Dietetics major interns at Alaska's Summercise
Janel Shoun-Smith |
Georgia McArtney is seated last on the left.
Lipscomb senior discovers new culture at internship this summer
Georgia McArtney, a senior dietetics major from Lindenhurst, Illinois, spent 10 weeks this past summer as an intern with Norton Sound Health Corporation’s Summercise Camp, a diabetes prevention program in Nome, Alaska. The program teaches healthy nutrition and exercise to the children of Nome, a community in Northwest Alaska’s Seward Peninsula on the coast of the Bering Sea.
Summercise works to increase healthy eating behavior as well as increase the number of youth meeting physical activity guidelines. The Summercise interns plan, teach and inspire 160 kids in various nutrition and exercise classes.
According to McArtney, there are only about 2,500 permanent residents in Nome, which serves as the hub village for 15 smaller towns (some of them as small as 40 or 50 people) in the Norton Sound Region.
“The native tribes of the region are predominantly Yupik, Siberian Yupik and Inupiaq, but there are also a lot of people from the ‘lower 48’ who have fallen in love with the region and now live here permanently or for the summer months,” McArtney said.
“There are no trees or grass, only dirt roads, small weathered houses and a lot of snowmobiles,” she said.
On one trip out to a village called Teller, the only village accessible by road, McArtney came upon a man whose vehicle was stuck in the mud. He had been stranded in the car through the night, not seeing a single vehicle until McArtney came along the next day.
In the first session of camp in June, McArtney taught gardening classes and led a group games class and a workout class for girls.
“The kids were so eager to learn about the earth and care for their plants,” she said.
In July, she taught hiking, biking, cooking and an outdoor photography class. In the cooking class she demonstrated making pavlova, a kiwi dessert from New Zealand, her home nation, and taught the children Maori words.
“It was a fun session because there was a lot more emphasis on being able to incorporate nutrition skills into the class,” McArtney said. “As we were cooking, I could take a few minutes to explain why what they were cooking was good for them and explain fiber and protein. It is exciting to see that when the kids make the food themselves they like it better because they put in the effort and they see what goes into it.”
The camp is valuable for the community as social changes have affected eating habits and thus produced a rise in diabetes in the area, McArtney said. In years past, the area residents survived as hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. But in recent decades, they have been purchasing more food, and thus eating more processed foods, snack foods and soft drinks, which are among the cheapest food item available in stores. The state of Alaska is working hard to combat the health effects of this change in diet, she said.
McArtney also did week-long hospital rotations which included nutrition counseling, WIC counseling and tobacco prevention programs. “When not on rotations, I have projects which include broadcasting on the radio (to Alaska, Russia and Canada), developing care plans for two patients in the hospital retirement home, teaching a nutrition class at the children's home, writing a diabetes prevention lesson and other activities,” she said.
In addition to all of her camp duties, McArtney had the opportunity to do some exploring, such as hiking up Anvil Mountain and out to Dorothy Falls, and to sample the local fare. “I've sampled reindeer sausage, moose burgers, muskox burgers, blacktail sausage, native salmonberries and sea greens,” she said. “I'm still holding out to try Eskimo ice cream, which is a local delicacy of seal fat mixed with tundra berries and sugar.”
“I’ve eaten so much game meat, from reindeer hot dogs to caribou burgers, and out freezer is stocked with salmon friends have given us,” she said.