Wayward Trail to Crooked Creek

It is rare to see the plan behind your life, but sometimes it seems that so many coincidences have led you to a certain point.  Since coming to Alaska, we have tried to do many, many different things to make homes and careers here, and not one of them worked out.  Rachel has been unable to find an opening with the schools in Seward, Ben couldn't wait forever for a solid job with the Forest Service, Rachel's job with the Seward schools is not one that she could see herself doing for another school year, much less until a teaching job opens up here, Ben's job with SeaView, although decent, is without possibility for promotion and/or moving into a better position, we looked into jobs in Homer which either ended up being a bust or we were unable to get, we were unable to find a house in Seward that we could afford and we were unable to find a way to get to another city/area that we would like to live in...  In short, although we have survived and certainly enjoyed ourselves in many ways, we have felt like there is no future for us here, and a couple of months ago we started looking into other options...

Thursday, April 12th, 2012
We left after work and headed to the Alaska Teacher Placement Job Fair being held in Anchorage on April 13th and 14th.  We went with the intention of finding jobs for both of us teaching in a remote village in Alaska.  Little did we know how exhausted, and yet elated, we would be in another 36 hours...

Friday, April 13th, 2012
We head into the job fair, suffering from severe lack of sleep after looking for hours for clothing for Rachel to feel comfortable in during interviews, and getting the dogs to settle down to sleep in the hotel, rather than barking at every single noise that they heard.  We went into the fair, into the pandemonium, the battleground of aspiring professionals, and began fighting for our place in the grand scheme.  Luckily, we had an advantage; just as in real battle, those who fight together have advantages, and as a teaching couple, within two hours we had six interviews for jobs with six different school districts.  The next 7 hours would continue to try us as we talked to person after person, "schmoozing" and talking ourselves up to every human resources person and superintendent that had a job that we were remotely interested in.  We left the fair a little after 5:00 PM, feeling tired, worn out, and a little discouraged when Dr. Marvel (yes, that is his name) asked us if we'd been offered any jobs.  But we were still determined to leave Anchorage with jobs...

Saturday, April 14th, 2012
Since we had already talked to all of the school districts with jobs that were somewhat interesting to us (and a couple that weren't), we decided to get a little extra sleep and head to the closing hours of the fair just a little before our first interview of the day; we had two more scheduled, and truth be told, we weren't interested in either of them, but would take them if offered.  Just as we were getting ready to leave, the phone rang.  On the other end was the principal of a district that we talked to only because we saw that they had a couple of Middle/High School Generalist positions available, that we had no intention of talking to initially, and that we never thought at the end of the first day would have been our first pick for a village to teach in.  She was calling to talk to us about signing "Letters of Intent"...we had no idea what that really meant, but we said that we would love to talk to them some more, and headed for the job fair a little early to do so.  When we got there, Rachel headed to their table to talk to them, and I headed to talk to Dr. Marvel to figure out what a Letter of Intent is.  "So you got jobs?" Dr. Marvel asked.  "We did?" I replied.  "Yeah, that's basically what that means!"  I headed over to join Rachel and sure enough, we went with the superintendent, signed letters of intent, and as long as nothing catastrophic happens, we will be the Middle/High School teachers (the only two!) for Crooked Creek, Alaska, for the foreseeable future...

We'll leave you with this, and more information and updates to follow...

 If you want to see where Crooked Creek is in general, just plug it into Google Maps.

Here's a little tour of the village, conducted by a couple of our future students, and filmed by one of the teachers that we will be replacing: