Teacher’s experience: ‘Hardest thing I’ve ever done’

LIVERMORE – Bonnie Campbell decided after 25 years of teaching she wanted to do something different.

She went to Alaska to teach in a small Eskimo village of about 300 people in the “Bush” and came away with experiences she never expected.

“It was the hardest thing I ever did,” Campbell of Farmington said. “I was a white person among all Eskimos. Only white people were teachers, and I did not fully realize the implications of a situation like this where teachers would come and go. I went some place where I knew nobody, and I’ve never been to the West Coast before.”

She realized how far she would be from family when she bought her tickets and looked at the map. Elim, Alaska, was close to Russia.

Campbell returned to teach at the Livermore Elementary School this year after three years of teaching in Alaska.

She taught kindergartners, first- and second-graders there and maintained two classrooms with the help of paraprofessionals in a K-12 school.

There were 90 students at the new school, located about 100 miles by air from Nome and on the coast of the Bering Sea.

The 1,049-mile Iditarod Sled Dog Race went by the school and her adjacent living quarters.

“Alaska is so big,” she said. “There are 15 schools in the Bering Strait School District. Fifteen villages you can’t drive to. You have to fly to them.”

There are no hotels, no restaurants, except in the school district’s headquarters at Unalakleet, a village of about 750 people, nearly 70 air miles to the south.

“I did lots of things I’ve never done before,” she said. “I did things that people pay megabucks to do.”

She went silver salmon fishing, caribou hunting and king crab catching. She ate whale blubber, went swimming in hot springs and cut up moose meat.

Teachers from other states teach in Alaska, she said, and the coming and going of teachers affects the people.

The kids get close to the teachers, then they leave.

Respect goes up if you do a second year, Campbell said.

Everybody in the village knows you, and when you come back they welcome you back with hugs, she said.

“Everyone is a big family,” she said. “You go to weddings, birthday parties and funerals There is a special bond.”

She signed up for subsequent years to do more for the children.

“My first year, I was so afraid of stepping on toes culturally that I was hesitant about doing some things,” Campbell said. “One of the things I learned is there is a lot of nonverbal language with Eskimos and response time is more delayed.”

She’d ask a child a question and if she wasn’t watching, she’d sometimes miss raised eyebrows that meant yes, she said. Eventually, children answered more verbally and became used to her Maine accent. She learned their English and Eskimo names and their nicknames.

The schools are big on technology, she said, with most of the teacher training and classes done through video conferencing. Kids do newscasts to other villages to tell them about Elim that way.

The area is so remote that dentists come once a year to see the children at school.

“Nobody understands what it’s like to live in a small village where there are no roads to the outside world,” she said.

But there are also no fears of strangers and the kids have the run of the village.

“It was really a wonderful experience. I met some people I’ll stay in contact with for the rest of my life,” Campbell said.