LOS ELDERS.

Ayudamos a preparar la comida y los primeros en servirse fueron los Elders, los más ancianos. Eso si, antes tocaba rezar.

Muchos de ellos sólo se comunicaban en yup´ik, pero la verdad es que encontramos a algunos que hablaban inglés bastante bien y pudimos llegar a un entendimiento, fue muy interesante el intercambio de información acerca de nuestras respectivas culturas.

Y como vereis, hice buenas migas con alguno, en concreto con Gabriel Guest, que sabía algunas palabras de español y nos enseñó todo su repertorio con un extraño acento algo parecido al mexicano. Ahora nos escribimos por email y estoy aprendiendo muchas cosas nuevas sobre su manera de entender la vida.

La reunión anual terminó con numerosos aplausos, uno para los voluntarios españoles que nos hizo sacar los colores. Muchos de ellos estaban convencidos de que eramos misioneros, ¿tengo yo cara de eso?...y afortunadamente David les explicó lo que eramos en realidad, dos locos que se habían pagado un billete de avión para perderse durante un poco más de un mes en una zona rural de Alaska y trabajar en "de todo un poco", como se diría por nuestras tierras españolas...

P.S. Gabriel, here you are the translation. Have a nice time. Lorena.

We helped to prepare the lunch and the elders were the first to be served. The custom says that previously to have lunch or dinner you have to pray and so we did.

Most of the elders communicate among them using the yup'ik dialect but it was no problem to speak also in English. It is also true that some of them didn't understand English so sometimes they needed a translator during the conference. In any case, with most of them we made an effort and could to understand them. It was very interesting to exchange different points of view between so different cultures.

We made some good realtions with some of them as for example with Gabriel Guest who knew some spanish words and showed them to us using a tone simmilar to mexican. Nowadays we communicate each other by email and both are learnig many new things about our way of understanding life.

The annual meeting finished with lots of claps, even some of them dedicated to the spanish volunteers which made us to turn red. At the very beggining, a lot of them thought we were missionaries, who are not very well regarded or at least it's what we haven been told. Have we the face of missionaries? ;) David explained to them we weren't such people fortunately. What David explained to them was that we were two crazy people :)))) who had payed a flight to spend a month in the bush of Alaska and "to do a bit of everything" as we would say in Spain.

Keep in touch Gabriel.