Is There a Yupiq Word for Commitment?

Stebbins, Alaska. A small Eskimo village (Yupiq, I believe) out in the Alaskan Bush. What an adventure this week has been. I haven't showered in several days due to a water shortage and I haven't been outside except for one trip to the grocery, but that's much compared to our rehearsals. We began the week with 66 showing up to audition. For a Eskimo village filled with kids who have no idea what a play is, 66 was a good turnout. Ms. Small, the first grade teacher, told us her kids had difficulty with the concept of a play, asking her if it was like a cartoon. Over the past few days, it has become very clear just how foreign this “play stuff” is to them.

One of the hardest things for them to grasp is the idea of commitment. Starting the week with 61, we now have closer to 40 kids in our cast. In the span of one day's rehearsal, that’s 4 hours total, I lost 7 kids. Some never showed up, some walked out during rehearsal, and one kid left in a huff with only fifteen minutes left of rehearsal. Many don’t understand that they need to be at every rehearsal we call them for. Some kids will leave for dinner and not return for the second rehearsal only to return the next day expecting to be able to continue. In the middle of running a scene, someone will walk over to use the bathroom. There is a prevailing attitude of “do what I want, when I want” in the kids and from what we hear, in the entire town.

These kids also have no concept of work. In other places, even when we’re working with kids with very difficult behavior problems, they clearly want to do well. Here they don’t even know what they’re working towards and with some of the kids, I’m not so sure they care to find out. Several of our cast members are in our show simply because the school faculty has given them incentives to stay in. Even rehearsing for two hours at a time is like torture for them; twenty minutes into a rehearsal kids will ask if we’re almost done. But for this village, work is the exception rather than the rule. We learned early in the week that most of the kids’ parents don’t work at all; it’s not hard to connect the dots.

There are many problems plaguing this village. Over half of the kids in the school have FAS (Fetal Alcohol Syndrome) in spite of the fact that it’s a dry town. This causes attention disorders, inability to retain information, and a host of other behavioral issues. I didn’t think it would get worse than Las Vegas in terms of attention problems, but I think it did. This is also the only town I’ve been in where it’s common to find second graders who chew tobacco. Apparently most of the kids chew. Mothers give their babies snuff to calm them down, getting them hooked as infants. The assistant principal has grotesque pictures of chew-related abscesses, holes, and other maladies in his office. When one kid (first or second grader) was caught with chew in school she was taken to his office and shown the pictures. Her reply? “That doesn’t happen to Eskimos.” And since most everyone is living off of welfare, more kids means more money. I asked three girls last night how many siblings they had. One had ten, one had nine, and the other had six with one on the way. Too many kids born into a downward spiral.

The only non-Eskimos in town are the teachers at the school (maybe there’s a couple of outsiders at the clinic as well). Many of them from the lower 48, they’ve mostly come up here for the pay which can be up to triple what they can make back home. The live in apartments next to the school or in nearby houses, strange visitors in a strange land. Some stay for two or three years, some make their lives up here. I find them to be kindred spirits in a way, knowing that their job and mine must require a similar kind of person. I understand their isolation, their alien status, and their forced community. I also have the utmost respect for them. Battling a legion of problems with every kid, they struggle every single day to help these kids in the basics. Some kids are three grade levels behind in certain subjects and when more than half are FAS and work is a foreign concept, getting back to their normal grade level is like betting on a horse with two legs. It takes a lot of guts, a lot of heart, and a bit of insanity to do that.

As you can guess, it’s been a challenge for us. Coming here I thought our biggest problem would be getting the kids to come out of their shells. The culture here is not one that encourages kids to stand in front of an audience and speak. They’ll be loud running around the gym and yelling to their friends, but ask them to do it when somebody’s paying attention and they glance away and mumble a few words. When they do speak up, they act a bit embarrassed. Unfortunately, with all the problems of drop-outs and poor attention, we haven’t gotten to work on volume or diction much. We’ve also had to alter the show in countless ways to make it work; we even got rid of a lead character altogether after the boy playing the character dropped out.

Thankfully the kids here are good kids at heart and not malicious in any way. Some, like one boy Nasu, loves to give us hugs and tell us “I love you” any chance he gets. We’ve come to call the lock on our in-school apartment door “Nasu protection,” the thought of waking up to his sweet, smiling face a likely one. We’re in a neighboring village next week and I can only imagine we’ll be facing a lot of the same issues again. I think I’ll be alright with that as long as we have some sort of show by the end of the week. That’s been our goal so far this week and we'll see tonight if we've been successful.

And if you're wondering where the pictures are, I left my camera on my parent's kitchen table. Sorry. I posted a link to the community's website and that has a few pics. Just imagine lots of snow and a frozen sea.