Recent Happenings

3-2-04

Waaqa (hello)!  It has been too long since I last put some news up here.  That is partly due to the busy-ness of my schedule lately.  I have essentially been enrolled in 4 college courses via distance learning (12 credits), and have been teaching 1 or 2 math courses at the school every day this semester, as well as coaching jr hi basketball and trying to keep up with the usual domestic stuff at home, not to mention spending time with Tammyhead!  Phew!!  One of those courses was a coaching/first aid course I had to take to be certified as a coach, and I recently finished it.  And I'm not doing much on the grant-writing front either, so most of my time is spent on the two speech-language pathology courses.  There isn't a ton of reading, but it is very technical and slow going, so 20 pages can easily take me over an hour to push through.  So far I enjoy it, though I still feel like I want a better grasp of what the day to day job would look like here on the Delta.  Tomorrow I will be observing an SLP who is flying out from Bethel to work with some of our preschoolers, so it will be great to observe her in action and pick her brain.

Good news!  Tammy has been slightly less busy this semester (yay!!), though she is still at the school at least 60 hours per week.  Lately we've had some good snow and warm weather, so she has gone skiing a few times, which is really fun for her.  On Sunday I went with her and chased her around on foot.  It is cool to explore the wide-open tundra and go anywhere we want.  It is hard to describe the huge difference between winter and summer, when our exploring is largely confined to the low, limited perspective of our kayaks.

We have two more weeks of junior high basketball, and we're all still having fun!  Our team is something like 15-3 so far, and pressure is mounting for us to win it all at the final league tournament on March 12 & 13 in Kwethluk.  I try to convince them that the main thing is having fun and learning the game, and that they are not quite ready for the NBA, and even though they are 15-3 it is still important to box out and play defense. ☺ I am also still trying to get pics of the team online, I'll let you know when that happens.  From our Alaska Links page:  Here is another great article, this one from the New York Times.  It is about interscholastic sports in Alaska.  It is a great read for a general idea of what sports are like here.  Make sure to read all three parts.  You get to the bottom and it seems like the end, but there are 2 more pages, click on the "2".

Tammy is speaking Yupik!  Amazing!  She really enjoys her class, and the professor is actually from Kasigluk, the sister of our first grade teacher!  I am so proud of Tammy for being in this class when her time is so limited.  She learns new words and phrases and tries them out on her kids, which they think is great.  I am hopeful that I will be able to enroll in a similar class in the future and catch up with her!

Quyana (Thank you) for reading our latest news!