KAREN:  Today is November 9th, 2005, and this is Karen Brewster, here with Clara Morgan, and we're here at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage where she's visiting but lives in Aniak.
 
And that's where you did all your community health aide work?
 
CLARA:  Uh-hum (affirmative). 

KAREN:  Okay.  And this is for the Community Health Aide Project.
 
And just to kind of get things started a little bit, Clara, thank you for taking the time to do this.  I know you're very busy today. 

Just sort of tell us a little bit about yourself, when you were born, where, how you got into health aide work. 

CLARA:  I was born a few miles down from Lower Kalskag in our winter camp, March 19, 1940, so my mother put our -- my place of birth at Kalskag. 
Getting into the health aide work was 1958, Dr. Jackson Shirmer, she now lives in Wrangell, she used to live in Bethel, she was a PHS, Public Health Service doctor.  And she made trips up to Aniak. 

On one of her trips she was looking for people who would want to volunteer to do medical work.  So Billy and I, my husband, William Morgan, and I, we volunteered, in 1958. 

And on that same trip, she was seeing about a five-month-old child with pneumonia.  And at that time, you had to mix your penicillin with distilled water, just powder.  So she showed us how to give the penicillin shot.
 
The first day we went there, she showed us how to do it, and the second day we went there, Billy did the shot, and then the third day we went there, I did the shot, and the next day she was gone. 

So it was -- in the villages, BIA teachers used to pretty much take care of the health when they came to the village.  And there was a lady there named Muriel Leech who took care of some supplies at the Aniak Lodge, and when anyone got sick or cut or anything, needed attention, she used to do that. 

So Billy and I volunteered for 10 years doing the medical work.  And in 196 -- 1968, the -- the Yukon Kuskokwim Health Corporation program was starting.  And they wanted health aide people to -- who wanted to be health aides to go to training. 

Well, at first when the people -- and all this volunteer time Billy and I did with no pay.  Then when they heard that there was going to be the health -- health person was going to be paid, there was a whole bunch that wanted -- wanted to be health aide.
 
In 1968, December 1968, we had our seventh child, and I told Billy, 10 years of volunteering, I said, I'm tired of it, let somebody else take it. 

And so as soon as they found out that they had to go to four weeks of training being away from home, and nobody wanted to, nobody wanted to go, so the chief then was Louis Vanderpool in Aniak, and he came to us twice.  And the second time he came Billy said, well, why not give it a try.  So I said okay. 

And in February 1960 -- let's see.  April 1969, I went to my first training, four weeks in Bethel.  Our youngest daughter was four months old.  I took her along because we had a couple of nieces in Bethel that would take -- we had no phones or anything, no -- you know, no communication before going down to call to make the plans with her baby-sitting and all that, but it turned out good. 

I'd take her to the -- our niece's in the morning, and then I'd pick her up in the afternoon about 5:00, a little after 5:00 after the training, for a whole month.  I can't even remember how I got rides to -- to do that.  So, and that was when I got my first four weeks of training. 

There was no clinic in Aniak, so I was working out of my house.  After I went home from my training, Billy and our neighbor, an old guy we took care of, Rayfield Qupuanak, he built a little plywood cabinet for me and put a padlock on it and a few -- few supplies that they gave us we kept in there locked, the stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, and all that.