"Waqaa"

"Waqaa" is how we were greeted by several of the children as we arrived in Mountain Village meaning hello, welcome. Let me start off by saying Anchorage was beautiful, but Ben and I were excited to leave the city. We left on the 19th and flew to Bethel on a 18 passenger plane. We went and ate at a wonderful pizza place in Bethel before boarding our 8 passenger plane to Mountain Village. A mix of emotions went through our heads as we were coming here. We were anxious, excited, nervous, and curious thinking about how our lives were about to change...again. :)
The flight over to Mountain Village was absolutely BEAUTIFUL! It was all tundra and so there were little lakes and rivers everywhere. We flew low enough where we could see boats along the rivers, trumpeter swans swimming.

When we arrived to Mountain, I was pleasantly surprised. We had heard that there are no trees and flat. Well, there are bushes, but they are green and from a distance look like trees to me. There is a big hill here as well. So, coming from South Dakota and Minnesota...this isn't too flat. ha ha. Our principal came to pick us up at the airport...or shall I say dirt landing strip. He then brought us to our houses. I fell in love with our house. It is much bigger than we thought, a lot nicer than we thought. We were then able to go take a tour of our school and as we were looking around in the gym, we noticed almost all of our totes were there. So, the next hour or so we started loading up totes and bringing them to our house. Did I mention that the school is only about 30 ft. from our house. Anyways, we got all of our totes into our house and helped Kevin (another newbie) with his totes. We then came back to our house and started opening up totes. It was like Christmas. Val and Kevin came over and were quite entertained by all of our stuff. We may have gone a little overboard. :)

Today, (Friday) we woke up and went to the Post Office...we now have an address! It is..

Ben and Anne Harvey
P.O. Box 32025
Mountain Village, AK 99632

After hitting up the post office we went to the AC store. You can get pretty much get all the basics there, however it is very expensive! For example, a 12 pk of coke is almost $13. A dozen eggs were $6 Ben and I have gotten back to unpacking all of our things and hopefully getting everything situated before we head to work on Monday. We have three days of inservice and work days and we start school on Thursday.

With love,
Ben and Anne