nspe.org
DECEMBER 2007
Expanding the Engineering Pipeline
The University of Alaska Anchorage is empowering native students to succeed as engineers and scientists and providing a source of technical talent for local industry. It's a model that's being replicated with indigenous students nationwide.
By Eva Kaplan-Leiserson
In Alaska, like other areas of the country, there aren't enough engineers to go around. Oil companies must often import staff from the "lower 48," which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in recruiting and relocation costs. And then, many employees quit after just a couple of years, unable to adjust to the cold and dark environment.
At the same time, many of the native people of Alaska struggle with low-quality education and eke out a living in traditional industries such as fishing. A suite of programs developed at the University of Alaska Anchorage, however, is creating a win-win situation, helping some Alaska Native students live their dreams of becoming engineers and scientists.
Developed by Herb Schroeder, associate dean of UAA's engineering school, the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program includes a pre-college program for high schoolers, a summer bridge experience for entering freshmen, a set of retention strategies for university students, and continuing services for graduate students.
The model has been so successful in attracting and retaining indigenous engineering and science students that five other colleges and universities in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington have implemented programs based on the ANSEP model. After an October conference in Anchorage, seven more in Washington, Arizona, Colorado, North Dakota, and South Dakota have committed to doing so.
At the six colleges and universities that have implemented ANSEP-based retention strategies, 70% of students have graduated or remain in the program. Among students who have completed the summer bridge program, that number shoots up to 85%. This compares to National Center for Education Statistics showing a six-year graduation rate of 36.5% for indigenous students in all disciplines.
Low Expectations
The story of ANSEP starts in the early 1990s, when Schroeder traveled to "honey bucket" villages in rural Alaska to research sanitation. In these villages, citizens haul buckets of sanitary waste to a town dump site, often spilling the contents en route, spreading pathogens, and creating health problems.|
Schroeder noticed communication problems between the Alaskan natives in the communities and the engineers from the public health service. "I decided you could mitigate some of the problems by having native engineers," Schroeder says. "In the whole two years I worked on that project, I never met a single native engineer." So the self-proclaimed "white guy" returned to the university determined to address the shortage of Alaska Natives who see engineering as a potential career path.
But the road was not a smooth one. At UAA there was a "widely held belief that native people couldn't do math and science," he says. And when he decided that he needed to reach out to high school students to ensure they were prepared for the tough college engineering curriculum, he faced similar views from high school officials.
The attitudes Schroeder encountered were representative of what he calls "systematic subjugation" of indigenous students, in which they're not considered college material. When Schroeder talked to high school officials, he got responses such as, "These students aren't cut out for college. They want to stay here [and] ride snow machines." And, "If we offered [higher-level math and science] courses, no one would take them and those that would would fail."
Years later, Schroeder would win the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring for developing the ANSEP program. In presenting the award in 2004, President Bush said something to Schroeder that perfectly summed up the resistance he encountered: "Under-represented minorities in this country suffer from the soft bigotry of low expectations."
For Alaskan natives, low success rates in higher education were the root of those expectations. But the ANSEP program has demonstrated that it's not that indigenous students aren't cut out for college, but that their prior education leaves them ill-prepared.
Diane Kaplan, president and CEO of the Rasmuson Foundation, a major supporter of ANSEP, explains that the quality of education in rural villages is poor. "Kids from small villages who might even be valedictorian in their high school class arrive at university so ill-prepared for success that they often flunk out in the first year," she says. "Imagine how devastating that's got to be to someone's morale."
What the ANSEP program has proven, Kaplan adds, is that once placed on a level playing field with students from larger towns and cities, indigenous students can not only survive but thrive in higher education.
"It's not because they're dumb, not because they're not motivated or don't have potential or aren't interested," says Kaplan. "It really seems that the problem has been…that they are ill-prepared to be successful, and have had people tell them they're not going to be successful, and they're believing it after a while."
Says Schroeder: "We've turned all those beliefs totally upside down."
Building the Model
In 1995, Schroeder started the university retention portion of his program, working with two native students to identify what they would need to feel welcome and be successful. Schroeder's weekly meetings with the students expanded into study groups, and he eventually wove in internships to help students explore different engineering jobs.
Today, retention efforts include co-enrollment of native students in classes to support each other; twice-weekly group study sessions led by more-advanced peers; weekly team-building and networking meetings with students, faculty, alumni, and industry partners; and summer internships at partner companies. If students participate in all components and keep a 2.0 GPA, they can earn scholarships to cover the majority of their schooling costs.
Teamwork is essential to the program and illustrates its primary belief. "Everything we do is based on the fundamental indigenous value that community comes before the individual," says Schroeder.
But the associate dean found that he was still doing a lot of "damage control" with students unprepared for university courses. After coming across a summer bridge program at the University of Washington that brought high school graduates to the university campus before they started school there, he launched a similar program at UAA in 1998.
In the nine-week bridge program, students take two hours of pre-calculus class in the mornings; work an internship with industry partners like BP, Alyeska Pipeline, or ConocoPhillips for six hours during the day; and then do more math with peer tutors in the evening. On Friday afternoons students attend brown-bag sessions with industry professionals to learn about their jobs, and on the weekends students can participate in group activities like go-carting and laser tag.
Although the program was successful, Schroeder found that students were still too far behind. So in 2002, he added the pre-college program for high schoolers.
Flying to Kotzebue, on Alaska's west coast and 33 miles north of the Arctic Circle, Schroeder met with 10 high school juniors that friends had told him would be successful in university studies. He brought parts for 10 computers and offered to teach the students how to build and operate the machines. The requirement was that they had to take trigonometry in high school.
All 10 students were eager to participate, but there was one catch: The school didn't offer the class. Schroeder urged the students to petition the principal for it. Now the school offers trigonometry, physics, and chemistry, Schroeder says, and its students are graduating from UAA with engineering degrees.
Schroeder's idea is now a reality in 43 high schools in Alaska, Hawaii, and Washington. If students take trigonometry, physics, and chemistry, build a computer one year, and teach another student to do so the next year, they're rewarded by being allowed to keep the computer they built. Initially funded by NSF, the program is now supported by industry partners.
The program gives students not only a vision of what they might become, says Fran Ulmer, interim chancellor at UAA, but also the necessary tools and skills to achieve that goal. Schroeder, she says, has "opened up the doors and windows of people's lives in a very powerful way."
Why It Works
In the 10 years before ANSEP, UAA's engineering program graduated three native students. Now, in the 2007–2008 school year alone, there are more than 350 native engineering students at UAA, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Alaska's Kuskokwim Community College, the University of Washington, the University of Hawaii Manoa, and Hawaii's Kapiolani Community College. About 200 more indigenous students are studying science at those schools.
What are the reasons for the model's success? The suite of programs that prepare students for university-level work is key. But equally important is the atmosphere that the retention program creates. For students and partners in ANSEP, it's a feeling of family and home.
Indigenous students come to study far from their villages and people they know, and they land in an urban environment vastly different than what they are used to. Through group study sessions; Friday afternoon pizza meetings; and organized activities like bowling, snowboarding, and rock climbing, ANSEP reinforces its group dynamic and creates bonds between participants and with faculty, alumni, and industry mentors.
The ideas of family and home are much a part of the 14,000-square-foot building that serves as ANSEP's headquarters. The ANSEP building was designed to look like a canoe and is decorated with indigenous art. Built with industry and foundation support and money from the state of Alaska, the building opened in October 2006. It is a place, Schroeder says, where native students can feel comfortable and "be native."
In addition to recitation rooms and offices, the building has a space for native dance performances and a kitchen where father-figure Schroeder can often be found on Sundays cooking up a meal for the students.
But even before the building opened, ANSEP was providing students with a sense of family. It is that feeling of community and belonging to which Matt Calhoun, a graduate student at UAA and the first ANSEP graduate, credits his academic success. Prior to joining as a sophomore, he says, "I just felt alone and distant to the point where I almost didn't continue college."
But ANSEP students, who share similar backgrounds and goals, support and help each other. Jenny Jemison, a senior at UAA who serves as a recitation leader for lower-level students, jokes, "I'm graduating in the spring, and I feel like I should have 70 other names on my diploma."
This team approach is perfect for preparing future engineers, explains junior Kelvin Goode, since much of engineering work is done in teams. "This program is pre-paring us for the engineering world from the moment we step into college because they emphasize teamwork and group thinking," he says.
Companies that host student interns and hire graduates believe that ANSEP students are better prepared than the average student. Kristi Acuff, senior vice president of employee and external relations for Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, says participants are high-caliber workers with a good work ethic. "ANSEP students just excel," she says. "We've been very impressed with them."
With an internship every summer, students are highly prepared when they start their professional careers. Every graduate so far has gone on to work for one of the 50 industry partners, Schroeder says. And when the British energy company BP recently recruited at UAA, Schroeder reports, seven of the eight people picked were ANSEP students.
"These students are competing with the best and the brightest from the whole world," he says. "Because they're BP, they're not going to lower their standards for the talent they bring into the company."
Another sign of success is that non-indigenous students are now joining the program, attracted by ANSEP's team dynamic and elite reputation. ANSEP does not discriminate and welcomes them.
Further Application?
As the ANSEP model spreads beyond UAA and Alaska, some believe its impact could go even further.
"I think he's created a really good educational model for retaining students into an educational program," says Carolyn Smith, operations manager at NANA Development Corporation, an ANSEP partner. UAA's Ulmer says the school is discussing the applicability of the model for growing the next generation of K–12 teachers.
Kaplan believes the ANSEP strategies could be applied to many different disciplines. "It's not really about engineering," she says. "It's about having an attitude that the students can be successful and giving them the support they need."
She continues, "What Herb has created, it's not rocket science. It's really common sense and commitment."
Says Acuff about Schroeder's eventual retirement: "The biggest hope is that he trains somebody right behind him who has the same heart, because he's got an awfully big heart towards this program and it's made it very successful."
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11.30.2007
America's Taxi Cab Capital
From the Los Angeles Times
America's taxi capital: Bethel, Alaska
With one driver for every 62 residents, the Albanian and Korean cabbies drive circles around other towns. Well, it's just one circle: Only 10 miles of road are paved.
By Tomas Alex Tizon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 30, 2007
BETHEL, ALASKA — Atiny, round-faced woman stands in a field of ice, a solitary figure in the tundra, waiting for a ride. From one hand dangles several plastic grocery bags. With her free hand, she flicks a finger as if inscribing a single scratch in the air, an almost imperceptible gesture.
A taxicab appears from a cloud of mist. It is an old, white Chevy, so splattered with mud there is hardly any white to see. On the roof glows a green sign that reads "Kusko."
"Hello, dear," the driver says.
"I'd like to go home," says Lucy Daniel, folding herself in the back seat among her bags.
Daniel, 65, a Yupik Eskimo who grew up riding dog sleds and paddling seal-skin kayaks along the Bering coast, now takes a cab everywhere she goes:
To work or to church or, like this afternoon, to the general store to pick up supplies, and then back to her house. Or whenever she goes ice-fishing for pike at her favorite spot along the Kuskokwim River east of here. She tells the driver: "I need 45 minutes." At the appointed time, the driver returns to get Daniel and her gear and, typically, one or two pike as long as a small woman's leg. The fish go in the trunk.
It's because of residents like Daniel that this remote village in southwest Alaska has become the unlikely taxicab capital of the United States. Bethel (population 5,800), buzzes with 93 taxi drivers, or roughly one cabbie for every 62 residents. That's by far more taxi drivers per capita than anywhere else in the country, according to Alfred LaGasse, executive vice president of the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Assn., the nation's largest cab organization.
Furthermore, Bethel only has about 10 miles of paved roads, which means there are about nine cabdrivers per paved mile. Dirt roads, branching off the arterials, add another 20 miles. These side streets, pockmarked by pond-sized depressions, are sometimes negotiable, sometimes not.
The taxi drivers spend most of their time on the paved roads, which form a loop connecting the most popular destinations: two general stores, the post office, the hospital and the airport.
"That's what I do: go in circles," says Bilal Selmani, the cabdriver who has picked up Daniel. Everyone calls him Lincoln. "Every hour, every day, every month. Round and round. Thirty years."
The taxis come in all makes and models, all colors and conditions, from brand new to barely legal. By the end of the day, they all end up looking uniformly Alaskan, that is, covered in a film of silt, slightly beat up but more or less functional.
Taxis rumble day and night, through fog and storm and minus-40 degree cold. In the process, cabdrivers weave themselves into the lives of residents to a degree unique in Alaska, or perhaps anywhere. The longtime drivers know everyone in town by face, first name or address. They know most everyone's stories.
They overhear arguments and love-struck whispers, they listen to confessions and tall tales and regrets. They pick up children from school. They shuttle travelers to and from the airport. They deliver everything -- moose meat, groceries, heavy-machine parts. They chauffeur all-night revelries, wedding parties and sometimes the dead.
The majority of riders are Yupik Eskimos. The taxi drivers -- most of them Albanian or Korean immigrants -- have their own tales, spanning continents and oceans but ending here, in a spot on the American frontier that most Americans have never seen or heard of.
Lincoln stops in front of a small square house in a subdivision of small square houses called Tundra Ridge. Daniel eases out, hands him seven one-dollar bills for the 5-minute drive. The flat rate is $5 per passenger in town, $7 per passenger to the outskirts.
"Bye," Daniel says. Like many who live in Bethel, she is originally from Tuntutuliak, a nearby Yupik village that survives on fishing and hunting. Daniel moved to "the city" in 1971 because, she says, "there was nothing for me in Tuntutuliak."
With her five children grown and her husband gone, Daniel spends her mornings working in a school cafeteria. She never learned to drive because, she says, "big machines scare me."
In any case, she can't afford a car, and even if she could buy a junker, she can't afford to have it transported to Bethel. It would cost $2,000 to $4,000 by barge or plane.
No roads lead to Bethel. What Daniel calls a city is a dusty, disheveled conglomeration of shacks and warehouses in the middle of nowhere -- nowhere being the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a treeless, permanently frozen plain the size of Utah. Culturally and geologically, the delta has more in common with far-eastern Siberia than with the rest of the United States.
Bethel, 40 miles inland from the Bering Sea and 400 miles west of Anchorage, is the hub for 56 Yupik villages that sprinkle the tundra like flakes of dried seaweed. A traditionally nomadic people, the Yupiks, like Daniel, began living in fixed villages such as Bethel only in the last 50 to 100 years.
They come to Bethel to work. It's also the primary reason outsiders come here. Bethel, the governmental and commercial center of the region, is a no-frills working town, where people draw wages in construction, freight, government administration and air travel. Then there are the taxis.
For Lincoln, the path to the American dream led from a farming town in eastern Albania, where he was born, to Connecticut and finally here. "I ask friend, 'Where can I make money fast?' He tells me, 'Alaska.' I drive eight days to Anchorage." A friend in Anchorage told him he could make a killing driving cab in the bush.
Lincoln, 53, has been a taxi driver in Bethel since 1977. He is short and stocky, with deep-set eyes and a prominent Roman nose. When he first arrived on the tundra, he had a long, black beard. One of his earliest customers, a native, marveled: "You look like Abraham Lincoln."
From then on, Bilal Selmani went by the name of the nation's 16th president. Most villagers don't know his real name.
During his first 25 years of driving taxi, Lincoln worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, nine months of the year. He would spend three months with family in Albania. Although his earnings might seem meager to many Americans, they represented a bounty for farmers in Albania. Word spread of his good fortune, and soon other Albanians trekked to Bethel to drive in circles for cash.
Between the late 1970s and early '90s, Albanians dominated the taxi business. Today, more than 100 townspeople claim Albanian ancestry.
Six years ago Lincoln brought his wife and two sons here. One son, Perparim, 24, drives graveyard after Lincoln finishes his day shift. When the car breaks down, Lincoln's other son, Lumni, 27, an auto mechanic, fixes it.
After dropping off Daniel at her home, Lincoln's workday proceeds like many others, with routine pickups and drop-offs.
He finishes an airport run, then picks up a woman and her infant daughter. The woman, in her early 20s, is crying. Lincoln helps her load the trunk with moving boxes. "It's a happy day. I'm finally free," says the woman, who has just broken up with her boyfriend. "Happy, happy," she says through tears. Soon her baby starts crying too.
After picking her up at a dilapidated trailer on one side of town, Lincoln drops her off at a dilapidated mobile home on the other side. "My life can begin," she says. Lincoln helps her with the boxes, each one labeled. Baby Clothes. Stereo & Music. Stuff.
Toward the end of his shift, Lincoln parks in front of the AC (Alaska Commercial) store, the same one where he picked up Daniel earlier in the day. It was quiet when he picked her up. Now the parking lot buzzes with people and cars. Most of the cars are taxis, and most of the drivers are Korean.
He gestures toward a couple of Koreans sharing a smoke between their cabs.
"Sixteen, 17 years ago, one or two Koreans," Lincoln says. "Now. Look. They take over."
"Mos-quito," the man says.
Yun Lee, 58, is describing what he hates most about Bethel. "Snow, not bad. Cold, OK. Mos-quito, big problem."
Lee has been driving cab here for about 1 1/2 years. Before that, he lived in Torrance for six months, and before that he had spent his entire life near Seoul. In Torrance he saw an ad in one of the Korean-language newspapers. The ad said something to the effect of Big Money, Big Adventure -- Come to Alaska!
Lee answered the ad and he has been driving loops on the tundra ever since. He has since learned that the first Korean cabdriver in Bethel started in the early 1990s.
Now Korean immigrants, who number between 100 and 130, own four of the five cab companies and all but three of Bethel's 12 restaurants. They're also buying up hotels and small businesses. The only video-rental store is Korean-owned.
Lee lives in a small apartment with other Korean cabbies. He works seven days a week. Work and sleep make up the totality of his existence.
Lee looks younger than his age, with smooth skin, a square jaw and a natural expression that seems to exude mirth. He is learning English from cassette tapes he listens to during much of his 12-hour shift. Today he is learning about outdoor gear. "Umbrella," the tape says. "Rubber boots." "Raincoat." Lee mimics the words.
Outside the post office, he stops for two men. He turns the volume down. The men appear to be in their mid- to late-20sand they seem strangely sullen. "Sub shop," one says.
The men hop in and the smell of liquor immediately fills the cab. The two pass a bottle between them. They snicker.
Lee pulls up to the sub shop, and the two men exit out of opposite doors and walk swiftly away. By the time Lee gets out of his cab, they're running. "Excuse me!" he yells in vain. Lee sinks into his seat, jaw set hard, and he turns the volume way up: "Snow shoes." "Parka." "Mittens."
Getting stiffed is part of the job. It happens once or twice a month, Lee says. Fortunately the village is small enough that sooner or later Lee will run into the two again, and he will ask for his fare. It's not like he can afford to give rides away.
After paying his overhead -- gas, dispatcher fees, insurance -- he is lucky to make $200 a day. In a place like Bethel, where consumer goods can cost double what they are worth in the Lower 48, a couple of hundred dollars doesn't go very far.
But the Koreans here are famous for scrimping and saving, and after a few years of driving, many take their cash and go home, though a few stay and invest in a business.
The best restaurant in town, the VIP, serves Korean and American cuisine. It was opened a few years ago by a Korean woman, another immigrant who drove a cab for years.
There are 16 female cabdrivers in town, most of them Koreans with limited English skills.
Which is just as well, says Alla Tinker, because they don't want to understand much of what their male customers say.
"The men, when they've been drinking, will come on to you," says Tinker, 35.
"I've had guys pay me to drive them around town all night just so they could hang out with me.
"What can I say? They're men."
The Koreans and Albanians tolerate each other. Still, the Albanians envy the Koreans for their success and their seeming aloofness. The Koreans tend to stay among themselves. The Albanians can be clannish too.
The Yupiks, who have publicly welcomed each group, privately grumble about both: the Koreans for being curt, the Albanians blustery.
Tinker hears it from all sides. She is one of the few Yupik taxi drivers in the village. She is friends with all the Albanian drivers, but the company she drives for is owned by a Korean.
"They cut each other up, but they're not openly hostile," Tinker says one afternoon as snow falls. Bethel is never prettier than after fresh snow. Tinker plows through town in her taxi, cruising for fares. "It doesn't look like the rest of America, but it's America here. Everybody's just trying to make money."
At the Larsen Subdivision, she picks up an elderly Yupik woman, Esther Green.
"Hi there!" Tinker says warmly.
"I haven't seen you in a long time," Green says. Green was Tinker's kindergarten teacher. It had been months since Tinker last gave Green a ride. "How have you been?"
The women speak in Yupik, laughing and exchanging news. Tinker stays connected to the community by talking with passengers. She also gets to share the goings-on in her life.
A single mother with two teenage daughters, Tinker has recently moved in with her mother to save money.
Tinker was born and raised in the Bethel area, and she wants nothing more than to get out. She says so to Green, who acts as if she has heard it before.
"OK then, bye-bye!" Green says, climbing out of the taxi.
But Tinker continues with her line of thought.
"One more year of this," she says. "Then I'm gone."
Her plan is to drive as many hours as she can, save as much money as possible, and then move to Anchorage, a real city, with tall buildings and universities and restaurants and movie theaters.
But more than anything else, she says, she is looking forward to getting in a car, stepping hard on the gas and driving, for once not in an endless loop, but straight, past the city limits, past everything familiar, to wherever the road leads.
tomas.alex.tizon@latimes.com
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America's taxi capital: Bethel, Alaska
With one driver for every 62 residents, the Albanian and Korean cabbies drive circles around other towns. Well, it's just one circle: Only 10 miles of road are paved.
By Tomas Alex Tizon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
November 30, 2007
BETHEL, ALASKA — Atiny, round-faced woman stands in a field of ice, a solitary figure in the tundra, waiting for a ride. From one hand dangles several plastic grocery bags. With her free hand, she flicks a finger as if inscribing a single scratch in the air, an almost imperceptible gesture.
A taxicab appears from a cloud of mist. It is an old, white Chevy, so splattered with mud there is hardly any white to see. On the roof glows a green sign that reads "Kusko."
"Hello, dear," the driver says.
"I'd like to go home," says Lucy Daniel, folding herself in the back seat among her bags.
Daniel, 65, a Yupik Eskimo who grew up riding dog sleds and paddling seal-skin kayaks along the Bering coast, now takes a cab everywhere she goes:
To work or to church or, like this afternoon, to the general store to pick up supplies, and then back to her house. Or whenever she goes ice-fishing for pike at her favorite spot along the Kuskokwim River east of here. She tells the driver: "I need 45 minutes." At the appointed time, the driver returns to get Daniel and her gear and, typically, one or two pike as long as a small woman's leg. The fish go in the trunk.
It's because of residents like Daniel that this remote village in southwest Alaska has become the unlikely taxicab capital of the United States. Bethel (population 5,800), buzzes with 93 taxi drivers, or roughly one cabbie for every 62 residents. That's by far more taxi drivers per capita than anywhere else in the country, according to Alfred LaGasse, executive vice president of the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Assn., the nation's largest cab organization.
Furthermore, Bethel only has about 10 miles of paved roads, which means there are about nine cabdrivers per paved mile. Dirt roads, branching off the arterials, add another 20 miles. These side streets, pockmarked by pond-sized depressions, are sometimes negotiable, sometimes not.
The taxi drivers spend most of their time on the paved roads, which form a loop connecting the most popular destinations: two general stores, the post office, the hospital and the airport.
"That's what I do: go in circles," says Bilal Selmani, the cabdriver who has picked up Daniel. Everyone calls him Lincoln. "Every hour, every day, every month. Round and round. Thirty years."
The taxis come in all makes and models, all colors and conditions, from brand new to barely legal. By the end of the day, they all end up looking uniformly Alaskan, that is, covered in a film of silt, slightly beat up but more or less functional.
Taxis rumble day and night, through fog and storm and minus-40 degree cold. In the process, cabdrivers weave themselves into the lives of residents to a degree unique in Alaska, or perhaps anywhere. The longtime drivers know everyone in town by face, first name or address. They know most everyone's stories.
They overhear arguments and love-struck whispers, they listen to confessions and tall tales and regrets. They pick up children from school. They shuttle travelers to and from the airport. They deliver everything -- moose meat, groceries, heavy-machine parts. They chauffeur all-night revelries, wedding parties and sometimes the dead.
The majority of riders are Yupik Eskimos. The taxi drivers -- most of them Albanian or Korean immigrants -- have their own tales, spanning continents and oceans but ending here, in a spot on the American frontier that most Americans have never seen or heard of.
Lincoln stops in front of a small square house in a subdivision of small square houses called Tundra Ridge. Daniel eases out, hands him seven one-dollar bills for the 5-minute drive. The flat rate is $5 per passenger in town, $7 per passenger to the outskirts.
"Bye," Daniel says. Like many who live in Bethel, she is originally from Tuntutuliak, a nearby Yupik village that survives on fishing and hunting. Daniel moved to "the city" in 1971 because, she says, "there was nothing for me in Tuntutuliak."
With her five children grown and her husband gone, Daniel spends her mornings working in a school cafeteria. She never learned to drive because, she says, "big machines scare me."
In any case, she can't afford a car, and even if she could buy a junker, she can't afford to have it transported to Bethel. It would cost $2,000 to $4,000 by barge or plane.
No roads lead to Bethel. What Daniel calls a city is a dusty, disheveled conglomeration of shacks and warehouses in the middle of nowhere -- nowhere being the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, a treeless, permanently frozen plain the size of Utah. Culturally and geologically, the delta has more in common with far-eastern Siberia than with the rest of the United States.
Bethel, 40 miles inland from the Bering Sea and 400 miles west of Anchorage, is the hub for 56 Yupik villages that sprinkle the tundra like flakes of dried seaweed. A traditionally nomadic people, the Yupiks, like Daniel, began living in fixed villages such as Bethel only in the last 50 to 100 years.
They come to Bethel to work. It's also the primary reason outsiders come here. Bethel, the governmental and commercial center of the region, is a no-frills working town, where people draw wages in construction, freight, government administration and air travel. Then there are the taxis.
For Lincoln, the path to the American dream led from a farming town in eastern Albania, where he was born, to Connecticut and finally here. "I ask friend, 'Where can I make money fast?' He tells me, 'Alaska.' I drive eight days to Anchorage." A friend in Anchorage told him he could make a killing driving cab in the bush.
Lincoln, 53, has been a taxi driver in Bethel since 1977. He is short and stocky, with deep-set eyes and a prominent Roman nose. When he first arrived on the tundra, he had a long, black beard. One of his earliest customers, a native, marveled: "You look like Abraham Lincoln."
From then on, Bilal Selmani went by the name of the nation's 16th president. Most villagers don't know his real name.
During his first 25 years of driving taxi, Lincoln worked 12-hour days, seven days a week, nine months of the year. He would spend three months with family in Albania. Although his earnings might seem meager to many Americans, they represented a bounty for farmers in Albania. Word spread of his good fortune, and soon other Albanians trekked to Bethel to drive in circles for cash.
Between the late 1970s and early '90s, Albanians dominated the taxi business. Today, more than 100 townspeople claim Albanian ancestry.
Six years ago Lincoln brought his wife and two sons here. One son, Perparim, 24, drives graveyard after Lincoln finishes his day shift. When the car breaks down, Lincoln's other son, Lumni, 27, an auto mechanic, fixes it.
After dropping off Daniel at her home, Lincoln's workday proceeds like many others, with routine pickups and drop-offs.
He finishes an airport run, then picks up a woman and her infant daughter. The woman, in her early 20s, is crying. Lincoln helps her load the trunk with moving boxes. "It's a happy day. I'm finally free," says the woman, who has just broken up with her boyfriend. "Happy, happy," she says through tears. Soon her baby starts crying too.
After picking her up at a dilapidated trailer on one side of town, Lincoln drops her off at a dilapidated mobile home on the other side. "My life can begin," she says. Lincoln helps her with the boxes, each one labeled. Baby Clothes. Stereo & Music. Stuff.
Toward the end of his shift, Lincoln parks in front of the AC (Alaska Commercial) store, the same one where he picked up Daniel earlier in the day. It was quiet when he picked her up. Now the parking lot buzzes with people and cars. Most of the cars are taxis, and most of the drivers are Korean.
He gestures toward a couple of Koreans sharing a smoke between their cabs.
"Sixteen, 17 years ago, one or two Koreans," Lincoln says. "Now. Look. They take over."
"Mos-quito," the man says.
Yun Lee, 58, is describing what he hates most about Bethel. "Snow, not bad. Cold, OK. Mos-quito, big problem."
Lee has been driving cab here for about 1 1/2 years. Before that, he lived in Torrance for six months, and before that he had spent his entire life near Seoul. In Torrance he saw an ad in one of the Korean-language newspapers. The ad said something to the effect of Big Money, Big Adventure -- Come to Alaska!
Lee answered the ad and he has been driving loops on the tundra ever since. He has since learned that the first Korean cabdriver in Bethel started in the early 1990s.
Now Korean immigrants, who number between 100 and 130, own four of the five cab companies and all but three of Bethel's 12 restaurants. They're also buying up hotels and small businesses. The only video-rental store is Korean-owned.
Lee lives in a small apartment with other Korean cabbies. He works seven days a week. Work and sleep make up the totality of his existence.
Lee looks younger than his age, with smooth skin, a square jaw and a natural expression that seems to exude mirth. He is learning English from cassette tapes he listens to during much of his 12-hour shift. Today he is learning about outdoor gear. "Umbrella," the tape says. "Rubber boots." "Raincoat." Lee mimics the words.
Outside the post office, he stops for two men. He turns the volume down. The men appear to be in their mid- to late-20sand they seem strangely sullen. "Sub shop," one says.
The men hop in and the smell of liquor immediately fills the cab. The two pass a bottle between them. They snicker.
Lee pulls up to the sub shop, and the two men exit out of opposite doors and walk swiftly away. By the time Lee gets out of his cab, they're running. "Excuse me!" he yells in vain. Lee sinks into his seat, jaw set hard, and he turns the volume way up: "Snow shoes." "Parka." "Mittens."
Getting stiffed is part of the job. It happens once or twice a month, Lee says. Fortunately the village is small enough that sooner or later Lee will run into the two again, and he will ask for his fare. It's not like he can afford to give rides away.
After paying his overhead -- gas, dispatcher fees, insurance -- he is lucky to make $200 a day. In a place like Bethel, where consumer goods can cost double what they are worth in the Lower 48, a couple of hundred dollars doesn't go very far.
But the Koreans here are famous for scrimping and saving, and after a few years of driving, many take their cash and go home, though a few stay and invest in a business.
The best restaurant in town, the VIP, serves Korean and American cuisine. It was opened a few years ago by a Korean woman, another immigrant who drove a cab for years.
There are 16 female cabdrivers in town, most of them Koreans with limited English skills.
Which is just as well, says Alla Tinker, because they don't want to understand much of what their male customers say.
"The men, when they've been drinking, will come on to you," says Tinker, 35.
"I've had guys pay me to drive them around town all night just so they could hang out with me.
"What can I say? They're men."
The Koreans and Albanians tolerate each other. Still, the Albanians envy the Koreans for their success and their seeming aloofness. The Koreans tend to stay among themselves. The Albanians can be clannish too.
The Yupiks, who have publicly welcomed each group, privately grumble about both: the Koreans for being curt, the Albanians blustery.
Tinker hears it from all sides. She is one of the few Yupik taxi drivers in the village. She is friends with all the Albanian drivers, but the company she drives for is owned by a Korean.
"They cut each other up, but they're not openly hostile," Tinker says one afternoon as snow falls. Bethel is never prettier than after fresh snow. Tinker plows through town in her taxi, cruising for fares. "It doesn't look like the rest of America, but it's America here. Everybody's just trying to make money."
At the Larsen Subdivision, she picks up an elderly Yupik woman, Esther Green.
"Hi there!" Tinker says warmly.
"I haven't seen you in a long time," Green says. Green was Tinker's kindergarten teacher. It had been months since Tinker last gave Green a ride. "How have you been?"
The women speak in Yupik, laughing and exchanging news. Tinker stays connected to the community by talking with passengers. She also gets to share the goings-on in her life.
A single mother with two teenage daughters, Tinker has recently moved in with her mother to save money.
Tinker was born and raised in the Bethel area, and she wants nothing more than to get out. She says so to Green, who acts as if she has heard it before.
"OK then, bye-bye!" Green says, climbing out of the taxi.
But Tinker continues with her line of thought.
"One more year of this," she says. "Then I'm gone."
Her plan is to drive as many hours as she can, save as much money as possible, and then move to Anchorage, a real city, with tall buildings and universities and restaurants and movie theaters.
But more than anything else, she says, she is looking forward to getting in a car, stepping hard on the gas and driving, for once not in an endless loop, but straight, past the city limits, past everything familiar, to wherever the road leads.
tomas.alex.tizon@latimes.com
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11.16.2007
Alaska Gas Prices
Alaska Towns Freeze Gas Prices
by Angela Denning-Barnes
Listen Now [4 min 30 sec...link to NPR]
Morning Edition, November 16, 2007 · Gas prices in Bethel, Alaska, a remote bush town, range from $5 to $7 a gallon. The only saving grace for residents there and in many of the remote towns in western Alaska is that gas prices aren't going up. They were locked in during the fall when an entire winter's fuel supply was shipped in by river barge and stored.
Angela Denning-Barnes reports from member KYUK in Bethel, Alaska.
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