by Elena Hamann (she/her) Bethel, AK ’25-26
My whole JV community stayed in our locale for the holidays. There are five of us in Bethel, and we all decided pretty early on that we weren’t going to travel out for any of the major holidays we may have visited home for as college students. Making the journey would be long, expensive and tiring, and by the time Christmas rolled around, we had plenty of local friends and grounding roommate rituals that offset most feelings of homesickness. We intentionally planned our celebrations around meals and having visitors – groceries bought with EBT, Christmas dinner with a ham gifted by someone’s service site, secret santa gifts for each other, eggnog, midnight mass, cheese plates and lots of hot chocolate and tea. We also had 2 JV visitors from different locales in Alaska stay with us between Christmas and New Year’s, adding to the joyous sense of togetherness. Between cooking, running around to look after the dogs of a couple local families, collecting and dropping people at the airport (which is five minutes from our house), and watching the new season of Stranger Things, the holiday season seemed to fly by in a blur of twinkle lights. I am endlessly thankful for my decision to stay in Bethel during this time, as it allowed me to strengthen and be embraced by the community network built up around us JVs.
I have found that spell of a JV year is not meant to be broken - to truly live simply, you need to challenge yourself to stay in one place and make do with what you have.
Bethel is by far the most remote locale under JVCNW – not connected to the road system, we have to take 2 planes to get from small town Western Alaska back down to the Lower 48. Its isolation makes it harder to source goods and leaves limited options for affordable groceries. As a community, we did our grocery shopping at Costco in Juneau before our fall retreat and brought storage totes of groceries back with us as checked baggage. This may seem like a hassle, but the Bethel version of simple living is a fun challenge for those who choose to take it on. Joy and gratitude are essential facets of life that living simply and mindfully in community have teach me.
Bethel is also unique in its rich native Yup’ik culture and place-based challenges. As a regional hub for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in southwest Alaska, it serves as a connection point between the 50-something native villages in the delta and the rest of Alaska – mainly Anchorage and the road system. We witnessed this interconnectedness firsthand during the aftermath of Typhoon Halong, which devastated several coastal villages and brought many state and national disaster relief organizations out to Bethel to help with evacuation and cleanup efforts. Disasters like Halong really underscore how vulnerable rural communities of color are to the growing threat of climate change. It is humbling and heartbreaking to see what we learned in school play out in real time. As volunteers working with vulnerable populations, we bear witness to the complex reality of inequality and search for meaning and purpose in giving back in what ways we can. It is especially important for us to listen to the voices of native leaders and tribal authorities to learn how we may best be of help rather than overstepping with good intentions.
Living in Bethel for the past six months has been an incredible learning and growth experience while taking in the wonders of Alaska. We are very privileged to have the JVCNW program, our friends, and our families supporting us in doing a year of service. The lessons of compassion, having an open mind and finding the beauty in small things that being a JV in Bethel has taught me will not be forgotten easily.
