A week in Træna

Instead of an "outdoor week" this week we had a "mini outreach week". The 15 students were broken up into groups of 3 and assigned an outreach location. We were given a budget and we had to plan travel and what we wanted to do while we were there. I went with two female students to Træna. Træna is the second smallest Kommune (county) in Norway. It is contains over 1000 islands but only four have people living on them. It is fairly far out in the sea and we spent 3 hours on a ferry to get there. Most of the people (about 300) live on Husøy, the island we went to. Husøy has the school, church, store, bank and post office (the last three are all in one building). The primary industry is fishing. They have a processing plant there where the fish are gutted and frozen in big blocks and sent off in big ships (mostly to Russia). We stayed at the Grendahus which had an apartment downstairs and a kitchen and hall upstairs. The hall is used for meetings or movies (they showed Shrek 3 while we were there). We spent quite a bit of time with the 10-12 year olds at the school. They were getting ready for a fund raiser on Thursday night. They were making cutting boards and butter knives to sell and practicing dances to perform. It was interesting to be immersed in Norwegian small town culture. One of the days I was supervising the wood shop class (I don't think that would have happened in the US). I felt pretty good that I was doing well at dances that were being taught to fifth graders. The dance teacher was just there for the week. He travels around to different schools teaching dance when he is not digging graves. He did such a good job. We had the kids over one night for games and pizza in the hall. We went Thursday to the gym at the school to see the dances and eat dinner with everyone. We also went to the old folks home to spend some time with them. Friday night we had an overnighter in the gym with games and a movie. That was chaos. None of us were very good at controlling 30 kids that were hopped up on Christmas soda and candy. Somehow I managed to survive and I didn't even kill anyone. They have church once a month (the priest and the organist travel around to different churches) and we were lucky enough to be there on the correct Sunday. One of the old ladies said she wanted to go with us if the weather was nice and it was a really nice day Sunday. We went in the morning to get her and pushed her in her wheelchair over to to the church. The priest left on the same ferry as us so we got to talk to him some on the way back.