Happy Thanksgiving!

Thank you all for all of your support.  Thank you especially to Mom and Dad.  I love you.  I miss you, but I know what I'm doing here is what I'm supposed to be doing.  I am thankful for all of my students.  They make it all worth it.  They are great kids.  I can't imagine teaching anyone else this year.  I am thankful for this small community that shows me so much thanks and welcomeness.  Thank you all.  I want to thank everyone for the packages and notes you've sent.  It makes my day and week when I get to read from you; from where I'm from.  I live here now, but I'll always be from Michigan.  It's a joke around here...Where is Jackie from?  She's from Michigan?  I'm so proud of where I come from and I'm proud of where I am now.

Yes, Henry's in this picture...he's just in Jessie's belly:)

Thank you Mr. and Mrs. McGeogh for the plentiful packages!  It was so kind of you to send them.  The kids were so excited for some warm clothes and some snacks.  I was excited for the card and socks! :)

Thank you Ella, Gracie, and Livi.  You made my whole day today, on Thanksgiving, by talking to me.  My kids loved talking to you too.  They thought you were such cute little girls! :)

I started making my NYO shirts today.  They look great!  And I had enough ink for at least what I needed to get done!  (pictures to come soon...).  Keep praying and rooting for us!  We travel Wednesday to Alakanuk.  Practice at 1pm tomorrow!  Go Team!

A Post for Pops

I always think of you when I see this sweatshirt... It's the school's shirt from last year. :)

I am definitely Livin the Dream:)

Update In EMO

It's been great here in Emmonak.  The weather is getting colder, but it isn't as bad as you would think.  Yeah, it's below zero (with windchill) at night, but it's not as bad as I thought it would be.  We are still walking around in sweatshirts some of the time.  The past two days I've made sure to put a coat on everywhere I go because of the cold I had.  But it's so gorgeous everywhere!!!

Notice the -5 degrees...

A view from the plane of the water freezing.

My boardwalk a few days before it snowed.

It's snowing!

On our walk to the post office...so pretty...AND COLD!

My boardwalk...see the moon?

See how gorgeous?

From the sky on the way back from Bethel.

The sun rises around 10:30am and goes down around 5:00pm.  It's been in the single digits and gets below zero with windchill.  On Monday and Tuesday it snowed.  We have about a foot now.  We had people get stuck here with "weather holds" on their flights.  Our wrestlers weren't able to compete last weekend, but they finally left on Wednesday for Regionals (the high schoolers).  One of them took second and is going to states!  Another took 3rd and the other took 4th.  Great job to them again!

Laura has fish in her room.  The kids are obsessed!  They watched them for atleast a half hour!

 HEHE.  We're so mean to Laura's dog...

 When the tech guys were here, Sam made us gumbo!  Yum!  My first authentic gumbo!  (He's from New Orleans)

Yummy Gumbo!

Yes...that is alligator...yes...I ate it...

Hehe!  a Bush Manicure! (done with whiteout:))

We're having game night again tomorrow night.  I'm excited to hang out with the kids, but more excited for sleep.  It's been a long week!

Wrestling in Bethel

2 weekends ago I went to Bethel (another city-bigger-it actually has cars and paved roads!) with the wrestlers.  These kids are amazing.  I had so much fun.  I was the high school wrestling coach...yeah...I didn't exactly sign up for that...or know what I was doing.  They did their best, and did well.  I had 3 high schoolers with me. When they were done with everything, we walked over to the elementary and watched the 4-8th graders wrestle.  They did great!  We had our littlest wrestlers get 2nd and 3rd, another 3rd place, a 4th, and a 6th.  Great job to my wrestlers!  And, they came in 6th place overall as a team out of 19 teams.

Half of the team as we're waiting for our plane.

Yeah, this is where I slept.  See that there are actually 2 red sleeping bags?  I slept there... I love the girls but I really wanted space!!! :)

I thought this was a cool picture to show the difference out here.  Guess which one I am...

Cute little wrestlers.

2nd, 3rd, and 4th places

On our way to Bethel, in the plane, I was sitting co-pilot again.  The pilot turned up the heat and with the altitude he promised me they would be asleep in no time.  :) It took about 10 minutes.  Before they fell asleep, the sun came out over the clouds.  As soon as it hit, a bunch of them started sneezing.  That was when I decided that Eskimos are allergic to the sun:)

Yes, there's a kid under those coats...

Good night kids! :)

I bought the kids Subway on the 2nd night.  They were so excited!  Most of them have never had Subway before.  One of the kids brought his Play Station, so the kids stayed up and had fun playing that.

Eatin some Subway.

After we ate, the kids decided they wanted to play "King of the Mat."  Basically they wrestle each other until one person has beaten everyone.  This was after the kids decided to bring mats back from the gym to sleep on...oh dear.

I love this picture...

 The game eventually turned into the whole team wrestling the biggest kid-an 8th grader.  They eventually got him! :)

On our way home, we got takeout food and ate it on the plane.  YUM!

The wrestlers on the way home.

Chinese food!  YUMMMM

NYO Examples

I wanted to show everyone what the different events are for NYO (Native Youth Olympics).  We travel and compete November 29-December 1.  Here are some of the kids after practice that I taped, so that you could all see the events.

1 Foot High-Kick

2 Foot High-Kick

Alaskan High-Kick

1 Arm Reach

Seal Hop

Scissor Broad Jump

Stick Pull

Wrist Carry

Here is some of us practicing and doing conditioning.

Here we are practicing our live performance.

 

Articles

I heard about this a few weeks ago while I was at Church.  It's kind of a big deal here since she's the first Native American to become a saint.  However, I've learned a lot since I've been here.  The people don't see themselves as Native American-they're Alaskan Natives.  Yes-technically they're Native Americans.  But they're very offended if you call them Indian (in the NA term). Or if you call them NA.  I think it's interesting to think about.  The kids think it's so strange to hear that in the lower 48 they would be considered Native American.  There are Native American tribes in Eastern Alaska and in Washington, and the kids say they can tell the difference in how they look and their traditions.  They can't tell me exactly what the differences are, but they say it's very different.  And offensive.  It's great to learn these things.

http://news.yahoo.com/1st-native-american-saint-stirs-pride-skepticism-164656143.html

I also came across this article on Facebook.  The pilot was perfectly fine.  I was thinking of not putting it up because people like my mother would worry too much.  They take precautions as we travel.  When we go on a Bush Plane, we have to wear full winter gear while on plane.  We have to have snow pants, coat, gloves, hat... So the pilot would have been perfectly fine...  They say a couple planes go down each year and people are always fine.  They usually get rescued within the day.  Don't worry!  I'm in the Bush! :)

http://www.adn.com/2012/10/29/2675956/commercial-plane-crashes-outside.html

Busy Weekend!

Whew!  What a busy weekend!  We had no school on Friday for parent/teacher conferences.  I was late to them because I went home from Laura's house Thursday night with a migraine.  It held up with me until Friday until about 9am.  Then I wanted to make sure that it was totally gone before I went into work.  I felt it was pointless for me to be there if I was just going to give myself another headache.  So I got to work around 10:30am.  People told me there were parents that had come to see me and I could try to catch them.  I was able to meet with 3 parents, and talked for a bit with them.  It was great.

Then, the volleyball games started at 2:30pm.  Remind you that school doesn't get over until 3:30pm.  So at about 3:15pm I told the office that I would be in the gym with the games and watching the students and taking pictures for the yearbook.  I wanted to make sure I'd get at least some before the weekend was up.  At 4:00pm, Laura and I started working the book fair.  It was nice to see all the families so excited to buy books!  And...I might have spent some money also...I bought quite a few books for the classroom and nieces and nephews!

Then, at about 7:30pm, I decided to go back into the gym and take more pictures of the volleyball games (this was after taking pictures of the book fair, also).  Another teacher let me know that the school has a camera that I could use for yearbook, so I got very excited.  However, it's not the best for action shots... I've been using Nate's camera (which is AMAZING!!!!), and I bug him to use it constantly.  Changing to this camera, was an adjustment.  It was very blurry on action shots, or shots that...weren't perfectly still for long periods of time.  It held the lense open for a bit and made everything blurry.  Luckily, Nate took pity on me and let me borrow his again.  I'll post pictures soon to show you the difference!

At 8:45pm, we started to head over to the Community Complex to where the Seniors were putting on a dance.  We couldn't get into it ahead of time because Coleen didn't get the keys to open it up ahead of time (thanks Coleen for letting us all freeze for 20 minutes after the volleyball game while you went to get them).  We (as quickly as we could) got all the food and decorations out of the truck, brought it into the complex, decorated, got the food ready, got the music up, and let the kids in.  It started at around 10pm.  Only an hour late:).

The dance was a blast!  They did turn off all the lights and only had strobe lights and colored lights at some points (which was when my migraine came back and therefore I went home-around 11:30pm).  However, the kids had a blast throwing the dance.  Unfortunately, the other coaches wouldn't let their teams walk down to the complex for the dance, but we still had fun.  We played musical chairs, limbo, and had a cake walk.  The kids even made Mr. and Mrs. Erfurth start a Snowball Dance! :)  The kids had a great time and did a great job.

On Saturday, I stayed in bed quite a bit late, and then went over to the book fair to help out again at around 3pm.  We stayed there until around 6:30pm, had the Thanksgiving dinner drawing (Mr. Kempher won!), and then went to Laura's house to have dinner and a movie.  There were some volleyball games earlier in the day but I missed them on the count of sleeping in:).

On Sunday, we had NYO practice.  Only about 10 kids showed up, so Laura called the rest.  We ended with probably around 20 kids.  We had fun working on our live performance, building endurance, and practicing the Eskimo athletic skills.  I was very proud of the kids.

The we went back to Laura's, worked on the grant we put together, made dinner, and watched X-Men with Sara and Nate.  Whew!  What a weekend!