Campfire in Kongiganak

So, I've decided to use the blog for several purposes, I guess. Primarily, as a place to practice and publish my writing, but also to occasionally keep family and friends up to date on my adventures and whatnot. If you're just here for the science, skip these ones.


I spent last week in a little village of about 350 people on the central-western coast of Alaska named Kongiganak. I was there to help out the campfire program, which is a sort of "fly-in" summer camp program that takes a few counselors and several boxes of supplies to remote villages to teach swimming, water safety and do fun camp stuff. It was a really cool community, everyone was really warm and friendly, and the kids were really sweet. Everyone's first language was Yupik, but the school-aged kids and the adults all spoke english as well. However, talking to the village elders and the young children was basically just a lot of smiling and hardly any verbal understanding.

Unfortunately, I brought bad weather with me from Anchorage, so we didn't get to do much swimming (which was a bummer, that was really why I went) but we did hike on the tundra (wet and squishy- flat like Kansas and full of ponds) and pick the tiny blueberries that covered the ground. We made lots of friendship bracelets, played tag and basketball, and had 75 kids, ages 5-17 at our "camp-in" which we held in the school gym. That's 3 of us against 75 of them. Eeek! But they were pretty good, I managed the s'more making station. Didn't get much sleep, but that's the way it goes I guess.

I had the oppurtunity to listen in on a community meeting with a fish and wildlife officer, which was unfortunately held because someone shot a cow moose and two calves before the season opened, and an anonymous community member called the FWS. Anyways, the town exploded in outrage, defending their subsistence rights and community solidarity, and it was a really interesting dialogue to listen to, even though lots of it was in Yupik.

So, it was a pretty interesting week, really warm people and fun kids, and I learned a lot about how parts of the US can feel like foriegn travel. Especially in the tiny little old planes on the muddy, flooding gravel runways. So it was a good little adventure- something I'm considering as a full time occupation for next summer prehaps.....