Toksook Bay today

So, it looks like I'm enjoying Toksook Bay hospitality for another day (at least). I haven't completely given up yet. It's almost 3:00 and the last scheduled flight leaves Bethel at 4:00 theoretically.

This is the view from the window of Julie's room. She has a sink, heater, carpeting, big windows, a phone, and internet.

This is the kind of day (wind howling and windows shaking) when if would feel good to hunker down with a good book and a cup of tea. Too bad I dropped my glasses on the airstrip in Nunapitchuk and can only read a computer screen zoomed to 200.

This might be a good time to reminisce about my first job teaching. LKSD (Lower Kuskokwim School District) wanted to put me on contract with the village left blank so that they could choose, but since I had a 3 year old, I wanted to be guaranteed a village with a preschool. With a degree in General Science, a major in math and a minor in Yup'ik, I was pretty desirable, I think, at least on paper.

I went to Atmautluak about 10 days before my contract was supposed to start. There was no available teacher housing. The principal lived in the apartment attached to the school, a returning teacher had the only other teacher house and another new teacher would eventually live in the window-less storage building with his new, young bride. Oscar Nick agreed to put in a stove and I rented his house. It was one big room with a small corner sectioned off. There was only a refrigerator and stove and cookstove, table and 2 chairs. The rest of the furniture I had to scrounge. I got a bed from the construction workers building the new school. I bought a honey bucket for a toilet and I was all set. I laid in a supply of kerosene and a lamp or two as well as candles. No radio, no phone and no TV.

The stove was fuel oil and I needed to buy all the barrels I would need for the winter from the barge that was arriving in 2 weeks. The 10 barrels were delivered to the shore and I had to roll them up from the beach to put near my house. A later visitor of mine had an opportunity to trade my nasty barrels of #1 for some new looking #2 barrels so that whenever it got really cold, the oil turned to jello and I had to go out and pour hot water over the valve. There was electricity 2 days a week for about 12, on Alice's washdays.

I hauled water in 5 gallon cans from the water tap on the corporation store building. The honey bucket, with one inch of the mandatory Pine-Sol, was dumped into the village bucket dumps. They were buried storage tanks with lids located aways from the houses that you walked up steps to use.

The next tricky part to handle was baby=sitting. Everyone sent me to Nancy N who had her grandchildren over all the time. Nancy ended up watching Erin for the 2 years I was teaching in the village. She spoke no English, but Erin picked up Yup'ik in no time and played constantly with Unca Moe and Louisa.

At first, I packed her a lunch. Then, Erin insisted that she eat Native foods and would tell me about the soup for lunch. She developed a taste for Pilot Bread and Crisco and often had dried fish dipped in seal oil. For drinks, there was a lot of Tang. Our home diet wasn't too great. I ended up flying to Bethel about once a month for shopping and a meal in a restaurant and I remember Swanson's only having a few expensive heads of lettuce in their produce aisle on one occasion. I stocked up on pasta, canned goods, dried foods and some frozen stuff. Everything had to be ordered by mail. And, everything had to be hauled the mile from the airstrip down the boardwalk.

I opened school in the community building. The windows were so thick with flies that you couldn't see out to the river. The new school opened about September and we hauled the furniture off the shore on the weekend and assembled it. I put together my first computer, taking off the top and inserting the cards into the Apple IIs. The 10 big boys and one girl in my class were very interested in everything but school. One guy only came at lunchtime to eat. When we moved into the new building, we all traipsed in to inspect the flushing toilets. I'm glad we did because within a month, they'd frozen up and we never used them again. The new stalls had room for the Pine-Sol and honey buckets emptied by the custodians.

Students came to school in kindergarten speaking only Yup'ik. The preschool teacher, Elena, taught all concepts and skills in Yup'ik and Erin became fluent. The second year, she spent one day in kindergarten, but sat under the table and refused to cooperate, so she went back to pre-school.

I'll tell more about those 2 years later, but several things I did stand out as something that I recognized even then as important. First of all, I hand-delivered each report card to my students' houses. Betty went with me to translate for me. I was the first teacher that anyone remembered visiting every house. Another thing we did was to make a cookbook of recipes and a list of traditional herbal remedies (in home ec class). Someday I will find those pages and give them to the people of Atmautluak. They contained recipes for anelleq (mouse rootballs), akutaq (Eskimo ice cream) and asaliaq (fried bread) and tepit (stinkheads) as well as lots of soups and breads. Yum-yum....Erin loved them!