The Gallon Challenge

The JVC year is known for being a challenging experience and our community has been working hard at making sure that we challenge ourselves enough. One of the ways we recently challenged ourselves was by partaking in the gallon challenge.
For those of you not familiar with the challenge, don't assume things too quickly. (We are a dry community afterall!) The challenge involves an individual drinking an entire gallon of milk within a single hour. In our setup, we also added the stipulation that the milk must stay down in the challengers’ stomachs for an hour.
Now not all of us were felt we were up for the gallon challenge. In fact, just the boys and our visiting novice priest felt up to the challenge. The girls, as well as our support person, decided to try what seemed like a more achievable task – the saltine challenge. In this type of challenge an individual trys to consume 6 saltines in one minute.
Despite our strongest efforts, the milk and the saltines seemed to be the champions this time around. Perhaps though there will be a round 2 some time soon!

The Bathroom Challenge

Back at the time of orientation, there was talk of how the kitchen usually ends up being a place of common ground among communities. However, in the Hays community this year this is not quite so. This year, the room that seems to be getting the most attention is the bathroom!

It all started when we arrived in August and we found the essential elements of our bathroom on the front lawn. Granted it worked out nicely for our photo shoot that there were three toilets (one for each girl) and two bathtubs (one for each boy) but now a month or so into the volunteer year, we are all getting a little tired of the potty dances while we wait for our new bathrooms to be done.

To keep our minds off of the wait, we have placed bets on when the bathroom will be done. We are now onto our second set of bets after our first set of dates all past in August. This time around, our bets are going into October. Still some of us are keeping optimistic, with the soonest date for completion being this Friday.

With all seriousness though, we haven't felt the inconvenience of having one bathroom that much. Truly, we are fortunate to have an extra bathroom. The only issue - it's in our basement. And let's just say, that like most basements, it's creepy!

It's especially creepy when you have go in the middle of the night. Oddly enough, we all realized very recently that we all have the tendency of going during the night. Still probability has not played its part yet with any of us running into each other, scaring the living daylights out of one another. Hope is though soon enough the bet will be over and we can stop holding our bladders, and our breathe that we meet a creeper in our basement!

There's a lot going on here...

Be warned this is going to be a very long post to make up for the time since the last one.

Hays Pow wow

            Fortunately the pow wow was later this year, which allowed us to participate in the whole weekend.  The festivities began on Thursday with a youth pow wow.  The youth pow wow was a lot of fun because many of the kids that were dancing were Mission students. We also got a chance to try out our pow wow dancing and got in on a few specials. Four of us participated in the potato dance and we all lost miserably but had a lot of fun.

            The potato dance is done in pairs. The pair must hold a potato between their foreheads while dancing around the arena to a round dance song. Towards the end when all of us were out the announcers called some special moves that the dancers had to follow such as turning around and changing directions.

            Harry and David entered the street dance special and David won for the male dancers. The street dance is regular pow wow style dancing in street clothes. David won twenty five dollars which came in handy since we had not received our JVC stipends yet…

            On Friday night we headed down to the canyon for the first Grand Entry even though it was a little rainy and cold. We bundled up and packed in Margaret’s car and headed down for some fun. The pow wow is the biggest event in Hays and it was great to be there for the whole thing.  As the volunteers we are quite noticeable and we still don’t realize how many people now “know” us.  Everyone comes out to the pow wow so it was nice to be able to meet and see a lot of the students from Mission and their families as well as meet other local people that we have talked about and heard of so far.

            Saturday was the fun walk/run and the Hays Parade.  We got up early and drove down to the canyon for the fun walk/run even though it was still raining and very muddy. We only participated in the one-mile walk/run because we had to get back “downtown” to judge the parade.  Once we completed our run/walk we collected our shirts and headed to pick up our official ballots to judge the parade. After getting our ballots we headed home to make tea, coffee and hot chocolate before claiming our spot across from the post office. We also grabbed a bunch of grocery bags because we had been told of the large amount of candy that would be tossed our way.

            When the parade started we were a little distracted by the excitement of the candy that was being thrown at us and missed some of the horse back riders and had to write descriptions instead of numbers… but we got a lot of candy.

            Saturday and Sunday were also spent at the pow wow. On Sunday Father Bob held mass at the pow wow grounds and two children were baptized which was pretty neat however we were late since church was not right in the front yard.

Beginning of School

            The first week of work was spent preparing for school. We spent long hours at school setting up classrooms and laminating.

            School finally started on the Wednesday after the pow wow August 18^th. The first three days were half days, which is a nice way to settle back into the routine after the summer. Most of the students ride the bus to school and are there by 7:45am.  Almost all of the students eat breakfast at school before the bell rings. The first few days were a little crazy as the students settled back into the routine.  It was a wonderful feeling to be in the new school at the beginning of the new school year.

            The first full week of full-length days was exhausting for everyone but now we have all settled into the routine and each day seems to be better than the one before.

Memorial Rodeo

            The first weekend after school started there was a memorial rodeo for a former volunteers father-in-law who passed away last year.  The family held a youth and over 55 rodeo in memory of their father and grandfather.  The event lasted all weekend and we spent a lot of time there playing with the children and watching the events.  There is a large group of children from that family who attend school at Mission. On Saturday night there was fiddling and jigging in the evening.  We went expecting to be able to maybe jig and listen to the music but it was clear once we got there that we were going to be the source of entertainment for the children for the evening. At one point we helped two of the 5^th grade girls scare the younger children who were setting up their sleeping bags in a tee pee by walking up to the outside and hitting the canvas and as much as the boys want to deny it they screamed louder than all of the girls.

            On Sunday there was a giant feed and give away after church. We stuffed our faces with food before the giveaway and then we were given more food to take home when we helped clean up after the event.

Lewistown Metis Pow wow/ Labor Day weekend

            After school on Friday we set out for our first community camping trip. We drove to Lewistown, which is about an hour and a half from Hays for the Metis pow wow celebration.  We got to Lewistown around 6:30 and were greeted by a group of Mission students as we set up our tent.

            On Friday night were the jigging, fiddle and waltzing competitions along with a giant live auction.  We sat through fiddling, jigging and the live auction thinking that there would be a waltzing competition at the end because Father Bob and Margaret were going to compete. We were excited for this competition because last year Father Bob and Margaret were one of the best pairs and we were hoping that they would take first place this year (they didn’t win last year because the judges thought it would be a conflict of interest) but unfortunately there wasn’t a family that wanted to sponsor the competition this year so there wasn’t a competition.

            After our disappointment in not getting to watch Father Bob and Margaret dance we walked back to the tent to get ready for bed. We layered on many layers before climbing into the small tent for the night.  We were guessing that we would be cold since it has been pretty cold at night lately but the next morning we all admitted that we were warm if not hot during the night.

            On Saturday morning we headed into town to find food and watch the parade.  We stopped at Albertsons where we indulged in free samples and bought some bagels before finding a tree to eat under.  Then it was time to find the perfect parade watching spot.

            As we waited for the parade we searched an awesome antique store for wonderful things that we might be able to afford for the house but walked out empty handed to sit on the curb and wait for candy.  The parade started a little late but it was associated with a pow wow so we were not surprised.  Lets just say the parade was quaint. There were about four or five“floats” in the whole thing.  A float could be consisted a horse, a truck with people in the back, or a trailer with people on it anyway we got to tootsie pops to share between the five of us.

            After the parade we went back to the pow wow for the afternoon and grand entry. The grand entry was also very small but there were a lot of kids and some of our favorite dancers from the Hays pow wow were there.  One of the fifth graders taught us how to dance women’s traditional during an intertribal and David judged the men’s categories.

            On the way home we stopped at a fantastic restaurant called LBM or Little Big Man’s.  They everything you could dream of from pizza to a burger bar.  We quickly mad friends with the wait staff and became obsessed with the idea of a burger bar fight which we were told ahs never happened but we insisted that they should always be prepared and even considered starting the first one just to make sure they were ready. Once we had stuffed our faces at the burger bar we headed home to Hays.