Willa Ashenfelter and Irene Aukongak, Part 1, Transcript Section 5

Community Health Aide Program Project Jukebox

image of Willa Ashenfelter and Irene Aukongak

Willa Ashenfelter and Irene Aukongak, Part 1
Transcript Section 5

Back to Interview Outline

Listen to Audio

Next Section

WILLA: We reported everything on the radio.

IRENE: And that way we learned from each other.

WILLA: Yeah. A lot of our education, too, was on -- at radio call.

IRENE: Yeah, just like we learn from each other. And when they stopped, when we have phone, just like we were (inaudible.)

WILLA: And when reception was bad, there was always somebody that was willing to relay. So we would talk with the village that could pick up Nome really well and they could hear us really well, and she'd relay to the doctor here for us. So that was nice.

We got to know some of the doctors by voice, and we didn't meet them. And some of them were really patient with us.

KAREN: Did the doctors get any training in -- in how to -- sort of cross-cultural training?

WILLA: I don't know. I know when I first started reporting, Martha said the doctors wanted us to report, that if we're going to report anything, to let him know, like, if anything that the size of was the size of a pea, and it grew to the size of an olive, those -- that kind of thing. Or if something was the size of a plum or -- it was both something the doctor knew and that we knew the size of, so we used that -- those terms.

And the doctor one time finally asked Martha and I, how come you ladies are always talking about food.

IRENE: Especially fruit.

WILLA: Yeah. Martha told me, tell him it's because we're hungry because radio traffic in the evening was around five o'clock, and they took -- the doctor in Kotzebue took the villages from Point Hope.

IRENE: Yeah. Point Hope. Yeah.

WILLA: All the way down to Stebbins.

KAREN: Wow.

WILLA: He was just along the coast. And some of the villages would have 17, but those were the days when we -- we reported headaches and --

KAREN: Like 17 cases?

IRENE: Everything.

KAREN: You reported every case?

WILLA: Every case, everyone that we saw.

KAREN: So radio call could take a while?

WILLA: Yeah. And sometimes radio call would break in right into KICY.

KAREN: Which is --

WILLA: It's the radio station here in town. And people would be listening to KICY and we would come in right over.

IRENE: They would overhear us, too, which I felt kind of funny, if I had patients to report, I felt kind of funny. But they started talking about it, too.

WILLA: Yeah.

IRENE: Like can we have our trainings.

WILLA: Not to use names, they would tell us not to use names, to use ages and female or male. But even so, because our villages were small, I think people pretty much figured who the patient was.

Anyway, one day I reported on the radio, and the next day I went to visit one of my aunts and her husband said last night he was really swearing at me. And I was asking him, what did I do? He told me he was recording KICY, a program, it came on at 5:30, and he said I broke in right when he was -- whatever he was taping. So he wasn't happy with me.