KAREN:  And so how did you get from village to village? 

JOYCE:  Oh, by the boat.

KAREN:  By the boat. 

JOYCE:  Yes.  We lived on the boat and traveled, and we had facilities so that if there were no meeting place, we -- the Native people love to -- love to get together.  We would have as many as 40 people on the boat at once.
 
KAREN:  Wow. 

JOYCE:  But anyway, I have quite an acquaintance with Kodiak Island. 

KAREN:  Yes. 

JOYCE:  And then when we came permanently, they wanted us to go to a village where there wasn't any other mission, and there wasn't even an Orthodox church in Larsen Bay at the time. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  So it was a pretty small village, but it was very remote.  And the fishermen almost exclusively had only six months' insurance because salmon and a few clams and like that were the main industry.  And so our boat had only six months' insurance also. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  And they kept one boat in the village with year-around insurance because it's a long ways from Kodiak when you don't have plane travel. 

KAREN:  Right. 

JOYCE:  And so I found out what it was like to have a family of kids and no medical service and most of the time no way to get there.  Our only doctors at that time were the Public Health nurses.  Excuse me. And they acted almost as doctors.  My daughter, from the time she was seven years old, was determined she was going to be a nurse.  And her idea of nursing was from what she saw the Public Health nurses doing.  They, likewise, saw the problems in the village with no medical service, and they also had the problem that they would start a series of immunizations and not be able to finish them.  And they only came twice a year.  So they had to start all over again.  And they got the idea that if they could train someone in the village to do the rest of the immunizations, and as far as Kodiak Island was concerned, that was the beginning of the health aide program. 

KAREN:  Oh. 

JOYCE:  They had -- these -- those nurses, they did anything that needed doing.  I used to think that it was terrible that nurses were so restricted when I found out how it was in the Lower 48 because I had watched these nurses do exactly what a doctor would do. 

KAREN:  So they didn't have doctors come with them? 

JOYCE:  No. 

KAREN:  Just nurses? 

JOYCE:  Just the Public Health nurses.  It was several years later before ANS sent out doctors from Anchorage once a year.
 
KAREN:  Wow.  So these nurses would come twice a year by boat, or how would they --

JOYCE:  Yeah, they usually came on the mail boat. 

KAREN:  Oh, okay. 

JOYCE:  Uh-hum. 

KAREN:  And how long would they stay? 

JOYCE:  As long as the mail boat was there.
 
KAREN:  A couple days? 

JOYCE:  Maybe two or three days.  And they saw everybody in the village.  Everybody got immunizations.  I used to say the villages protected Kodiak because the village people were so immunized.