PALMER -- When Carolyn Zibell and a few of her Aqqaluk High School classmates walked down the halls of Colony High School between periods last week, teachers stopped them and told them to get back to class.
"They didn't even know that we weren't from here," Zibell said.
With nearly 1,200 students, though, new faces at Colony tend to blend with the old, said Dawn Brettrager, a health and physical education teacher at Colony.
Not so at Aqqaluk.
Angelia Weydahl says she and four of her Colony classmates stood out like sore thumbs when they visited the tiny Noorvik school in April.
"Everyone knows everyone there," Weydahl said. "It's not very often they see a white person walking down the hall."
And it's not very often that city kids get to experience life in a village or that village kids get to experience life in a city, said Suzanne Gerhardt, who teaches Spanish at Colony. But a student exchange through a sister school program between Colony and Aqqaluk allows students to do just that, Gerhardt said.
"It just changes their perspective, or it has the potential to anyway, to see that life can be so totally different someplace that's not so far away," she said.
Gerhardt heads up the sister school program at Colony, and Aqqaluk teacher Amy Eakin heads it up in Noorvik. The two just began their partnership this year through the Rose Urban Rural Exchange, a cross-cultural exchange program aimed at building understanding between people in urban and rural Alaska.
The Colony students made atikluks -- a traditional dress worn by Alaska Natives -- and went ice fishing in Noorvik. Weydahl said she was surprised to see that kids in the Northwest Alaska village enjoyed some of same technology that kids in urban areas enjoy.
"They had dish TV and computers. It was a lot more modern than I expected," she said. And there were no honey buckets, she said. "I was afraid of that, but there wasn't. They had indoor plumbing and running water."
Brettrager's daughter Kalli was among the Colony students who traveled to Noorvik. She says she was struck by the hospitality she encountered in the village.
"The people were really happy to have us and they were very accommodating," Kalli said.
The Noorvik students went neon bowling and visited the musk ox farm during their stay in the Valley. They also attended Colony's production of "Fame."
In addition to the weeklong student exchanges, Eakin and Gerhardt orchestrated joint community service projects between the two schools as well. Eakin's student leadership team began a program this year called "Out of the Closet," which provides donated clothes for needy people in Noorvik. The Colony students helped with that effort by sponsoring a prom-dress drive in their school. Their efforts sent about 10 dresses to Noorvik.
And the Noorvik students donated meat to Colony. They sent muktuk, moose jerky and five moose roasts for a potlatch the school held at the end of its Alaska Native and Cultural Awareness Week in March.
Gerhardt says she and Eakin learned a lot from this year's experiences. Those lessons will help them add value to their sister school program in coming years.
"This was our first year to get to know each other's needs and how we can help each other out. It's not just a one-time exchange," she said. "From here on out, we'll be there for each other."
