load the plane. We pile our luggage on the runway and they put it in the back. Nice and simple!

The size of the planes still amaze me. This is us leaving Shishmaref and going to Nome where we would get on another plane. Before we go to the airport in Shish we have to call and tell them how much we weigh and about how much we think our luggage weighs. We don't go through security, they don't scan our bags, they don't look at tickets, they don't assign seats. We just get out of the truck, load our luggage, and get on the plane. I am in the very back of the plane so you can see how small it actually is.

All of our luggage in the back of the plane.

At the airport in Nome... Notice the caribou in the back of the truck...

On the plane ride from Nome to Unalakleet we ended up doing what is called a milk run. This means that even though the plane's final destination was Unalakleet, it stopped in two other places before it went there where it dropped off one person at each site. We stopped in St. Michaels and Stebbins before landing in Unalakleet. That means that Mike and I had 10 separate take offs in 3 days.

Yes, this is the first picture we took after landing in Unalakleet. Can you spy why we took the picture?

A beautiful blue sky day in Unalakleet.

It had been rainy for us since we landed in Alaska so it was nice to see all of the blue skies!

A few of the new teachers who were already in Unalakleet met us at the airport with a poster and song and walked back to the school with us.

We spent a little time on the "beach" the fist day. There is a lot of drift wood that washes up onto the shore.

They built these with the drift wood. At first we thought it was just the kids having fun but later we saw they used them to hang and dry out fish. This is Mike with the drift wood.

Lisa with the drift wood!

My awesome photography with my little digital camera : )

All of the schools in our district are either newly built or renovated. A certain percent of the building fund is dedicated to art. This is what you see when you come in the doors of the Unalakleet School. It was really cool to see and you can see the Norther Lights painted in the background.

Some of the school and the school playground.

On the other side of Unalakleet.

Mike taking a video with our new camera so we can make everyone watch it when we get home!

Some of the new teachers, and you can see the place they made to drying rack.

Can you see the fish drying inside?

Driftwood

A fishing boat.

Lisa with the water behind her.

If I remember correctly, these are called "dog circles." Most of the dogs in the villages stay outside. You can see here that the wood is stuck into the ground and the dogs are tied to stay there. If you see a lot of dogs like this they may be a part of a team for dog sledding.

Mike on the last day of training. We were ready to be home.

Our bed/area in the "couples room" at new teacher training. We were in a room with three other couples. You just kind of pick out an area and try to get as comfortable as possible.


On our way home we had a charter that went from Unalakleet to Shishmaref. We flew with Era Alaska which we just had to take a picture of since they are the airlines on the TV show Flying Wild Alaska. (We saw the mom but were considerate and non-touristy so we didn't take a picture of her.)

We were in Unalakleet for 3 1/2 days. While we were there we really bonded with the new teachers in the district and in our school. We explored Unalakleet, met some really great people, shared stories, played Rummy, ate really well, and learned a lot about teaching in Alaska!

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Our First Day in Shishmaref

When we first landed in Shishmaref we were both very excited but way more nervous. We were about to enter a whole new culture and we only had our two months of research to know what to expect. The assistant principal met us at the airport where we grabbed our luggage right from the side of the plane (much like unloading the trunk of a car) and piled it into the back of the school's truck. No one would let us carry our own luggage and all insisted on loading it into the truck for us. The truck itself is pretty beat up with the tailgate missing but the school employees are allowed to use it and it gets you from one place to another.

Then the assistant principal (John) drove us to our house. As we were driving around when we saw anyone we waved to them. Some of the kids ran after the truck for a little bit when they saw their were new people in it. When we got to our house one of our neighbors, Amy (who also teaches 2nd grade), came out to meet us along with about eight shy little kiddies who all huddled around her. Our principal, Steve, and our other neighbor, Ken (teaches high school science), also came out to meet us. You will probably hear us say it about a million times, but the people here are so incredibly nice!

We were then given grand tours of the house, school, and island (photos to follow in later posts).

After our grand tours John helped us get our many many boxes we had been shipping up from the school and to our house. Many of the boxes were much more battered than we thought they would be but they are all accounted for! We only had two casualties in the shipping process, one of which was fixable and the other we have not tried fixing yet. Mike is still waiting for some of the boxes he shipped up late... we hope they get here soon because he only has one pair of blue jeans currently!

One of our pile of boxes in the school hallway

Some of the corners of our boxes were busted open

Boxes boxes everywhere!

Mike surrounded by boxes! You can also see the new cabinets that were put into our kitchen over the summer!

Now, when we took the job, they made sure we were very aware of one thing: there would be no running water in our housing unit. They said that teachers in the past have not had trouble with this so long as they knew what was in store. We decided we were bold enough to take on that challenge. In our entry way there is a 300 gallon cistern which we fill with water. That water is then pumped into pipes and goes into our sinks and showers, so it is basically like having running water except that we have to refill the tank whenever it gets low. The biggest difference is that we do not have a flush toilet and we use what is called a "honey bucket," which is ironic since they also refer to Mike as my "honey..." Anyways, we will go more in depth on the water situation in a later post. After we had lugged our 30-some boxes into our house Ken showed us how to fill up our cistern so we could indeed have water!

Filling the cistern with water. We run a hose from the school, through the hole in the wall, into the cistern. It takes about 45 minutes to fill completely. You can see the little flaps by where the hole is. There is a flap on the inside and outside. The girls who hung out on the porch liked to open the flap and yell for Mike or me to come over so they could tell or show us something.

We spent the majority of the rest of the day cleaning and unpacking. It was a nice day so we left our front door open and all day children would be knocking and poking their heads in to see who these new people were. Two girls in particular liked to hang out on our little porch. We let them come in for a quick tour but told them they couldn't visit long since we had a lot of work to do. These two girls then sat outside and yelled silly things in to us, when we walked to the store they walked along and held our basket as we shopped, then they even carried our bags back for us. All day we had people visiting, even after we closed our door we had people knocking. It doesn't get dark until about 1 AM so a lot of the village, kids including, stay up until very late and we have yet to see night since we have been here.

Yes, Mike did help clean

Our messy living room

After all of our busy days and traveling I was ready to hit the hay at about 8PM so I went to lay down while Mike continued to unpack some. While I was laying down I heard more people knocking and I heard Mike conversing with what sounded like 12 kids at the door all wanting to come in and visit me even though Mike told them I was sleeping. They all seem very interested in us and we still get kiddos every day wanting to visit. They knock on the door and when you answer they ask, "can we visit?!" We hate to turn them away but we are old and want to go to bed before midnight!

After Mike succeeded in persuading the crowd to come back another time when we could visit longer, our wonderful neighbor brought over some food for us to try. I was very excited when Mike woke me up with fresh fried salmon that our neighbor. What a wonderful ended to our first day in Shishmaref!

We arrived in Shishsmaref at 3:00 PM on Monday and flew out for new teacher trainging at 1:30 on Tuesday. Thus we had less than 24 hours in Shish before heading on our next adventure in Unalakleet!

Our first homemade meal as a married couple! Canned wedding soup! With little time and little supplies this was the best we could muster up in our less than 24 hours at home.

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Our Journey to Shishmaref

Two days after getting married we held our breath and held each others hands and leaped into the unknown. The unknown for us was moving. Not just moving, but moving to Alaska. Not just moving to Alaska, but moving to an island in Bush, Alaska. We now call Shishmaref, Alaska our home.

Before we could get to Shishmaref we had an overnight stay in Anchorage. In Anchorage we had one objective; that objective was to do our first grocery shopping as a married couple. Only our shopping experience was quite different. Functioning on little sleep and with about 12 hours of traveling under our belts we had the challenge of shopping for the the next four months at once, thus requiring us to buy non-perishable food in bulk. Also, since Shishmaref is a dry villiage we were not able to ship up anything that contains alcohol; this includes things such as Fabreeze, and certain mouthwashes and medicines. While we were shopping people would comment on the amount of food we were buying and knew we were headed to the Bush. Five shopping carts later we were ready to retire from our Bush shopping experience. We left our carts at the back of the store in what is called the "Bush Department" where they will check out our carts, package our goods, and ship them to us. They have up to 30 days to ship the groceries and we will pay for it when it gets here so we do not know when to expect our goods or what the damage will be cost wise.

Bright and early (6AM) the next morning we headed back to the airport for our flight to Nome and then to Shishmaref. With our three hour layover in Nome we ventured into town where we bought a snack of granola bars and bananas and then went to GCI where we purchased our phone since Verizon does not work in our villiage. When it came time to board our plane we walked onto the runway to climb into our ten person plane to Shishmaref! We experienced our first weather delay due to rain but we both slept through it because of our lack of sleep. The flight itself was uneventful (again due to sleep) and about an hour after take off we were happy to land in our new home, Shishmaref, Alaska.