last night reflections

      I’m sad to leave the village and all the friends I have made over the trip and going four-wheeling. The biggest thing I will miss most is all the dinners we had all together, having funny conversations, bonding with one another and also the food that we got to try. From the beginning I was super excited to go back to the village and look into the different cultures such as, the weather change, the language, the food and the different personalities all around. This experience made me feel more comfortable traveling away from home because I usually really like to travel anyways, especially in groups of people because while everyone is traveling and waiting for our next flight that time is just bonding time whether it feels like a person is a complete stranger in the group or if it’s with a person you know really well, you bond with them.

Something I thought I could never do is just ball all 5 days that we were there, in our free time that’s all me and Calista did. We also did have a couple games with Napakiak, but still, we played horse a lot, played with the other high schoolers. While we played horse we always tried to do far shots, it was mostly half court or maybe a foot closer. After a good game of horse my shoulder hurt a lot because of those made/missed half court shots from putting too much power in. Besides from playing basketball all the time I also thought I would never go on the ice again and go ice fishing too.

ice fishing

    I wouldn’t say I was “nervous” I was more excited to go out on the ice again. It reminds me of when I lived in Point Hope because I used to go out on the ice to go hunting for belugas, seals, walrus and humpback whales. We never really did any ice fishing during the winter because all the sea animals would eat most of them and it was rare to catch a lot of fish, so we did most of our fishing in the summer. I definitely had fun on the ice, trying out ice fishing for the first time was an experience. It was really exciting the second time we went because just having adrenaline and trying to patiently wait for a tug on the hook. I’m pretty sure I caught 14 of the pike but they were really small, I didn't get any big ones, Sheridan caught most of the big/huge ones. There was a point where I was kind of competing with Calista to see how much we can catch, for a while we were tied from 1-12 and after Calista got way ahead of me by like 8 more and after that I only caught 2 more.

dinner with an elder- alice andrews

    I really admired how excited Alice was to eat with us and tell us all about her own culture and explaining how she used to teach her daughters how to cut the fish. The second thing I admired was when she had connected with all of us by letting us tell a little bit about our culture whether it was 5,000 miles away or close enough to walk to.

local food

    The best food I have tried for the first time was definitely the moose jerky and the soup. The food that surprised me was the moose jerky and the dried pike fish because I thought the moose jerky was gonna taste like caribou jerky which was the only kind of jerky that I’ve had. Also the agootuk (mixed berries, sugar and crisco) was sweeter than I thought and I wasn’t expecting it to be that good. I liked all the food I got to try.

first night

The first night of the exchange, I’m pretty excited to meet new people and be back in the village. I’m ready to get back on the ice and tryout ice fishing and learning about the Yup’ik culture and maybe the language. I’m also curious how they get water nowadays and compare it to when and how they did it way before. The biggest thing I have admired from today was the enthusiastic vibe of the kids and people, for an example. The kids kept waving and smiling at us and if they weren’t too shy they would welcome us to Napakiak. I really like how welcoming everyone is and the vibe in general, all the teachers are really nice and gentle. Walking around town and just enjoying the kind of cold weather and seeing the smoked fish either in the smoke houses or drying in a shed. The ice is everywhere, little kids riding four-wheelers to get to other places and then the nice flat cold tundra. Napakiak really brings me back to when I lived in Point Hope Ak, cold, icy, tundra everywhere and the people that look like me. So far, I’m not really uncomfortable or nervous about anything because just from having a good vibe all around.

SSE Blog

On our way to the small village we have traveled from Sitka to Anchorage, Bethel then to Napakiak. The early morning of leaving Sitka was a little rough to wake up at 4:10 am to catch our 6:00 am flight on our way to Anchorage. We finally reached Anchorage on time, we thought we were done sitting around. We got to our gate thinking we are going to go to Napakiak on time but the flight attendant announced that our flight got delayed because of the bad fog in Bethel. We were waiting for the next update which was around 12:00 pm, no luck, Bethel was still foggy, then our next available flight was at 6:00 pm. After our sweet sweet sighs, we went to a nearby restaurant in the airport to get some lunch together. We ordered our food then after all we did was talk and talk about how excited everyone is to go to a small village to meet the Napakiak kids and learn new things.  We stayed in Anchorage from 10:30ish am to 6:00 pm. Eight whole hours of doing nothing in the Ted-International Airport, maybe we walked around some, but after an hour and a half we were all exhausted and bored.

Last Night Reflections

I will definitely miss it here along with the kids in the community. Having so much to do in a little village was a blast. We went to a birthday party and then cut some more fish when we got back to the school. My last night a couple girls asked Jojo and I if we wanted to go four wheeling, we said yes. We went all around the village and on some of the back trails and hung out with them a little bit after.