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.