Alaska City, Village Kids Trade Places

The four students peered at the different kinds of butter in the refrigerator. So many choices, so many prices in this huge supermarket, almost 500 miles from their tiny village in western Alaska. “This one is $3.75,” said 13-year-old Aaron Ballot. “This one is $2.99 a pound,” teacher Peter Beachy said. “But this is the kind we have at home,” said Karstin Hadley, 14. At the village store, they have only one kind of butter and it costs $4.79.

The eighth-graders are from Anchorage, a city of 282,813 people, from the Inupiat Eskimo village of Buckland. They came as part of an exchange program. High school and middle school students from 30 schools are taking part in it. The program pairs village schools with city schools. The program helps build understanding between rural and city Alaskans. The students change places with one another.

The students and their teachers stay with host families. They visit their sister schools, work on educational projects and go on field trips together.

In Anchorage, the students from Buckland visited a farm. They went to the University of Alaska. They ate Big Macs and went to an indoor water park. They also shopped at huge malls. Buckland student Aaron Ballot went to see Spider-Man 3. It was only his second time at the cinema.

Ballot and his classmates also visited Mirror Lake Middle School. The school has 680 students. That’s more people than the entire village of Buckland.

The Buckland students had fun. Still, city life was different for them. “It’s too big for me,” said Hadley. “It’s too busy here.”

The week before, seventh-graders from Mirror Lake went to Buckland. Buckland is a treeless village. It is just below the Arctic Circle. The students went ice fishing and learned local dances. “It’s a different kind of culture, a different way of living,” the 13-year-old Tilly Cantor said of her first visit to a native village.

The Mirror Lake students had a chance to visit the local store. They were shocked to see how much food cost in Buckland. Buckland is so far from cities that it is hard to ship goods there. This makes the prices go up. For example, a large bag of potato chips cost $7.15.

Students had a chance to see the differences between two lives. Some things were the same. Most people have dogs. The teenagers have laptop computers. Many families had movie nights at home.