KAREN:  I want to go back a little bit to you were talking about the radio, using the radio. 

PAULA:  Uh-hum. 

KAREN:  Where was that radio located? 

PAULA:  When the BIA, Bureau of Indian Affairs, started schools in all the village -- well, some villages, they provided those radios.  It's a big radio, they provided to all the teachers -- I mean, to each school so that the -- they can communicate -- what is that radio called. 

KAREN:  Is it one of those big, like --

PAULA:  The airlines use to communicate with each others. 

KAREN:  Yeah. 

PAULA:  I can't remember. 

KAREN:  That's okay. 

PAULA:  Anyway, those were for the BIA teachers to use to communicate to like district school and Mountain Village.  And they let us use them to report.  And the hospital had the same radio.  So that's why we used to report to the doctor like that. 

KAREN:  And confidentiality, how was that handled? 

PAULA:  Like I told you, all 48 villages, you know, whenever the doctor say this is KIK-732 Bethel hospital on the air for medical traffic, all the 48 villages would call in, and whoever the doctor hear clearly, he call that village.  And we have to wait and listen. 

And the health aide reports the person by name, age, and what's wrong with that person.  You know, all of us can hear what's wrong with that person. 

KAREN:  That's way different than nowadays when confidentiality is so important. 

PAULA:  Yeah.  Yeah, it is. 

KAREN:  Did you like doing that radio traffic? 

PAULA:  Not really.  Like when I was going to LPN training, we talked about confidentiality.  And when we -- after five -- five months of classroom work for -- for seven months we worked in the hospitals.  And things were confidential.  And we -- the only good things that we could do is taking temperatures, blood pressure, making beds, you know, help the patient with bed pan. 

Out in the field in the villages, that wasn't useful thing.  You have to depend on yourself instead of depending on the head nurse and the doctor, being a health aide you have to depend on yourself.

KAREN:  What about the training you received in Bethel?  Did you find that helpful? 

PAULA:  Very helpful.  We used to have Phase 1, 2, 3 and 4, now you call it Session 1, 2 and 3, 4.  And we used to go to Anchorage with 12 health corporations, maybe two -- two from each corporation.  I don't know.  Quite a few from each corporation.  We used to go to Anchorage and have health aide training there.  That way we got to know each others. 

And around here, just the YK Delta health aides would come to Bethel and have training at the hospital.  And Dr. Annabo (phonetic) who was one of the first teachers we had for health aide training.  The health aide training make us more confident in ourselves. 

And it's very unique in that, you know, so that -- and each year it was better and better the way the health aides were taught. 

Now it's very easy.  In the past we used to do lots of notes and all kinds of writing, all the notes are provided to you nowadays with training.  But what we did, the way you learn the best is to actually doing something. 

Like when we had eight months training, at the hospital up there we did -- we actually see the patients.  We took care of the emergencies.  So it taught you self-confidence, and self-strength so that you can take care of things at home.  Like babies always come at night, so you get up and deliver babies at night.