WOW so much has happened since the last posting! Middle of May I headed home for my summer break and the first week of August I returned to Alaska. Rachel and Sheila came back with me to tour the mid-west as neither one had ever been before. Sheila experienced her first concert, farm, casino and the list goes on! It was a GREAT time having them in town and especially having Sheila experience the life and the culture I come from since usually she is the one teaching me about hers. I’ve heard Sheila tell many stories about the trip ever since I’ve been back here in Alaska.
Moose got to spend lots of time with his ‘grandparents’ this summer while I did A LOT of traveling. THANKS MOM AND DAD! I visited a total of 12 states over the summer (Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and Alaska! The trips were so much fun but BUSY! I went to Colorado with Lori to visit the Lords. Nebraska to visit Nick, Ross and Jenn. Florida with the Frey girls. Tennessee with the Kuntz side of the family. Chicago to visit Diana and Dan! Kentucky to see Cassie and found a dress for Diana’s wedding :O) As soon as I unpacked a suitcase I packed it right back up again. Somehow I managed to also get some quality family time in there as well. It was so nice to be back. Some of my best friends even got married this summer! Congratulations Anne and Dan Smith as well as Colleen and Alex Lowe!!!!
I decided to go back to Alaska a couple of weeks early because I wanted time to move into the new house and school as well as go fishing and berry picking. This was a very good and bad decision all at the same time.
Let’s start with the bad news… when I got off the plane in Kong… I was brought right back to my old red house… a mile from the school. NOT IMPRESSED. ALLLLLLL of our stuff was packed away in boxes. These boxes were supposed to be at the new house, but no, back at the old house. Apparently the new houses didn’t pass code so the district wouldn’t buy them yet and no one knows when or IF we even will buy them. THEREFORE no one can tell us if we should unpack everything or not. This REALLY irritates me because I spent the last 2 weeks of last school year staying up until about 4 or 5 am to pack my house, classroom and do school work. Did I get paid extra, of course not. Did I care… no… because I was excited to get to move to a new house with flush toilets, a dishwasher, washer and dryer. INSTEAD I can’t find anything because it is boxed away and worst of all we had to bring out the honey buckets again ☹
The situation is really frustrating which is a lot of the reason I haven’t blogged yet and communication is difficult because I can only get online when I’m at the new school since we cancelled internet in our house and don’t want to pay a reinstallation fee. We were told we would be in new housing and even chose which unit we wanted. We were also under the impression that our old houses were ‘unlivable’ because the district wasn’t allowed to sell them when we moved out and the houses were supposed to be moved to the dump due to the asbestos. The new houses are BEAUTIFUL inside and the old ones are not so much. UGH SO FRUSTRATING. Not only was the housing screwed up… but there was only one key available to the new school. ONE! For all the teachers and principal and maintenance guys to share. I couldn’t work late at night like I usually do because 1. I didn’t have a key and 2. I didn’t want to walk a mile in the dark and get attacked by a person or wolf or something. Stranger things have happened. My classroom looked like a disaster because at the end of last year we had to just dump things out of boxes and reuse the boxes since we ran out. Here is a picture…
I will post pictures of the completed room soon.
Although we have ALL been really frustrated and annoyed with the housing situation, the good news is that I have GREAT friends in Kong. Can NOT thank Sheila ENOUGH for everything she has done for us. We did not cook the first week back (hoping that we would be moving soon so we didn’t unpack anything) and Sheila cooked us some fabulous meals. She even threw a welcome home meal for us and a welcome to Kong meal for the new teachers. We had some AMAZING fresh Salmon and Halibut. It was absolutely the best fish meal I have ever had… no exaggeration what so ever. There are two new teachers this year and Michele returned as well. The two new teachers are Patrick and Dustin… I’m sure you will be hearing more about them. They are a lot of fun and I think we will have a GREAT staff out here this year. Lots of fun already! We actually went on a fishing trip with Rod last week! He took us in his boat (only some of us could fit so it was Dustin, Patrick, Michele and me who tagged along) down the river to the Bering Sea to his special fishing spot. It was about 16 miles away if I remember correctly. It was so awesome because we fished near a sandbar where seals like to ‘hang out’ and some were even swimming right by us. Rod taught us to net fish and we went out at 1:30pm then returned to Kong around 9:00pm. We caught 63 Silver Salmon! He also took us Halibut fishing for a little while but no luck… not really the right timing for Halibut. While we were net fishing, a seal came up and started eating our fish in the net. Almost got itself killed! Right in front of me. I was going to be a little sad if I saw the seal get shot or harpooned. Rod ‘let’ us do all the work and when we returned we were the ones who cleaned the fish. NOT very well I might add. We cleaned what we wanted to keep and Sheila announced over VHF that we caught fish and gave the rest away. It was such an amazing experience really. Look at all my pics!
School started yesterday, Tuesday. On Monday night there was a village meeting which all the teachers attended. We had to introduce ourselves and when Sheila made her introduction she talked a lot about her summer in the Midwest and in Maine as well as the hard work we teachers have contributed to school and the community. It meant a lot to hear her talk about all of our cultural experiences over the past year and how much we do want to be invited out and be a part of the community. Other people from the community were also very welcoming to us and happy to see us back for another school year. Even though I have been grumpy about housing for 2 weeks straight, I am happy to see everyone again and thankful that I have such great friends out here.
My second year of teaching is starting out very well so far. The first day was rough just because I have worked day and night for two weeks straight and the exhaustion all hit on the first day of school. I felt so sick just because I was that tired. On the bright side though the day went very smooth. Everything I wanted to get done, I finished ahead of time and I think my kids are off to a great start. This year I have organized things better and they know my expectations/routines the very first week of school. Last year at this time I still hadn’t met all of my students.
The cross country team started practice my second day back in the village. I have had about 19 sign up so far but not all 19 are at practice every day. Things will start getting serious next week because our first meet is Labor Day weekend. They seem to be off to a good start though!!! The team consists of all Junior High and only 2 high school students so far. I haven’t had time or energy to run with them much but hopefully that will change next week. We have three meets scheduled. The first one will be at Toksook Bay and the last one at Bethel in hopes of going up against more competition to see how the kids to. We will have our first meet in Kongiganak September 10-11. I’m pretty excited to be organizing this and a little nervous too! We have named it the Kongiganak Tundra Trot. The whole race will take place on the tundra because the boardwalks are too dangerous. Boards often break on our mile walk to/from school (one of the kids I was with one evening went running on the boardwalk, slipped and had a huge gash in her leg. Seriously the deepest wound I have ever seen. We spent 4 hours in the clinic that night as they tried to clean the drying mud out of it. Poor kid! Lots of screaming)! Anyway, it should be an interesting race since the mud just sucks you in sometimes and there are little ponds everywhere! Speaking of mud… last week I was walking when my little 1st grade student was riding a bike and saw me. He got really excited and yelled at me to wait. I waited he came riding fast but wasn’t looking where he was going. He rode right off of the board walk into a huge pond of mud!!! He landed and sank to his hips in the mud and wow was he unimpressed (as I would be too!) He and his bike were stuck in the mud and as we tried to help he started throwing mud! I felt so bad for the poor kid but it was quite a sight to see!
Welllll I think I have bored you enough. My new address is:
Amanda Frey
Ayagina’ar Elitnaurvik
100 Tassak Way
Kongiganak, AK 99545
Miss you all!
P.S.- My Yup’ik speaking and listening skills are improving. I sit in the Yup’ik 2nd grade class a lot this year with my student and I have learned how to say the days of the week and some of the months! Just in the past 2 days. I can also count to 5 and say the number ten. I’m getting there!
Let me know if you want to come visit! Our first meet would be cool to see but the Cultural Heritage Week/2nd Annual Tommy Phillip NYO meet are the same week in October this year. Should be a REALLY cool time to come if you ever plan on it.
ALSO! I did not edit this because it is too long for me to reread at the moment. Sorry for any mistakes!
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