Carolina Girl in Alaska: Atqasuk Arrival

I know you've all been waiting with bated breath for my blog update about getting to the village. But here's the funny thing about bush Alaska, the bush is the bush and things will go how they will regardless of your neat little plans. Example number one: my adventure getting to Barrow. Example number two: my inability to blog because of the internet connection. As in, our apartment's internet is being set up this week and the school internet was kind of funky so it wouldn't let me on blogger. No big deal, because I'm in Anchorage now for our inservice.

First things first, let me tell you about Atqasuk! For those of you who don't know, Atqasuk is just under 300 people. So very, very small. My high school graduating class had more people than this village. Everyone has a Honda (read four-wheeler) and there are about 75 children in the school. There is a community center, post office, one little store, a fire station, a police station, and a health clinic. And, obviously, Meade River School where I will teach third and fourth grade.

When we got to the village, most of my boxes had arrived and were in our house, but only one of Danielle's boxes had completed the journey. This means that all the delicious food we'd planned on being there when we arrived was not. So our first real order of business was to go shopping. Food in the bush stores is expensive. Very expensive. Most people either order food and have it shipped in, buy through Amazon Prime, or bring it in using Rubbermaid plastic tote bins whenever they go to Barrow, Fairbanks, or Anchorage. In addition to the food being expensive, the store is only open for limited hours; 2-6 Monday-Thursday, 12-6 on Friday, and a short period of time on Saturday.

How expensive are groceries? Well, a pack of four sticks of butter cost $6. And we spent $103 on the items in the picture below:

Then there's the post office, where they knew my last name because of the number of boxes that had already been delivered for me. Oops. Sorry guys. The post office is a busy place because we all have P.O. boxes for our mail. Not that it particularly matters if your P.O. box number gets on a package, because the post office workers know every person in town and where they live. The post office was full of boxes, mostly for a teacher who just retired. I had two more boxes waiting for me; my pillows from L.L.Bean. So now I have pillows, but no sheets. Awesome.

Boxes you mail to the bush get there whenever they get there. You just have to put them in the mail and know they'll show up eventually. So my missing boxes of sheets and books are probably sitting somewhere in Prudhoe Bay or Barrow, just waiting to get on a bush plane flight to Atqasuk. The problem is that these planes are tiny. 7-9 passenger CESSNA planes. So they carry however many people are flying that day and then fill the rest of the space and weight limit with cargo, including the mail, food for the store, and our packages. Here are some pictures from the first plane flight I took to Atqasuk so you can get an idea of the size plane I'm talking about here and why packages might take a while to get here:

The white tarp behind Danielle is the back of the plane. The black you can barely see near her elbow is the net holding the cases of soda for the store.

The pilot. As seen from my seat. I'll get a better picture of the dashboard next time. Our second pilot got turned around and pulled out google maps as a navigation aide. So there's that.

Last thing I want to tell you about and show you before I end this post is my house. I'm living in the four-plex, a big house for teachers and staff divided into four apartments. Mona (the counselor) lives in the three bedroom across from Danielle and I. Burt, Mary, their 20 year-old son Gale, and their 9 year-old daughter live in the apartment beside Mona. And next door to Danielle and I lives Janice and David, whom we have yet to meet. There are a few other places for teachers and staff to live, including Rod and Patti's house (they've taught in Atqasuk 6 years), the principal's house where Debbe (principal) and her husband Michael (8-12 science teacher) live, and the duplex, where Jim lives on one side and Dale Marie lives on the other side. We're quite a fun group, and I'll tell you more about the different teachers in later posts. For now, enjoy some pictures of my house! I'll post more pictures of the village, the school, and other things over the next few weeks. Right now I have to get back to my inservice training!