What A Week

Ok, sports fan, I have had the most unusual week, and it's only TUESDAY. This weird week started on Saturday, sort of. I had to go to work on Saturday; and let me tell you, Saturday school is NO FUN. I took an inservice on Non-violent Crisis Prevention. Basically, it was a class to teach us how to handle kids, without hurting them, in case they had a fit or whatever--which is a lot more common that you would expect.

Well, I had a very peaceful Sunday. My roommate was gone to Anchorage, and I cleaned house. It was so nice to be in a clean house. :) Well, Monday morning came and the weather was bad. This is where things start getting strange. About two hours into the day, the power went off, and then it came back on, and then went off, and on, off, on, off, on, off, on, etc. Finally at two o'clock, the required school day, they sent the kids home.

Today, was the really interesting part. Suddenly all of my kids started saying the smelled smoke. I went over by the windows and, sure enough, it smelled like smoke. I called up to the office and told them that something was on fire behind the school. They responded that they already knew. That's fine, but with my luck if I hadn't told them, it would have been the school. Within five minutes people were coming to pick their kids up from school. Within fifteen minutes they were calling school off. Now, it was only about 12:30 so we didn't make the required time so we will have to MAKE IT UP. I was placed as guard at the back door to keep anyone from leaving out that way---the direction of the fire. The majority of students had not eaten lunch yet so the kitchen staff was giving food away left and right. I sent one of the other teachers down to "make a plate for me" while I guarded the door. He came back with a HUGE plate of food. Two chicken sandwiches, enough tater tots to feed a platoon, and some pineapples. So we sat in the floor by the door I was supposed to be guarding and had a picnic.

I could not fathom WHY we would send kids out into the village when there was a house on fire. All they would do would be get in the way. I later found out from our "Acting Sight Administrator" (our actual one is gone for meetings with about half the other staff) that they were afraid the fire would "jump" to the school. WHAT??? So, we all left and had to tell the acting SA where we would be--just in case. When I left the school, there were big pieces of ash all over the ground in front of the school. The fire was about 100 yards on the other side of the school. Since I have been home, I have heard lots of snow machines going to get ice to put on the fire.

Now is a good time to remind you that we have NO RUNNING WATER IN THE VILLAGE. The way they deal with fires is by throwing snow and ice on it, or in summer they bring big buckets of water up from the river. So, I am currently sitting in my little green house hoping that the fire doesn't decide to "jump" this way. I will blog again tomorrow to let you know how it goes.

Trying not to choke on smoke.

Debbie