This is where we live

Last weekend, we went to Mount Rushmore. It is only about 20 minutes away from Rapid City, which is where we will be going for major shopping trips maybe once a month; at least that's what everyone else here does. I had been to the Monument before, but Joseph and the kids hadn't and they were pretty excited. When Josh first saw the carved Presidents, he laughed right out loud and said they were "silly". He hadn't believed us when we told us we were going to go see some faces carved in the side of a mountain!





This is the part of South Dakota that most people think of when they ruminate about this state: the lovely Black Hills where this national monument resides.


At least, I assume this is the part everyone thinks of, since people kept talking about how beautiful South Dakota is when we said we were moving here.


The Black Hills are indeed beautiful, covered with pine trees, moderate climate, etc. And we enjoyed our hike around Mount Rushmore (well, Elora and I did, Joseph had to take Josh back to the Visitor's Center to use the facilities, not to mention that the path didn't support strollers after about half-way, where all the stairs began.) Anyway, I say we enjoyed our hike because this was the first we had been surrounded by green and trees in the last month!



Don't get me wrong, I believe the rest of the state to be beautiful too, its just a different kind of beauty. And there are literally NO trees where we live. Oh wait, there might be a handful planted in front of the school, but we can't see them from our house. As you may know, we live in a community of about 25-30 houses behind the school that Joseph teaches at, on the Cheyenne Indian Reservation. The "town" where our mailing address says we live, is actually just a gas station and small store at a junction of two rural highways!

There are two sections to the community where we live. In this first section, there are only Native American families. They have to apply to the Tribal Council to get one of these nice houses, and it may take up to a year or more to be approved.



This second area is where many of the school employees live, both Native American and White. If you look at the larger copy of this picture, you may see that most of the homes need some outward repair, and may not be the highest quality... I wasn't happy with our place when we first moved in, but upon looking around I realized I didn't have much to complain about, and we actually have one of the better places to live!


Many of these homes and trailers are shared by single teachers who only come during the week then drive home on the weekends. Those teachers who do appear to have children are generally single parents, and their kids either attend the school or are shipped off to another town for all day Headstart during the day.

While the Native American section of the community has more families with small children, we never see them outside except in the evenings. In fact, it is rare for us to see any people at all during the day, except the occasional maintenance man. Sometimes it feels like we live in a ghost town!

Not that we're ever bored. There is plenty to do. For instance, Elora found this big pile of dirt the other day:



Then of course there is always all this grass to explore.




We see a lot of grasshoppers, crickets, and butterflies on our way to the mailboxes each day (our big excitement of the afternoon).


And hey, once Jonah found a stick!




Not to mention the dogs and cats that are all over the place. But at least the cats catch mice (which I'm pretty sure all the houses are infested with!) Unfortunately, while Josh likes the dogs from a distance, he is a little scared of them up close, ever since a very excited dog knocked him down twice a few weeks ago. Poor Josh.



Okay, I guess there is also the school playground. We went there once the week before school started. I thought it was a little ghetto, but the kids liked it. Unfortunately, now that school is in session we can't really go over there during the day, and in the later afternoon Jonah naps. This is the kindergarten area:


And this is the bigger kid playground. Look, you can see one of the trees at the school behind us! How exciting.




The nearby (40 minutes) town of Faith is where we get things like milk maybe once a week, and go to church on Sundays. Did you know it is the "T-Rex Capital of the World"? I guess the most complete T-Rex dinosaur, dubbed "Sue" was found near here, so there are a lot of dinosaur related things around this small town of 450 people. There is also a cute little park that my kids keep asking to go to, but we discovered after our first two weeks here that we can't afford to go driving to town all the time! Our rent is very cheap, but we more than make up for it in all the gas we have to buy.



Oh yeah, and there are occasionally Pow wows. We missed the big one over Labor Day weekend because of crummy weather, but we attended a smaller one the weekend before, in a nearby town called Cherry Creek. Joseph had told a boy in his class that he’d come, and the boy told him to show up between 1 and 2 to see him dance. We got there around 1:30 but nothing much was going on. The announcer kept saying they had so much time before they started, but the times he was giving kept panning out ever longer. They finally got started around 3:15! (The boy from class never came.)


It was very unorganized and not that exciting, but Elora really liked it. She loved all of the costumes and wanted to dance too.



Unexpectedly, an older lady came over and gave Elora a dress with bells to wear so she could dance too, which was pretty cool.


She was pretty excited and ran around a bit, but she was sad that I wouldn’t let her run out into the middle of the circle with everyone else.

Later, people seemed more and more annoyed at our kids. I decided that maybe it stemmed from the moment Josh shrieked at some little girl for picking up his water bottle. We had immediately told him to calm down, but the parents got their kids away from us, and people seemed to be avoiding us and turning their shoulder to us the rest of the day. Maybe it was my imagination.

Around the time we were ready to leave, about 5:00, Josh and Elora went and stood by a little boy and girl, the same girl Josh had yelled at. The kids had toys, and I was watching my two kids to see if they did anything, but they were just standing there. The other mom gave me a look, but I didn’t know what she wanted, then she leaned down to Josh and Elora and said, “ You need to go back over by your parents now.” That’s when I told Joseph it was time to go! I still don’t know what the deal was, but I was feeling a little singled out at that point. There were maybe four other white people there by the time we left.

Still, we saw some beautiful vistas on the way to the pow wow. While the grasslands look flat from a distance, they are really quite hilly:

And did you know there are vast fields of sunflowers in South Dakota? Along with many accompanying bee farmers.


Yup. This is where we live.

Sunday and adventures

This is a picture of the building where we'll be going to church. I don't know exactly when it was built, but it is very new. And yes, this is the whole building, consisting of the chapel area, a kitchen, a classroom, an office, and the bathrooms. (And it took me at least six tries to upload this small picture file!) I guess there is another chapel in a town farther away, but all the people attending there were from this town, so they finally closed that distant one and opened one here.

Today I got to speak in church. I think they were so excited to have a new speaker, which surprisingly made me less nervous about whether they would like what I had to say. Of course they would like it: I'm a new face, right? We misjudged how long it would take us to get there and arrived right when it was supposed to start....I bet they were getting more nervous than I was!

But they still had some nice prelude music playing even though no one plays the piano: they have a player piano with all the hymns programed into it.

Last week when we stopped in town and met the church people, I was asked to speak for about 15 minutes this Sunday about "us". I waited to hear what gospel topic I should also incorporate,but no such conversation was forthcoming. So I ventured the question, "Aannnd anything else?" Again I was instructed to just talk about us, and maybe "what the church means to me". Yeah. I don't like telling people too much about me, at least at our first meeting. And I know I don't have 15 minutes worth of "me" to talk about in church.

So I decided to dedicate half the talk to a recap of our lives (the condensed version) and the rest to something that somewhat related to our family: "Coping with trials." I felt a little pretentious , as I typed it, because really, no one in our family has died, no one has cancer or suffered a terrible accident and we actually found a job and aren't homeless! We are in pretty good shape! Then I felt a lot less sorry for myself, and more optimistic about everything in general.

The talk went pretty well, except I felt weird talking about us when half of the congregation was visitors who didn't really care: an older man, his two college-age sons, and their friend. That did make me glad I'd added a gospel topic too!

I was worried the kids would have a hard time realizing they were in Sacrament meeting, what with the small group and unusual circumstances. They did pretty good the first half, when I was still sitting with them. But when I was speaking it wasn't so great. They weren't loud or crying (thank goodness) but they kept wandering up to where I was speaking! The stand looks similar to other church buildings, with the low wall separating the speaker from the congregation, but there are no stairs at all, and everyone is sitting in the same padded folding chairs.

While Joseph took care of Jonah (I guess that's what he was doing?) Josh came and stood by me, giggling and looking around. After a few minutes, Elora decided she would get up too, and she stood next to me, walked around behind me, and eventually just sat down next to the Branch President and his councilor!

At least twice during the talk I paused for a second to quietly urge, "Go sit down now, please," thinking Joseph would get the message and maybe grab them back to their seats. Yeah right. But they were only a little distracting to everyone, right?

After my talk (I'm not sure how long it actually was, I couldn't see a clock) we sang the closing song and closed the meeting! They only have one hour of class instead of two, so the primary kids (my kids and the two others) went back to the classroom with some teachers, while we took turns reading a Conference talk for our lesson. A very old man was the teacher, and he kept calling me "Sis", it was cute. His wife kept telling me how excited they were to have us there, as did everyone else. After the lesson was over, everyone talked for quite a while, but when we got out to our car and I saw the time, it was only 11:30......church had started at 10:00. So I guess my talk wasn't that long, huh?

After church the Branch President kindly invited us to their house for lunch. Their house was about 16 miles north of town, ours is about 25 miles south east of town. But it was very nice to be able to sit and visit, even though Elora kept saying, "Yuck! I don't like this!"
Whose rude little girl is that, anyway?

The last few days

No way. I wrote this huge HUGE post about all thats been going on, but the internet here really sucks and I've been waiting for it to be on long enough so I could paste my whole post in here and publish it. Now it won't let me do even that!!!!
So to sum up...we're in South Dakota, Joseph is teaching on an Indian Reservation. It took a long time to get here, after a trip to my parent's for a week and to a family reunion by Yellostone for a few days.
We didn't get the house we were promised...we got a crappy white trash trailer that stinks and was filthy. I was mad because we cleaned out our apartment all DAY LONG...really, we left at 11:30 PM. These last people didn't even bother to take their soap or their hair out of the shower. Or all the dead bugs and sticky stuff. Eww. OH and it took 6 hours to unpack (literally), because no one came to help us, except maintenace, who Joseph asked to help with the big furniture. And one lady the last five minutes, who took in a few boxes.
We still may be moved to the nicer house, but we're waiting for someone to leave. This will benice, but meanwhile, I don't want to unpack anything if we have to move it again. But clutter and disorganization are very stressful to me. Argh.
The kids are bored to death, and very HOT. Also, they must still be stressed over the move, as one little person has had 7 accidents since we left Logan (even though they've been potty trained for over two years) and another little person doesn't want to take baths or eat dinners, and the last little person is super clingy...more so than ever before.
I get to speak in church on Sunday. To the other five people and my family. THey're saving Joseph to speak next month, so they don't use us all up at once. The two young women moved out last month, as did the other couple in their forties. Nice.
We have no phone, no internet most of the time, and no forwarding address yet. I feel cut off from everything! The nearest town is 40 minutes away, and super small.
Anyway, I better publish this before the internet shuts off again....this is the only time of day it actually works: after 10:30 at night! So if you don't hear from me for a while, now you know why.
Hopefully, once we get everything in place and move over to the other place (groan) things will be normal again!

ANNOUNCEMENT

We still need to work out some details- so a slight possibility this might not happen- but we are probably moving to South Dakota! Joseph was offered a job while we were driving to Cedar City to stay with my parents. It is on an Indian Reservation near the town of Faith- where luckily they do have a congregation of our church- and it is in the middle of nowhere!

Seriously, go find a google map of it. I can't even find where the houses are for the reservation!

At first I was not too excited, but when I look at it in the past tense, it seems kind of cool. See, if you say, "Yeah, we live on a Reservation far away from trees, mountains, and people," then it kind of sucks. But if you say, "Remember that year or two we lived on a reservation and learned how to commune with nature, you know, back before we lived in this awesome town?" Then it sounds like a cool story to tell your kids. Right?

We are pretty sure this offer came so late, because if it came any earlier in the month, we may have turned it down hoping for something better. But for now ,we will be spending a week at my parents house, then going to part of a family reunion in Idaho the next week. We will leave there early, pick up all of our belongings in storage in Logan (see, it works out because we'll be close to our stuff when we need to get it!) then driving for two days to South Dakota. Joseph has to absolutely be there by the 16th, and school starts the 23rd.

So unless there are any further developments this week, that is the plan.

Anyway, just wanted to update everyone... thanks for reading!