Our First Home

Hello from Newtok!

Can you believe we finally made it after so many months of talking/planning!

Sorry it has taken so long to fill you guys in on what has been going on in the Hall's house...

We (meaning Emily) have been a little overwhelmed getting everything together for the first day of school and getting our house all situated.  

Newtok has been great so far. A little different than what we are used to, but we are definitely enjoying it! 

But it is official... we are all moved in!

I figured I would do a series of blog posts about Newtok - the first one about our first home! I'm sure you guessed it from the title.

Now our house is the first one we thought we were going to be in.  Grant, our principal, told us a month or so ago that we would be moved to a bigger trailer. Then, with an addition of a new male teacher, we got moved back to our original one.  

Our place is literally two rooms... 4 I guess if you want to count the arctic room and incinolet room.

The main rooms are the kitchen/sitting area and our bedroom.  

It definitely is small.. cozy I believe is a great term for it.

Everyone (even the Natives) refers to it as the small trailer behind the school.

But it is our first home together and has everything we need, so we are enjoying it!

 The front of our house

 Inside the arctic room

Using the arctic room as storage.

 This is from our front (only) door.  Fridge/oven on the left, couch and sink straight ahead.

I love our decorations for the couch!

This is our sink.  We have to haul water from the school in two two gallon jugs.  We use one as our water for the sink and the other as extra water to refill our washing jug and our Brita pitcher.  It drains into the bucket, where we have to dump it out so it won't overflow.

 Our fridge and stove/oven area. We have to start our stove tops with a lighter.

Our cabinet space! Since we do not have the most spacial kitchen, this is where most of our kitchen stuff is stored. There is a system to our madness!

 Walking into our bedroom.  This dresser holds most of my clothes and our toiletries. We recently added a mirror  to help make it easier to get ready! The door to the left is our incinolet room.  I will post a picture of what that looks like.

 We really do have a comfortable bed! To the right are shelves that Joshua uses to hold most of his clothes.

Our "closet".  We don't really need it yet, but once it gets colder, and my sweaters become bulkier, this will become a necessity. 

The incinolet room! It hangs just off of our bedroom.  It reminds me of an airplane toilet.  You have to put a liner inside the toilet and once you are done, push the start button and it starts burning everything.  You can tell if it works by: 1) it makes noise for almost 45 minutes and 2) it smells like your whole house is burning. We really are fortunate though in having one of these in our place so we do not have to go to the school every time we need to go to the restroom.  It's the small things!

TA-DA! You have now seen where the Hall's new home will be for at least this next year.  It may not look like much for you readers, but we appreciate it! 

Newtok has been great so far. The only thing that we have not gotten used to is the multitude of sunlight here.  We will be playing cards till 11 pm, only thinking it is around 5 because of the sunlight. For example: 

This picture was taking at 10:30 last night. Talk about a change! 

But thank you to everyone who thought of us as we made our way up north.  It has definitely been a change, but one we will appreciate for the rest of our lives! Stay in touch!