Subsistence Living

Living in extremely remote areas has a variety of perks and challenges.  While food is extremely expensive in stores and ordering online is also quite costly (especially if you want fresh produce), it is also quite common (and even necessary) to use the natural environment to provide for oneself.  It's really a simple concept.  You use what's available.  This week, I got to see it in two very different ways.

We turned our truck around to catch this!

First of all, my school owns a net for fishing.  On Sunday, we started putting it out and pulling it in every evening.  Our goal:  to catch and fillet as many salmon as our freezers can hold.  In our first four days of netting fish, we caught 100 salmon!  Most of them were silvers which are excellent for eating.  A number of them were chum.  The chum are easily the worst salmon out there.  They are commonly referred to as "dog salmon" because people use them to feed their dogs.  Our typical evening this week consisted of pulling the net in around 5:00 p.m., disentangling the fish from the net, rinsing them off, taking them up to our complex to be filleted, rinsing the fillets, and vacuum sealing them.  The whole process does not take very long when everyone is involved.  I think it took an hour when we pulled in 33 which was our biggest catch of the day this week.  On a related note, we went berry-picking this morning.  It took a while for us to find them.  It's probable that the reindeer ate a significant portion of them.  Regardless, I now have some blueberries!

Stebbins is visible in the background.

Two of the cabinets are visible here.

But subsistence living goes beyond the typical foraging for food in some situations.  Take first-year teaching in Bush Alaska for example.  You come into it with practically no supplies or resources to speak of.  Once again, you use what is available to you.  Fortunately, I had both in my new classroom.  Unfortunately, I had way to much of them!  When I entered, I found three rather large movable cabinets. All three were spilling over with, well, everything!  Wednesday afternoon was spent removing everything from each cabinet.  I was able to spend Thursday putting things away that I wanted to keep and throwing out everything else.  Friday (yesterday) I was able to put on some of the finishing touches.  It is finally starting to look like a classroom!  I am rather excited to get things underway.   Quite a bit of planning is left to do before I am really ready for the first week of school, but I have a decent idea about what is going to happen.


Here are some more classroom pictures:

Supplies have been removed.

Everything is now strewn about.

Here are extra bookshelves and another big cabinet is visible in the back. 

My cleaned-up desk area

Reading Corner

Part of the rest of the room

A Foggy Start For A New Home

One week down!  Overall, training went well.  But it was more an introduction to the things that we will need to learn as we progress throughout the year.  None of us really felt like there was really enough time to learn what we had thrown at us.  At the very least, we have now been exposed to the Reading curriculum.

Regardless, it was a fun week.  The new teachers were all fantastic.  A wide variety of ages were represented.  And everyone brought unique experiences with them.  It was neat to talk with some of the more experienced teachers who were simply new to the district.  So many interesting stories were shared.  It has been fun to get to know my Alaskan family better.  We played volleyball with students, played poker with gummy fruit snacks, and even polar bear plunged the Norton Sound!

Today was a long day.  We were supposed to leave for Stebbins at 2:30.  Unfortunately, we were delayed by just over 5 hours.  Fog was covering the village, so the pilots would not be able to see the runway.  Just another typical day in Alaskan air travel.  We've now been informed that flights have the tendency to leave anywhere in between 6 hours early and 6 hours late.  I'm in Stebbins now.  I haven't seen too much of the town because I went straight to the apartment to get settled in.  I didn't bring much, so I'm mostly ready now.  Not too much on the agenda for the next couple of days.  Going four-wheeling is a distinct possibility.

The Beginning

In less than twelve hours, a new journey will commence. On Monday (August 8) morning, I fly to Alaska to start my new role as a Fifth Grade Teacher. To say that this next year will be extreme would probably be an understatement. In the next several weeks alone, new and multifaceted challenges will present themselves, and that is even before the school year begins.

...and now I’m sitting at the airport about to embark on this insane adventure. It is intriguing to think about minutiae that brought me to this point. When I began college, I wanted to be a doctor, so I went to Grove City. After two years, I decided to become a teacher. In all likeliness, I would have attended Bloomsburg if I had known I wanted to teach from the beginning. Changing majors also meant I would graduate a semester late...which meant I was living with Gino...and put me at PERC at the right time...and meant I was waiting around for him by the Bering Strait booth while he was finishing his interview...which got me an informal second interview...during which they found out we were roommates. This chain of seemingly random occurrences has brought me to this point. One different decision at any point along this journey would have produced a drastically different outcome.

Earlier this summer, I read a book by Donald Miller called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. A major premise of the book was that you have the ability to create a better story out of your life, and in many respects, it was quite inspirational. But right now, I find it to be encouraging as well. I can look back on the decisions I’ve made over the last year and know that I am doing something extraordinary. I am certainly in a story worth living.