Natural Helpers Retreat in St. Mary's

At Alakanuk, I am the sponsor for Natural Helpers. A group of students, grades 8-12, who are meant to be leaders and helpers for other students and community members. Our main focus is suicide prevention, counseling for victims of bullying, and many other topics pertaining to mental and physical safety. It has been a definite struggle to show them what leadership skills even are, but I hope that I can guide them to develop their skills, foster better friendships, and have a positive impact on many hurting people in the community.
In the picture above, we ladies helped the maintenance men unload and load printers for Alakanuk School. We had let eight Natural Helpers and chaperone, Clark, jump on the first plane, while this one was flying 15 new printers from the District Office in Mountain Village.
They seemed to enjoy the idea of helping the process go more quickly, so a few showed off their muscles. We got all of them to fit in one load with a little bit of jimmy-jamming and brain power! Natural Helpers in action!
We rode in a van with all of the windows intact and a heater-- a couple miles to St. Mary's. We actually got it up to 60! Our roads in Alakanuk have potholes the size of bath tubs. What's this? A hill? Hills in the background? A ROAD SIGN? I forgot what those looked like.
We were pretty excited about the white ground at St. Mary's! Alakanuk was brown for quite some time before gaining that clean layer of white.
We walked to the local store for some goodies. And they have a dairy aisle. Sour Cream and a whole GALLON of REAL milk!

The Natural Helpers retreat opened my eyes to the raw hurt that spreads to everyone in the villages. Suicide has been an epidemic which plagues villages. Hooper Bay has had about nine suicides this year. After almost an entire weekend of ice-breaker activities and sessions, all of us (about 85 people) sat in a circle around a candle on the gym floor. Students, sponsors, and chaperones shared stories of how they were affected by either someone who had committed suicide or how they had seriously thought about attempting it themselves. As the hour hand passed three hours, tears fell down my still face. (These quotes are not exact, but it will give you more of an idea of what I heard.)

"My sister threatened me to not call the cops or she would kill herself. She was saying she didn't care if she went to hell. Because hell couldn't be as bad as this life. After talking to her for hours, I knew I couldn't stop her and went to get help. She killed herself as soon as I left."

"I almost pulled the trigger. I would have killed myself to make [my parents] stop fighting."

"If only I had walked to his house to see what the explosion was. But, I just thought, 'Oh, boys will be boys.'"

"The kids still get things ready and run to the window expecting their uncle to come home from work. Then, they remember. And that's the hardest part."

Please pray for the grieving families and especially those who don't know how to handle such extreme stress.