Honor • Duty • Respect - The Citadel

Even in a rainy, rural, one-stoplight town,sometimes Valerie Bell just wanted to wear heels.“I like to dress up,” she said, “but I feel that’s not thepractice here.”Bell just finished her internship year on Kodiak Island,Alaska. About a year ago, she and her husband agreedthat they both wanted an adventure. They discoveredThe Citadel’s far-reaching internship program extendedto what many call the Last Frontier. Bell applied and wasaccepted as an intern with the Kodiak Island BoroughSchool District. Soon afterward, the two put aside theirbeach towels and sunscreen and packed for life in a fjordcreated by glaciers thousands of years ago.Bell spent most of her time in an elementary school,implementing intervention techniques and behavioralmodification. The majority of her students were Filipinos whoseparents worked in nearby canneries. She even worked withstudents in remote villages who attended schools with just afew classrooms. Despite the clear differences between herstudents in Alaska and the fourth graders she taught at W.B.Goodwin Elementary School in North Charleston, Bell felt shemade good progress over the course of the year.“Kids are the same pretty much everywhere.”Still, she felt a culture shock. The sleepy town has only ahandful of restaurants. There’s a movie theater, but Bell andher husband couldn’t always count on it to play the latestreleases. For this young couple, finding social outings provedtougher than seeing Russia from their house. So when thetown hosted a Chocolate Festival, Bell was sure to be there. Butinstead of clunky rain-boots, she slipped on a pair of stilettos.“I was slightly overdressed,” she jokedAlicia Glick has a few myths to dispel about Kodiak Island.First, she did not spend her nights shivering in an iglooduring her internship inAlaska. In fact, she livedcomfortably upstairs inthe same centrally-heatedbuilding as Valerie Belland her husband. Second,Kodiak Island, despitehaving a latitude northof Moscow, hardly everfreezes. Third, bears don’troam the streets and peekinto kitchen windows,sniffing out a free meal.However, there are some major differences between life inCharleston and life on an island off the coast of mainlandAlaska. For instance, when her job demanded attention ina school far away from the central office, she arrangedfor a small prop plane to pick her up. In those hard-toreachlocations, Glick spent the day providing specialeducation services to rural school children. At the endof the day, she hopped back in the plane, shoulder-toshoulderwith the pilot, and flew home.Glick also quickly realized fresh food was scarce in hernew hometown. To take matters into her own hands, this22 The Citadel 2011