Beryozova Shkola Graduation 2011

The annual momentous village event, the Beryozova School Graduation, took place on May 12. The graduation followed the traditional pattern, with speeches, promotions, awards, and a play. Our students range from the very small...
to the somewhat larger...
...to the almost grownup:These kids are all reading above their grade levels, are advanced in math, and in general are a credit to both their parents and the three ladies who staff the school. The young lady in the red dress is Lukia. She came to my house long ago now, a child, and at that time I was impressed by her faultless manners. This year she participated in the Russian language Olympiada, a nationwide contest of Russian Language reading and writing, won a Gold Medal in the essay category, and will probably be published soon. Not bad for the Alaska bush. The young man in the black shirt towards the right, Ivan, walked off with so many awards that his parents should consider bringing a wheelbarrow to graduation! His sister did just as well.

Academics out of the way, we proceeded to the play. which (in my opinion) was the best they have ever done. This time they did it in English, which is nice for me because my command of Russian is less than Tarzan's idea of English. (I can read cyrillic -- but I have no idea what most of the words mean). Anyway the play concerned four Princesses, a King (daddy), some suitors, and a mystery: how did the princesses wear out one pair of shoes per day? Here, for instance, we see the Princesses, the King, and an unsuccessful suitor at left.
Alas, this suitor (the baker) fell asleep and couldn't solve the mystery. No princess for the baker. Eventually a knight in shining armor showed up. Being a soldier, he knew better than to fall asleep on watch.
Observe the guards at left, ready to defend the King. At right, the knight. He solved the central problem: the Princesses were traipsing off to an enchanted castle in the woods, and dancing the night away. Their shoes weren't up to this gig, so they wore out. With the secret out, the princesses danced some more for us.
And so the Knight won one of the princesses, the King was enlightened, and they all lived happily ever after (to coin a phrase).

And after, the Village mothers served up the traditional Russian food -- marvellous. A good time was had by all,

And now that it's summer I expect the Russian kids to show up at Chalupy Acres for more education. I show them how to make things with their own hands. I think this is a valuable bit of their education, even if it is somewhat erratic, since I don't control when they show up.

New Construction in the Village

Walking down the road the other day, I saw a new construction project in the Village.
You can see that the kids have built a wickiup or teepee or survival shelter or...
and a very healthy activity, too. Totally unsupervised, and much better than sitting around watching television.

The Russian Village

Sometime ago -- perhaps around 1980 -- a number of families escaped from the Former Soviet Union and somehow wound up in bush Alaska. ("The bush," by the way, is how those of us who live at some distance from the urban centers refer to our environment.) These people, with names like Reutov, Polushkin, and others, are "the Russian Village," as the rest of the Willow inhabitants call it. They are very traditional and very polite. One of the houses appears in the picture, taken obviously in spring because you can see bare ground. Their kids come to me for woodworking instruction. They usually wear traditional Russian dress; I find it very appealing. As kids anywhere, they are obsessed with armaments. Observe, in the second picture, the formidable variety of weaponry. Neoni (in the required long skirts), looks innocent and oblivious of the boys fighting each other, but this is not so, as you can see in the next pic. No wonder Napoleon and Hitler retreated before Moscow. But sometimes I feel like an arms merchant, a "dog of war" as some would have it. However, slowly I fit into the village in spite of the fact that I don't speak Russian very well. Once I took a course in Scientific Russian (reading). So I can puzzle out the Cyrillic alphabet, at least. The kids are completely bilingual; they attend the local school, which has about 15 students. All of them are two years ahead of their contemporaries in the public jail, I mean public school, system. Strangely enough, Beryozova school is a public state school. Some days Alaska really shines. In Russian "beryozka" is birch; Beryozova would mean "of the birches" or possibly "in the birches," Russian is not big on prepositions. But it's a lovely place to live.