May 25, 2009
I just arrived in
Travel day was really cool. I left my house around 4:30 am for my 6am flight, and of course, I was extremely nervous. I’ve never liked flying a whole lot, and this was my first time flying by myself, meaning this was the first time I had to put much thought in getting from gate to gate on time, etc.
Luckily the Lord stepped in with some encouragement right at the start. Just after I sat down to wait for my flight an older couple sat down next to me, and the man struck up a conversation. After a few minutes he started talking a bit about his faith and giving me encouragement. In our conversation about
All of my flights went really smoothly, and as scary and unnatural as I think flying was, I found out that I really love having a window seat. Who knew that there were that many layers of clouds? I mean, I have flown before, but I think this was the first time I actually appreciated how beautiful the world is from that high.
There was another intern on my last two flights, but we didn’t realize who each other were, so I didn’t find out until later. We got picked up at the airport by the two CAMP directors who are both really young and nice. One took us to our apartment which is on a dirt road in the middle of town. It’s in a pretty nice, yellow building and the space is HUGE! We found out that all but two of us get our own room, which is really nice. The apartment has a huge kitchen and den area, and three of us are sharing it. We have cable and a DVD player. No internet yet, so if I’m posting this, it will probably from the office or the coffee shop down town.
We drove around a bit last night to look at the town. Most of the streets are dirt, and there are a lot of broken down cars, tools, and gold mining equipment lying around. One area along the road leading out of town is used as a “museum” of gold mining equipment from the early 1900’s. There are three roads leading out of town into the bush where people have camps. Hopefully we’ll make it out there a few times. AND! We saw a herd of reindeer crossing the road last night. I went to bed around 11pm in the broad daylight and slept extremely hard. One of my roommates said she was up to see the sunset around 1am.
I woke up around 5:30 am (9:30 am at home) and there was a bit of a sunrise going on. It was still really light outside, but the sky was pink so you could tell it was morning. We all got up around 8:30 and headed to the CAMP office to catch a ride to the start of the Memorial Day parade. There were about 30 people in the parade, and maybe 40 onlookers. We processed up the hill to the cemetery where there was a nice ceremony to honor veterans and fallen soldiers.
After the ceremony Kelly, from CAMP, took the three of us out to brunch at Airport Pizza (which is actually more of a coffee shop that serves pizza, among other things). I spent the rest of the morning unpacking and getting settled until another intern got here around 1. The four of us went exploring this afternoon on foot. There are a lot of bars on the main road and a few restaurants and cool gift shops. The shops we visited have a lot of native art and carvings, as well as Russian artwork. I saw fox, mink, and musk oxen pelts and some moccasins that looked really warm.
The women at the visitors’ center say that the baby musk oxen have been hanging out pretty close to town lately on the tundra, so hopefully we’ll go on a hike soon and see them. The sea is still a little icy, although the majority of the ice broke off last week. We’re waiting on the last four interns to arrive tonight, and we start orientation and stuff tomorrow morning. I think that’s about it for now…more later, and I should be posting pictures soon, so I’ll post a link to picasaweb on here. :D Love all of you!
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May 26, 2009
Today was our first day of training at the office. We had to fill out a lot of human resources forms this morning, take a drug test, and have our immunization records checked. I’ll have to get fingerprinted later in the week. We watched a really fun video on blood-borne pathogens (thrilling, I tell you.) The CAMP office had Subway sandwiches for us at lunchtime, which is about the only recognizable restaurant in town.
A lot of the restaurants we’ve seen have really odd combinations of cuisines. There is a sushi/pizza place, an American/Japanese/Italian place, and a barbeque/Chinese place. This week, we have a gift card for our stipend which only works at one of the grocery stores in town, but by next week we should be getting a direct deposit into our account. I think all of us interns are going to try doing a lot of group dinners to save money and maybe trying 1 restaurant a week. Prices are, as expected, really really high here. For instance, one avocado is close to five dollars, milk is seven dollars per gallon, but we’re applying for a store savings card, and we should be able to “mooch” off the hospital a good bit.
Anyway, after lunch we got to meet the rest of the CAMP staff and play a name game to get to know each other. It looks like we will be getting a ton of really cool opportunities to gain experience in the nutrition field up here. We will be working with WIC some, a summer-lunch program, and various other community nutrition projects. There are three dieticians who will be working over us, and everyone just seems to genuinely love this community.
They’ve told us we may get to spend some time with the elders of the town, too, which would be really cool. We may even be able to go berry picking with them. A group of women came into the office today from one of the surrounding villages to sell crafts they had made. I love it!
One of my new friends, Tala, is a big runner so she and I went for a run last night around 9pm. We were trying to find a 5k route we had heard about and got a little turned around so we didn’t go for very far. Today in our meeting we found out about a running club in town and a 12.5 mile race up to the top of
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