The Bunkhouse vs the Bristol Bay Inn

My first few days in Alaska were spent in a building referred to by all as either The Bunkhouse or The Condo.  It is a double wide trailor broken up into a kitchen, small living room, bunk room with four sets of double bunk beds, two bath rooms with showers, and three smaller rooms.  I am pretty sure that my room and the room next to me were once a single but later split into two by a thin sheet of plywood because I could hear everything going on in there and vice versa.  It was like living in a large tent but not the lavishly-styled one in the Harry Potter books.  It was also about twenty steps to the conference room where all my trainings happened.

I shared the Bunkhouse with three other female newbie teachers, one of whom was also going to be teaching in Togiak.  All three were in their twenties and, for Katelynn, age 22 from Montana, this was her first job.

The days passed in a blur of paperwork, revisions to paperwork and the kind of training one might see at any school district in the country.  Except that at night, the sun didn’t go down until well after ten o’clock and a bag of salad cost over $5.

Because this is the first year that 6^th grade is considered part of middle school, I was shuffled between two groups; elementary and secondary.  Most of the time, it was fine, though I enjoyed the secondary people more.  They are more likely to be sarcastic and wry and jaded in a way that the elementary people are not.

Although we were given a tiny per diem check on the first day (I literally walked into the district office and was handed a check), we were also given breakfast and lunch each day.  I learned early on that fresh fruit was to be hoarded whenever possible and that after a week of Lunch Lady food, it was totally worth it to spend ten bucks on a real milk shake in the restaurant in the motel where I spent the second half of my time in Dillingham.  It was the best thing I have ever had!

The Bristol Bay Inn is a basic motel with clean comfortable beds, no internet or mini-fridge and the scratchiest towels I have ever encountered.  It was like a loofah every morning!  My skin never looked so good.  Too bad it didn’t match my hair, which was badly in need of a wash with shampoo.  I tried to get on the Never Use Shampoo bandwagon this summer but my hair is too thick and I gave up after a month.  Now I was back on the greasy train, and didn’t want to risk a bottle of shampoo getting confiscated by the TSA.  But no one seemed to notice and the weather leant itself to pony tails.  And no, there were no little bottles of shampoo appearing in the bathroom every day like at an average Holiday Inn.

At the Bristol, I had a longer walk to trainings and a roommate; this time a Language Arts teacher from Manatauk, a school of around 80 kids in a village smaller than Togiak.  Joanne was nice enough, had been with the district for a while (more than 5 years, I think) but lost me when she admitted she thought Donald Trump might be onto something with his presidential candidacy.  Luckily, she was a social gal who hung out with the other Manatauks and most of the time, I was in bed asleep when she got home.  We were both concerned that my nose hose would keep her awake but she found it to be soothing in a ‘white noise” kind of way.  Good thing because I do not sleep without it anymore.  Common courtesy doesn’t extend to dying from not breathing all night long.

By week’s end, I had learned many of the ins and outs of this particular district, the names of everyone in the office and what time to go to the gas station for a cup of real coffee in the morning.  I had watched a line net hauled in with dozens of fresh salmon in the pouring rain, cut one up myself with an ulu (pronounced “uuuu-loooo-uck” in Yupik), learned a Native dance that we newbies performed for the entire district and that the entire district could fit into one gym with only ten tables set up.  The other thing I learned that was crucial for my peace of mind was that I never heard anyone seriously gripe about the district.  That was very new!  And most welcome.