A Few Thoughts

A few things I have noticed in my short time of living here. First that food waste here is a huge no-no. When I first stepped off of the plane there was a dead seal pup just sitting next to the building by the airstrip. Was an interesting first sight but figured someone had just caught it. Well one of the instructional aides here was telling me that someone had left it there and it spoiled. The village was really upset that someone wasted not only good meat but the fur as well. Now thinking back to the lower 48 we throw away food all of the time down there and don’t think twice about worrying if we will have food through the winter. Now they don’t necessarily worry about having food since there is an overstocked grocery store here but it is a huge waste of good meat and fur.

The second thing I have noticed is that I would rather save food then eat it. Now don’t worry I am not getting an eating problem but well let me first explain that the food that we purchased over two weeks ago has yet to arrive so we are currently living off of cheese sticks and one of our fellow teacher’s food supplies. Our food was supposed to be here on Wednesday but it still isn’t here and they haven’t even charged us for shipping yet. So we are very curious how much longer we are going to have to wait for food. But anyway my point is that I would rather save and have food then be without. Then again one of the other teachers is going hunting this weekend and will hopefully bring back a moose so we will have food for a long time!

Oh and my final thought. So this past weekend I watched a lynx get skinned by hand. Probably the weirdest experience. Ryry went and saw it when he first brought it home and she started whimpering and ran all the way back to our house. Good thing to know about my weenie dog. It should be interesting when the moose comes home seeing as I will probably watch that as well but the whole disassembly of a moose can take longer then 12 hours. The ladies who are very skilled at it down in the village say they can get it done in 12 hours, which means I know we can’t. I took some pictures of the skinning of the lynx but they are pretty gruesome so I don’t think I will post them.  Maybe of the moose.