9-9-2012

I’ve always taken the availability of electricity for granted.  I’ve never lived in a place where we lost power for any length of time, so I guess I’ve lived a charmed life.  I’ve also never been bitten by a snake, but I don’t think those two are connected.  Before we moved up here, I read about villages whose power was disrupted constantly.  Until this fall, we continued to be lucky.

We had a few outages prior to this fall, but nothing too bad.  Maybe a few hours at a time, but then it was back on, just in time for us to watch yet another reality show about Alaska.  But this year has been brutal.  

This is an uluaq, or ulu in English. It is a Yup'ik
knife used for cutting up meat and such.

Our village, like most villages in rural Alaska, gets power from diesel generators located in the village.  There is usually more than one generator, just in case one fails.  This fall, we would have 3-4 power outages a day, usually only lasting between 15 mins to an hour.  Which is not a big deal unless you have a classroom where technology is used.  I happen to have one of those classrooms.  So it has been a constant struggle to reboot computers while students are acting like it is the apocalypse.  Even though it would be the tenth time it had happened that week.  Drama kings and queens.  It does get pretty dark in the classroom during this, so there’s not a lot we can get done during this time, except for me to talk about the apocalypse.  (They frighten easily.)

But, it looks like the problem has been solved.  On our way to work yesterday, we talked with a man who was waiting to go to the airstrip.  He said he was here to work on the generators and thinks he had the problem fixed. He said words like “air in the fuel line” and “breaker’.  I swear he even said “salami pudding”.  I don’t know because I’m not mechanically inclined. I was born without the Mr. Goodwrench gene.  I don’t know how to work on a car and never had the desire to. Some people find that odd or even offensive that a man doesn't know how to fix his own car when it breaks down. I ignore them and go back to my specific skill set: eating and updating my moth collection.  (Not at the same time, that would be ridiculous.)  So far, we’ve yet to have a  power outage since seeing the stranger, so I guess it wasn’t an hallucination from breathing moth dust.

Another look at the delta and the mighty Yukon River.
Again, these are Monica's photos. This shows why it
is so difficult to get from one place to another.

We are getting into our groove at school.  The students remembered that they don’t like doing school work and their teacher remembered that he doesn’t like writing lesson plans on Saturdays.  But even with the larger class, we’re making it work.  One 5th grader told me he missed me this summer.  I asked him how he’s going to feel next year when he moves up the the middle school.  He said, “Sad”.  Then his face lit up and he said, “I’ll have a locker!”.  So it seems I will be easily replaced by lockers.  

With the power fixed it looks like football season will be enjoyable.  Last week the power went out during the last few minutes of a close game, so I wasn’t looking forward to a whole season of that.  We now can go back to the charmed life of continuous electricity and snake-bite free living. Until the next big storm and they have to string together paperclips as a makeshift power line.