FARMINGTON — Ten eighth-graders traveled to Alaska last month to spend more than a week with Eskimo peers in a tiny village in a rugged western region.

The Mt. Blue Middle School students traveled by jet, bush plane and minivan to Crooked Creek, about 300 miles northwest of Anchorage and an area that has few outside visitors.

The public is invited to learn about their trip at an open house from 6 to 8 p.m.  Monday, Nov. 8, at the school on Middle Street. Students will present their videos, displays and share what they learned. The group is also talking about raising money to bring a few of their new Alaskan friends to Farmington next spring.

Four of the Farmington students and teacher/chaperones Greg Veayo and Wendy Simpson spoke about the trip and showed a video at the Mt. Blue Regional School District board meeting Tuesday.

The project leader was former Mt. Blue Middle School teacher Alan Shumway, who taught at the Johnny John Sr. School in Crooked Creek, Alaska, two years before moving to Farmington. Shumway was offered a semi-permanent job at the Alaskan school and has stayed on.

Students on Tuesday had put their thoughts and impressions down on paper for the school board.

“I thought long and hard and realized that those two weeks that I’d just spent with my peers and people from a totally different culture would never be able to be relieved again,” Haley Greenleaf said.

“Now after returning, I am very thankful for having the opportunity to participate in this experience and I would love to give the same joy to someone else.”

MacKenzie Dwyer said that seeing another way of life “has completely changed me.”

“When we went to the bush village, I met the kindest people I have ever met. These people do not have a lot of money . . . but they live with what they have and their hearts are in the right place,” she wrote. “They do not need everything that we have to live a happy life. We take everything we have for granted. And maybe we really don’t need all those things.”

Rachel Mitchell said one of the things she took away from this trip was the sense of family and friends.

“This trip showed me that at the end of the day, all you really have are the people who love you. Nothing else matters. Those are the people who will always be there for you, no matter what,” she wrote.

Taylor Kaminsky wrote that the trip has changed her personality and her views on life.

“I’ve learned that when we all work hard at something, we can turn it into something huge.”

The video showed spectacular vistas of glaciers and wild country, the small village and school, the 30 students who attend the school, and the activities that they shared. These included making what is locally known as “Eskimo ice cream,” a concoction made of fish, shortening, sugar and blackberries.

Veayo diplomatically said the kids were “not too excited about” the mixture.

The Alaska Experience project took a year to plan. All eighth-graders learned about the culture, the ecology of the sub-arctic ecosystem, and had regular teleconferencing sessions with their peers in Alaska. The Farmington youths also helped raise the $1,600 needed for each traveler. No district funds were used.

Since the trip was educational, there were classes to attend and daily activities planned by their Eskimo peers. These included lessons on how to dissect a salmon, skin a fish, use sticks to make bows, arrows and slingshots, and taking nature hikes.

Simpson said afterward that the Alaskan students, while they have Internet access at school, have a skewed image of the United States because they have no visitors from the lower 49.

“This was a global education experience. We may not have left the United States but it sure felt like it,” Simpson said. “It was an amazing trip. The kids made us proud and they were wonderful representatives from our school and from our community.”