Americans in Arles: 4th of July Party

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4th of July, anglais, Arles, Avignon, Case Western Reserve University, celebration, cooking, dancing, dessert, English, Europe, famille d'accueil, fashion, festival, firecrackers, fireworks, fondant, fondue, Fourth of July, francais, France, French, French cuisine, French food, French lessons, host family, IES, Independence, lessons, music, national anthem, national holiday, party, shopping, singing, solo, solo travel, student, study abroad, travel

(English translation below.)

Aujourd’hui, j’étais très occupée.  C’est la fête nationale de l’Independence d’Etats Unis !  Ma mère d’accueil m’a dit que je peux inviter tout le monde chez nous pour célébrer.  Après beaucoup d’organisation, nous avons décidé qui vais apporter des plats américains et différents.  Entre mes deux cours, je suis allée avec Alex pour acheter les billets à Genève ce week-end et pour faire du shopping à MonoPrix.  J’ai trouvé des ballons et des décorations pour la maison.  Alex et moi avons mangé chez moi où ma mère d’accueil a cuit des pates avec de la sauce aux tomates.  J’ai fait mes devoirs, bouillé de l’eau pour faire « Sweet Tea », et suis allée à mon deuxième cours.

J’ai fait les décorations après mon cours et puis suis allée à une maison à l’autre côté des Roquettes pour une leçon de la cuisine française et provençale.  Cinq autres étudiants et moi avons fait des déserts fondants et du chocolat avec une mère, sa fille, et leur chien.  La maison était mignonne et la nourriture était très bonne.  Je me suis dépêchée après la cours à Carrefour City pour acheter des œufs.  Il y avait beaucoup de monde qui ont fait une queue et qui n’étaient pas vraiment polis.

Chez moi, j’ai réchauffé mes « Baked Beans »,  mis mon « Sweet Tea » sur la table, et fini les décorations.  Pendant les prochaines quatre heures, presque tous les étudiants sont arrivés dans les groups différents et avec beaucoup d’alcool, des légumes, des desserts, et cetera.  Ils ont aimé beaucoup ce que j’ai fait, les chattons, et l’atmosphère.  J’ai joué la musique américaine sur mon ordinateur et j’ai fait des crêpes avec Nutella pour tout le monde.  Dehors, nous avons allumé des cierges magiques et des autres choses qui fument.  Nous avons chanté ensemble en face de ma maison la chanson nationale des Etats-Unis.  C’était une soirée absolument amusante, américaine, et formidable.

A la fin de la fête, beaucoup de monde est allé aux Roquettes pour une fête publique.  Je suis allée avec trois autres à la Rhône pour jeter des pétants.  Un homme nous a demandés ce qui passe et nous expliquions.  Nous avons eu un peu de peur parce que les pétants sont illégaux en France !  Je les ai trouvées avec bonne chance et l’assistance.  Mais l’homme était gentil ; le vent était encore fort pour les allumer !  Quand nous avons fini, nous sommes allés aussi aux Roquettes, puis à Paddy Mullins où des musiciens jouaient Red Hot Chili Peppers.  J’étais très fatigues quand je suis revenue chez moi !

*****

Today, I was very busy.  It’s the national day of Independence in the USA!  My host mother told me I can invite everything to our house to celebrate.  After a lot of organizing, we decided who would bring which American dishes.  Between my two classes, I went with Alex to buy our tickets to Geneva this weekend and to shop at MonoPrix.  I found ballons and decorations for the house.  Alex and I ate at my house where my host mom cooked pasta and tomato sauce.  I did my homework, boiled water for Sweet Tea, and went to my second class.

I made the decorations after my class and then went to a house on the other side of the Roquettes for a lesson on French Provencal cuisine.  Five other students and I made fondue desserts in chocolate with a mother, her daughter, and their dog.  The house was cute and the food was very good.  I then hurried after the course to Carrefour City to buy eggs.  There were a lot of people in line who weren’t very polite at all.

At my house, I reheated my Baked Beans, put my Sweet Tea on the table, and finished the decorations.  During the next four hours, nearly all of the students arrived in different groups and with lots of alcohol, vegetables, desserts, etc.  They really loved what I made, the kittens, and the atmosphere.  I played American music on my laptop and made crepes with Nutella for everyone.  Outside, we lit sparklers and smoke ball.  We sang together in front of my house the American national anthem.  It was an absolutely fun, American, amazing evening.

At the end of the party, a lot of people went to the Roquettes for a public party.  I went with three others to the Rhone to throw firecrackers.  A man asked us what was going on and we explained.  We were afraid because fireworks are illegal in France!  I found them with good luck and assistance.  But the man was kind; the wind was again strong for lighting the firecrackers!  When we were done, we went too the Roquettes as well, then to Paddy Mullins where some musicians were playing Red Hot Chili Peppers.  I was very tired when I returned home!

Cooking lesson.

Some of the decorations.

Grabbing from our American assortment.

Some of us outside in the middle of the party.

 

Sparklers 🙂

The swan’s in the fountain now??  During the crazy festivities.

Digging and Digging, then Dancing at the Night Box

Tags

adventure, Africa, boit de la nuit, Cameroon, Case Western Reserve University, climate, dancing, engineering, Engineers WIthout Borders, mountains, New Years, night club, solo, student, travel, village, weather, West Africa

Pictures to be added.

Batoula-Bafounda, Cameroon, Africa
Our crew got up early but it took 2 hours for us to actually start.  By then, it was 8am.

We were served breakfast (it always seems to be a selection of eggs, potatoes, or plantains with little variety).  I curled up on my usual spot on a big, leather couch and waited for the food to be served.  It always amazes me how much cooler the mountains of Cameroon are than the beaches were in Benin or Togo.  Granted, the days become much hotter, but I can work outside all day in jeans and feel fine.  In the mornings, I’m so thankful I thought to bring along a thin zip-up hoodie.  I don it every morning and don’t usually doff it until mid-afternoon.  I’ll come in every few times in the day to refill water bottles and get supplies and I’ll notice that the Italian tile floors are always cool and always being swept for the constantly accumulating masses of red dust.

Kate J. slept in and didn’t touch breakfast until much later.  We, the rest of us, started the tower and the trenches, but not much else happened.  When Kate J. finally got up, she left for Bafounda at 2pm or so for goods that we needed.  The labor stopped by 3pm for the day.  We aren’t sure how many will work tomorrow on account of New Years Day being a big thing here.  It sucks to have yet another holiday and getting nothing done when time here is valuable.  The locals don’t understand that we can’t just “stay an extra day or two”.  They think money is as plentiful as the water we speak of in the States.

Sometimes I wonder how big the village really is.  We are living up at the front of once of the entrances, but allegedly there is a river and many more areas that cannot even access what we will be installing.  I also wonder how far people travel in a day since I always see the same adults putzing around the well project.  They’re the only contributors, but I can’t blame the others.  It would be hard to take time out of your strenuous day to contribute to a well that is so far away that you will never access it.  But I’m also disappointed by how many elderly people and children show up to work.  Do none of the healthy people have time?  What can they possibly be doing in the day?  Are they all farming and leaving their four-year-olds to tote pickaxes in our trenches?

After dinner, I read in my room and napped a little while the others talked, then I came out and asked if we were going to go anywhere for the New Year.  How strange, to be in the New Year a solid 5 hours ahead of the east coast.  I would literally be waking up for a day of hard work before people in the States were in the New Year.  Kate H., Eric, Ryan, and I decided then to celebrate, so we went out to find a club.  As we were ready to cross the road, Eric with a headlight on his head and us with some semi-traditional clothes and sandals on, some villagers came out of the compound and asked us to join them.  We suddenly recognized them as the “pool boys” from the compound who spoke only French and their local dialects, wore impressively white pants in the dust, and were always sneaking around us girls and texting people on their phones.  They must be the hotties in town, I guess.

We congregated in the darkness.  The boys were so dark-skinned that I could only see their pants and the whites of their eyes in the moonlight.  We were standing under a tree that was hissing incessantly.  Cockroaches?  I almost preferred not knowing.  When the boys seemed to have a cue of where to go, we followed them 2km into the village to a very odd night club.  By odd, I mean… it looked like a garage.  It was a big cinder block square with obnoxious French-African dance music playing from some boom box and little colorful disco lights that you might find at a 6th-grade basement party.  When we walked in, the boys seemed to wave off the cover.  Everyone moved aside for these absolutely out-of-place visitors.  The large congregation at the door just stared at us.  When we walked in, we were handed glass bottles of Coke and wrapped bubblegum – bubblegum?!  We felt like we were given special treatment as chairs were put up on the stage for us and we were asked to sit down.  Of course, nothing is free; we then had to pay back for it all later.  But, in the meantime, we decided to dance.

Dancing in West Africa is definitely different, and it varies by country.  In Ouidah, dancing for men was – men don’t move their hips, the ladies do that.  Here, the men literally were grinding on each other to get the ladies’ attention.  Oh, and there were maybe a dozen men plus our guys, then me and Kate H. plus two girls who looked like they were 12.  The four of us tried to stay in a group, but the men kept stealing us and dancing us away.  I lied and said I was married to Ryan, Kate H. claimed Eric, and then the boys struggled to play the same games to win us back.  Every move we made was a strategic move to get away from the others, so we would literally cha-cha to a far corner and into a tight-knit circles.  But it never failed.  The boys danced right back in and made our boys uncomfortable.  It was so loud, everyone was speaking the same language: laughter, body movement, and facial expressions.  What an experience.  It wasn’t so enthralling that we couldn’t leave, it was just a bit tiring and still strangely intriguing – different.

We went back, after paying of course, and stumbled down the long trail by the moonlight.  I kept pointing out constellations, causing everyone to look up at the wrong times and stumble into washed-out ditches and cracks in the trail.  I started talking about lions, tigers, and beasts, and we gave ourselves chills thinking about the wild animals in Africa and asking ourselves what could possibly be waiting in the bushes of mountainous Cameroon?  When the boys led us under the hissing tree and back into the compound, I went back upstairs immediately.  Kate H. and I tried to clean up as quietly as we could so as not to wake up Amy or trip over her on the floor.  I texted people for New Years, then I curled up on my bedbug-infested mattress, rolled my dirty clothes into a ball for my pillow, and went to bed.  Could it really be 2013?

Defining “Native America”

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AISES, Akaka Bill, Alaska, Anchorage, beer, Case Western, culture, dancing, Flat Top Mountain, friendship, Hawai'ian, Mexican, Native American, Navajo, Northern Lights, Potawatomi, powwows, solo travel, stories, student

Continuing from our previous adventure, three more valuable points were learned tonight:

1. Although we, as Natives, live worlds apart and seem different on the outside, our cultures are unusually alike.
2. Native rights are not just an issue where there are reservations; the Hawai’ians have been victimized in incomprehensible ways as well.
3. There is a struggle even among Natives to properly identify our Alaskan, Hawai’ian, and Mexican cousins as ones of the rest of us.

Back at the hotel, the different brews were distributed.  One was actually made with pine needles.  I tasted all the different types we got, including the Hawai’ian kind Nathan insisted I try.  Everyone had criticized him for buying Hawai’ian beer until he explained it was for the non-Hawai’ians.  We played card games and laughed and wrestled.  As the night got later, we got louder and were warned a couple times to calm down.  The problem is, we’re Natives.  Give a Native a couple drinks and that’s about all it takes.  Even Tylynn, proud of her partying, was tipsy halfway through her second beer.  We all began questioning her stories, but in jest.  But the night wasn’t about beer, it was definitely about our last night together.  After some time, the beer was completely forgotten and we were showing each other pieces of our cultures.

I told the histories of my family, with the slave trade that had caused my 5^th-great-grandfather to be imprisoned and forever abandon white society, even though he was half Pekowi Shawnee.  I actually have a copy of his mother’s handwriting as she divvied up goods to his siblings in her will.  She thought he was dead.  Years later, he returned with a son from his Potawatomi wife.  He inherited some of his father’s goods, then returned to his tribe.  His grandson, my 3rd-great-grandfather, lived through the age of the Removal Act and ran his family into the mountains of West Virginia, then the wilds of Virginia.

My story fascinated the others, who had their own sad histories.  Karina grew up on the Navajo Reservation, with its known struggles and deficiencies.  Now she was at school in Hawai’i to get an education away from the Reservation.  She wanted to get out, and her story perfectly reflected the sentiments of Doug Littlehat, my other Navajo friend who left for Wisconsin and joined the Menominee Nation College.

Points 1-3, part #2: Hearing stories of suppression and difficulty, we all felt the impact of Europe on our ancestors and, to an extent, our current lives.  Not all of us were full-blooded, such as me, Nathan with his Irish father, and Kelsey who is an eclectic mix of Hawai’ian and Chinese with a Hispanic last name (Lopez).  Regardless, our lives were made drastically different because of the paths our ancestors were forced to take.

When Areidy spoke, she asked if I knew what she was.  “Mexican, right?” I said.  “Yeah,” she smiled.  “So… what tribe?” I asked.  “Mexican,” she answered, laughing.  “But aren’t you still… Aztec or something?” I asked.  She laughed some more.  “That’s the age-old question,” she said.  “We’re not Native.”  “But you are,” I said.  “Your people were here before the Europeans.”  “Yes,” she said, “But we’re not American.”  “You’re North American,” I said.  “But we’re Mexican,” she frowned.  “It’s a difficult identity.”  “Same as us,” said Nathan.  “We’re Native Hawai’ian.”  “But that makes no sense,” I argued.  “Because you’re in America now.  You’re all still Native peoples.  Why do we have to identify Alaskan Natives and Hawai’ian Natives separately anyway?  Especially Alaskan Natives.  They’re from the same genealogical path as the mainland ancestors!”

Thus began talk of the fall of the Kingdom of Hawai’i, white man’s deception on the Natives, the Akaka Bill, and how homeless people used to be shipped to the island.  “It’s so small…” I imagined.  “How can you stand having so many tourists on your island?  I bet they make up a huge part of the population year-round.”  Nathan nodded, “It’s true.”  They were all from the “Big Island”.  Although it was frustrating, they at least had their little secret coves and mountain tops to get away to with friends.  I couldn’t imagine my native land being a popular destination point.  And hearing the history of Hawai’i, I felt so angered by how Europeans had simply plucked the Queen from her throne, confined the Natives, then forced tourists and Americans onto the islands.  What an invasion of privacy!  And, for the first time in my life, I mourned over the absence of a Reservation.  The Reservations I had grown up knowing were always presented with evil connotations, as dry lands where people are imprisoned in order to maintain any sense of their identities.  But Hawai’i was in need of some kind of Reservation, of some kind of protection from the vast numbers destroying its tiny land and small group of people.  That was the purpose of the Akaka Bill: fighting for the restoration of some Native Hawai’ian identity.  But, Nathan said, not all Hawai’ians were in favor of it.  Those Natives felt it was “all or nothing”, meaning either give me my island and my Kingdom back or else you can have what’s left of it.

Just then, someone pulled out a pamphlet about Native scholarships.  Nathan pointed at the eligibility lines.  “See!” he said.  “For Native Americans and Alaskan Natives.  This one, oh this one does say for all three!” He pointed at a line that included “Native Hawaiians”, but frowned at the spelling.  “So you can’t apply to ones that don’t list you?” I asked.  “No,” Nathan said, “We could probably still apply, because it technically counts, it’s just we’re considered something different and yet always left out…”  “But you’re not that different, are you?” I asked.  “I don’t think so,” he said.  Then he turned to me and Karina.  “Tell us about your cultures.  We don’t know anything about the Mainland Natives.”

The next hour was full of me telling stories about the Northeastern Indians and Karina brushing over the tribes of the Southwest.  “What about dancing?” Nathan asked.  “Pow-wows!” Karina and I both answered, then I looked at her.  “Karina, are your pow-wows dancing competitions and drum competitions and food booths and the such, too?” I asked.  “Yes!” she answered.  “And the men have such cool dances, but the women… not so much.”  “Boring, right?!” I said, realizing what dances she was referring to.  She laughed and nodded.  “How do you dance in a Pow-wow?” asked Nathan.  As the others watched, Karina and I began stomping around in a circle to some music she found on her laptop.  We smiled at each other because it was exactly the same on both sides of the country.  Then she went, “The men dance like this!” and she imitated movements of the men who wear regalia and stamp with bells on their ankles.  “And the women, like this!” I said, extending my arms and hopping from foot to foot.  We laughed at how silly we looked.

“Wow,” said Karina.  “I never realized how alike we are.”  “Where do those dances come from, anyway?” I asked, knowing they couldn’t be from both of our cultures.  “I think they’re from the Plains Indians,” she said, which made sense.  Then Nathan cut in, “Your Pow-wows, that sounds just like our dances and drumming events!” he said.  “I never would have thought we could be so far apart and so different and yet…”  “Exactly the same,” we all finished together.  And it was so true, because we were.

I Hardly Know You… Take Me Somewhere Cool

Tags

adventures, AISES, Alaska, Anchorage, Case Western, culture, dancing, Doritos, experiences, frozen, gas station, glacier, ice, lake, Matanuska-Sustina, Native Alaska, Native American, popcorn, solo travel, student, Taco Bell, wolf

It was the last day of the Conference, already.  And yet, it was only three days long, so was that truly all that surprisingly how quickly it had passed?

I showed up at the Egan Center nice and early, looking forward to some breakfast before the session began.  I made the mistake of not picking up some coffee on the way.  For the next few hours, I was fighting my eyelids.  After all, I’d only had a couple hours of sleep.  As I wandered downstairs, I found that not many people had arrived.  I did, however, see Doug.  I grabbed a plate of food and sat down with him at a vendor’s table.  Our seats lasted long enough for Josh and Dean to join us before the vendor came to set up and we were moved to another table.

“What session are you going to see?” asked Josh.  “’Building Sustainable Roads’,” I said, “At least for the first one.”  He had something else in mind, so we went separate ways.  The gist of my lecture was that no road is really sustainable, but we do what we can do to deal with our high energy demands in transportation as well as road construction.  After the session, I took off running for the coffee shop.  I returned just after the start of the next presentation, ‘Sustainable Technology Initiatives in Hawai’i – Department of the Navy’.  The room was crowded, but I quickly found two rows of Hawai’ian friends with a seat beside Albert and Nathan.  I looked up and recognized Alysse and Christine, who smiled and waved at me.  Nathan and I jokingly filled out a survey about the Hawai’I presentation (he was biased!).  The talk was interesting; they discussed wave energy and ways of managing waste at the Navy base.

There were two more session slots.  I only had one other talk I was considering, one about Tribal Water Rights.  However, my friends were eager to leave.  They had met a Native Alaskan student from the University of Anchorage who had his vehicle at the event.  Albert had just run out with him to pick up a rental for the last day and my friends were hoping to go find the glacier up north.  They invited me to come.  As much as the lecture intrigued me, I decided I had already sat through two and that I could afford to enjoy a little more of Alaska with my friends.  I walked back to their hotel with them and waited for Albert to return.

Eventually, Albert was back.  We divided up and I took the backseat of his car with Isaiah.  We followed the others up the road out of Anchorage and into the Matanuska-Sustina Valley.  They wanted to find the glacier where I had been my first day.  On the way, I explained how this might be a problem.  As we kept driving, the problem because more clear to them.  Even if we made it all the way there, we would have trouble coming back before the cultural events on time… and we probably wouldn’t even be able to make it past security to the glacier itself.

We stopped at a gas station that had a Taco Bell (yes, even in Alaska) where we bought Doritos and popcorn snacks and decided to give the reins over to the lead car.  They’d drive as far as we could, then we would turn around.  For the next hour or so, we drove, drove, and drove.  We ate, laughed, took pictures, and joked.  Then, the car in front of us veered to a pullover.  We pulled in behind.

“A wolf!” Everyone jumped out and started taking pictures of a wolf and some birds fighting over a carcass on the ice below.  As we stood there, another truck began to pass us.  The people saw us and, despite being locals, then veered over as well and got out to take pictures.  Then the others came over.  “We’ve decided to turn around,” they said.  My friends were bummed.  At least I’d gotten to see the glacier, but I still felt sad for them.

We made up for it, though.  A few miles down the road on the way back, we pulled over again.  We had found a large, frozen lake.  Approaching it, no one wanted to get too close and fall in.  That didn’t last long.  We each got a little more and more brave.  Before we knew it, we were running across the entire lake, sliding on our feet and laying down to look at the incredible thickness of the ice and the bubbles trapped on the grasses below.  Nathan and Jeffrey counted to three and pushed towards each other, sliding in backwards opposite directions.  Isaiah ran and slid on his belly across the ice, like a comical penguin.  We took many pictures and Tylynn even built a tiny snowman.

We were freezing, but we were in a winter wonderland.  “It’s going to be getting dark soon,” someone said.  Sadly, we knew we had to go.  We packed back in the cars and made our way back to Anchorage.  Everyone in our car fell asleep except for Albert, who was driving, me, who felt bad sleeping in front of Albert (even though I was in the back), and Nathan, who was in the passenger seat and also didn’t want to sleep if Albert had to stay awake to drive us.  We admired the colors in the sky as the sun set.

Before we knew it, we were back at the hotel.  There were cultural events planned at the Egan Center, so we hurried off to see some, all the while discussing plans for how we would spend our last night.  We wanted to see the Northern Lights.  We put those thoughts on the backburner once we saw how filled the Egan Center was, teeming with Alaskan Native experiences.  “I’ve never seen anything Alaskan,” said Karina, and the rest of us nodded, mumbling the same notion.

In the first room, we watched a series of men, women, and children beat on drums and dance.  Their dances were just like one you might see in any of our cultures, except they were representing animals unique to Alaska.  One dance was a walrus dance.  The dancers even got on their sides and hopped like walruses at one point.  There was another dance, the “Ice Bump”, where dancers spun in circles and bumped hips like clashing icebergs.  Before leaving the room, we looked around at the various booths with jewelry made from tusks and bone.

The next room was hosting the Alaskan Olympic demonstrations.  Yes, Alaskan Natives have their very own Olympics.  Sports include activities their ancestors did to both keep warm, survive, and strengthen hunters and warriors.  Many events were complicated jumping events, requiring ridiculous amounts of core strength and balance.  The demonstrators, some of who held titles in their events, would balance on a hand then swing up and kick a ball suspended high above their heads.  In one three-person event, two men balanced a pole between the two of them while their partner hung from it by his crooked wrist.  The two pole-bearers then sprinted around the room until either they tipped off their companion or he gave out from fatigue.  That event is measure by successful distance covered.  But the winner of the night was the trampoline-like event, an activity once used to scan the tundra for food or enemies.  About thirty people crowded around an old seal-skin tarp and one person climbed on top.  After given very specific directions on how he was and wasn’t allowed to propel himself from the tarp, the people in the circle swayed in and out with “3, 2, 1…” and flung the man in the middle a couple stories into the air.  Looking up at the high ceiling, the woman running the event announced, “Now, this ceiling would not be nearly high enough if you were all competitors!” and we marveled at the height achieved, not able to imagine going higher.  “Sign a waiver for your turn!” she said, and people quickly rushed over.  Some of my friends helped pull the tarp, but none of us made the list to ride the ride.

I was ready to move on.  I was tired and excited for our evening expeditions.  I wasn’t alone.  Karina followed me out.  We stood in the hallway, looking back into the room that had just held the dances.  It was approaching 11pm by now and there was a woman in the room wearing a ridiculous hat.  The hat looked like something from outer space.  Karina burst out laughing, and I knew I wasn’t the only who found it strange.  I observed as lots of people gathered, cocked their heads, raised their eyebrows, and stared as these woman with the weird outfit began rapping in her Native tongue.  It might have been really cool if her language were conducive to the sounds of rapping, or even if she herself were capable of rapping well, but it clashed with the music and sounded like nails on a chalkboard.  We laughed and laughed and laughed, as to ourselves as we could, and were relieved when the others were finally out of the other room.  We pointed the lady out, the others laughed, and then we moved on to our outside adventures.  All I could think was, I hope I finally see those darn lights!!!  It’s one of those things I’ve had on my Bucket List forever, and I was ready to check it off!

Anchorage is All the Native Raaage!

Tags

AISES, Alaska, alcohol, Anchorage, Anchorage Mall, Boeing, Case Western, dance, dancing, diversity, Egan Center, Electric Slide, friendship, Gangnam Style, Michael Jackson, Native American, rave party, solo travel, student, Thriller

I never talked to Josh again that night.  I didn’t avoid him on purpose, but I was in need of spending time with more and more different people.  I didn’t want to be stuck in the same, stagnant group.  Besides, I was so enthralled with my new friends Kelsey, Karina, Nathan, Isaiah, Kamuela, Albert, Tylynn, and Jeffrey, all from the Hawai’ian school.  They introduced me to people like Riley (from a Californian tribe) and Areidy (Mexican).

Before the dance, Tylynn, Isaiah, and I went to the Anchorage mall to find some dinner.  I got odd Mexican food, and they tried a “tornado potato”.  It was all kind of lousy, and we laughed because it was Mexican food sold in Alaska by Asians!  When I told Isaiah I could go for some poi, he looked ready to hug me.  “I’m so glad you know what that is!” he said.  I told him I always spell Hawai’i with an apostrophe and he was equally excited, telling me it was a start.

The mall itself was unusually large and strangely laid out, with a shoe store sitting at the base of an elevator and several stories of steps.  We brought some food back to Kelsey, waited a little, then went to the dance.

The dance was sponsored by Boeing and I have never seen anything like it.  We were given shutter shades and glow sticks as well as fake teeth.  There were some snacks, but of course no alcohol.  I had slowly learned how taboo alcohol is in the Native culture.  Well, at least around the Elders.  The kids were just as crazy as any other.  However, “alcohol, illegal drugs, and harassment” are completely forbidden by AISES, so as to “reflect the ideas of our Native communities”.  We were expected to “promote the well-being and growth of all people” by supporting an avoidance of mind-altering substances.  I knew this was just centered around the fact that alcohol has such a grip on our Native communities, in ways we would like to forget.  However, it wasn’t stopping the youth at AISES.

Some people at the dance didn’t smell sober, but most were.  There were people dressed like any typical teenager, some wore ordinary clothes with large, Native jewelry, and then there were the Elders… men and women dressed very traditionally, standing around the dance floor.  There were tables, but not many used them.  Once the dancing started, I learned immediately how up-to-date this community was on their moves.  There was a Thriller dance competition where one of the winners aggressively danced backwards into Albert.  There was also a lot of Gangnam Style dancing and moves to dances that I didn’t even realize had moves.  We did the Electric Slide and several chains snaking around the floor.

Isaiah having a blast.

My Hawai’ian friends were the best dancers I had ever met, Tylynn in particular.  Isaiah taught me to relax and enjoy it as much as they did, then he asked me to slow dance with him.  This, I was better at.  When the salsa music came on, the whole room began cheering.  I guess Mexican culture is one of our own!  I danced with Isaiah and Jeffrey, mostly, and it was amazingly fun.  We left the dance floor completely exhausted, laughing at the Boeing representatives who must have found us absolutely insane.  But they sponsored a wonderful event.  It was everyone’s highlight of the Conference.

That night, we talked about buying some cases of local brews and finding a park to watch the Northern Lights from.  On the way back to my friends’ hotel, we got distracted by a cooler of ice cream.  I’m not sure how the dare began but, before I knew it, Karina, Isaiah, and I were standing outside without jackets, shoving ice cream down our throats as quickly as we could manage.  At one point, Isaiah even took off his shirt.  I was shaking so violently that I got ice cream all over my face.  Isaiah ran in behind the others who were too cold to continue taking photos.  Karina and I finished our ice cream, proud to have completed the challenge, and returned inside.

We sat around in the lobby, deciding what to do, when an extremely drunk Navajo guy and girl came into the lobby.  They introduced themselves.  The guy was more with it than the girl he had in tow, and she was clinging to his iPad.  He left her on a couch and went to the front desk.  On the way, he introduced himself to us… again.  We all looked at each other with raised eyebrows, not liking this guy very much.  Then Tylynn suddenly stood up.  “Should we help her?” she asked.  We looked over to see the girl passed out on the couch in a pool of vomit.

And thus began an endless night.  Rather than having the fun we intended, we babysat a poor drunk girl we didn’t even know.  But we felt like it was our duty.  Our duty to help her, to save her from the scumbag taking advantage of the fact that she was incoherent, to return her to her proper hotel and room, and to keep the Elders from witnessing the scene.  We managed to evade the man long enough, with the help of the sympathetic lobby woman (who wanted to cancel his room because she disliked him so much for what he was doing), then we slipped the girl into a cab.  Isaiah and I took her to her hotel.  I found her key and answered a call from the man, telling him to bug off.  She gave us money for the cab and we pulled her upstairs.  She was so sick and still vomiting that we couldn’t bear to leave her.  I called a recent friend on her phone who promised to show up immediately.  I put the girl’s phone on silent and charged it on a nearby charger.  When the friends came through the door, they told us to go downstairs where another girl could give us a ride.  I was relieved because Isaiah said he would walk me to my place, then go alone in the dark.  It was almost 5am and I couldn’t stand seeing him go alone.  We got into the Tahoe outside and were delivered home to sleep out the few hours that remained.

Oh, alcohol.  We try to move on, but you keep reminding us of our weaknesses.