Hello from Montana, where temperatures are still reaching 90 degrees! Sure is no sign of the harsh winter yet (but I'm sure that when it comes it will hit hard.)
There has been so much I've been wanting to blog and still so many more pictures from the first month that I've been needing to post.. but right when I was on a roll with posting, we had a slight incident of no electricity for several days. We are still running on the generator here at our house (there is some unknown legal drama surrounding why they can't install the electrical poles; they need to wait for the tribe's permission and for some reason they can't get it yet... just a typical situation on the reservation!)
So when the generator blew out one night last week, we "roughed it" for about 3 days with no electricity-- which was so completely not bad that I feel like I shouldn't even write about it. Really the only inconvenience was no hot water for showers... so we really couldn't complain. We were able to move all of our food to one of the school fridges, and even just used the stove in the teacher's room to cook dinner. We functioned by flashlight and candlelight and just lived extra simply for a while! I personally wish we just had to live without the generator at all (at least until winter ...though I definitely appreciate the hot showers!); it uses a lot of diesel fuel (which is expensive and not sustainable) and would just really force us to live even more simply. But I think I'm out-voted on that one...
We learned that a lot of the families on the reservation have to deal with problems like this all of the time. One of the teacher's aides told us that it's just like her house, how they never know when they're not going to have water or power. It makes us think how much we take it for granted at home ...and how some people-- in this same country-- have to live without the luxury of even such basic resources. I've known this- we all have- but it served as a grounding experience (no electrical pun intended.)
They finally fixed the generator, but we have to keep a close eye on it. We're thinking we won't see electricity installed before winter, if at all, which will bring further challenges. We shall see! Typical, typical.
In other news, our Ashland JV friends came to visit last weekend. We took them to Forth Smith, which is about 20 miles south of us, right down the road- by Yellowtail Dam, at the head of BigHorn Canyons- and is apparently a world-reknown fly fishing area. (We've really met people at church who are up here from Kentucky, Arizona, and even Mexico just to fish!) Like I said, we still have the remnants of summer heat here, so it was the perfect day to spend at the river (all of the pictures in this post are from the riverside.) Our friend Meredith said she felt very "Pride & Prejudice"-- like how they must have spent their leisure time in the old days, just sitting by a river, fishing, reading, picnicking. It was such a simple and enjoyable day!
So many more pictures to come... Crow Fair, our excursion in the BigHorns, Native American Week at school, pictures of our house here... they'll be up soon!
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