BARROW, ALASKA, ANYONE? ANYONE? NO?

Nate sent out his application to do an externship this summer with the IHS. His choice of places to extern were in this order Alaska, Montana, and last California. I was surprised by his choices and the order. I don’t know if he gave it that much thought, mostly Nate just shoots-from-the-hip. We have discussed Alaska a lot, of course I knew about California, but he just threw in Montana. Whatever? His externship could have a large bearing on where we end up. After sending out the application, we got this response from a clinic in Barrow, Alaska. I won’t include the whole e-mail. I will just highlight the good parts.

Barrow is a small Inupiaq (Native Alaskan) village of about 5,000 people located on the Arctic Ocean coast in Northern Alaska. To do well in Barrow, you need to be the type of person that enjoys cold weather. I have happily lived in Barrow for the past 10 years and have remembered the phrase 'many are cold, few are frozen' on many cross-country ski trips, ice-cave camping, and during storms where the temps plunge into the -60F range.

There are very limited jobs for spouses/significant others in Barrow outside of our hospital and the local school district. If you have a spouse or sig. other or kids, you need to fully discuss the idea of moving to Barrow with your family/sig.other before applying for our externship. Barrow is a challenging place to live. It gets extremely cold during the winter and the summer temps range from 30F-55F on average. It also snows frequently
on my birthday (July 24th).

If Barrow does sound like an appealing place to live, you are probably like myself and the Staff dentists; a person with a good sense of adventure and someone who is looking to use dentistry to make a difference in people's lives.

Note: A women sent this e-mail. Hilarious!

Well, Nate forwarded the e-mail but he hasn’t said a word about it. I don’t think Barrow was quit the place he had in mind. Fishing poles are probably frozen year round there.