Sitting on a bed in an Anchorage hotel room, Ally Shangin put face paint on her 2-year-old daughter. Lola grinned and touched the green and blue on her forehead and the red whiskers on her cheeks.
“I was keeping her busy!” Shangin laughed.
Their room at the Wingate hotel was crowded. Shangin’s partner, Garrett Kashatok, sat on the second bed as their oldest daughter, 9-year-old Katelynn, played nearby with her two other young siblings. Toys, clothes and strollers piled up around them.
“We have our own space and everything,” Shangin said. “Small space.”
Shangin and her family are among about 670 evacuees from Western Alaska who are staying in Anchorage hotels after last month’s storms destroyed their homes. Some, like Shangin, say they don’t know exactly what’s next — they hope to move into apartments eventually. But for now, in the middle of so much uncertainty, they’re just trying to adjust to their new daily lives, so far from everything they know.
“Moving here with our family – it was okay, but it's not okay,” Shangin said. “I want to go home. My girl is missing her home. My honey misses our home.”
State rushes on repairs
It’s unclear exactly how many evacuees are still in Anchorage.
Beyond the 670 people who are staying in city hotels, an unknown number have moved in with family or friends, according to Jeremy Zidek, public information officer for the Alaska Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Management. He said that so far, more than 1,400 people have registered for state assistance in Anchorage, Bethel and other communities.
Meanwhile, state and federal agencies are working to repair homes and infrastructure in the affected villages, aiming to move some residents back. But as winter settles in, some places remain devastated. For many evacuees, returning this season is not an option.
“So we are looking at temporary housing,” Zidek said.
He said that could be in Anchorage or in other communities. There’s still no timeline for when people will move from hotels to other homes. Zidek said officials want to first make sure that the new housing is furnished and is close to other services evacuees might need.
“There's just a lot of moving parts,” Zidek said. “We want to make sure that we do it in the right way.”
In one room
Shangin’s family is doing what they can to adjust to life in Anchorage. After evacuating from Kipnuk, they stayed at an Anchorage mass shelter for over a week and then moved to the Wingate.
At the hotel, she said, they get breakfast and unlimited coffee every day. For the remaining meals, they order fast food. Their hotel room has no kitchen, just a mini fridge and a microwave. It’s not what her family is used to.
“I mean, fast food every day – not us,” Shangin said. “They are used to homecooked meals all the time. They're used to the Native food.”
Child care is also a challenge. Katelynn, Shangin’s 9-year-old, is homeschooling so she can help her parents take care of her siblings. In the mornings, she wakes up extra early to do schoolwork while the younger ones are still in bed. When the family needs to do errands with three strollers, which they often lug onto city buses, Katelynn is a big help, Shangin said.
She said they rely on Katelynn to watch her siblings more than they did back home. In Kipnuk, a village of about 700 people, she could let her older children play outside alone. In Anchorage, she doesn’t feel safe doing that.
“You have to keep an eye on your kids,” she said.
But at the hotel, Shangin said, at least she has a community. Many people staying there are also from Kipnuk.
“Seeing some of the people from home is good,” she said.
Zidek said that the state and Red Cross tried to keep families and residents from the same villages together, and they want to keep doing that when they move people to apartments.
Adjusting to the new life, together
Aspen Hotel in East Anchorage opened its doors to many Kipnuk evacuees as well. On Wednesday, the hall was filled with children from the village running around and playing together.
Julia Tuutaq Stone, Kipnuk’s police officer, is staying at the hotel along with her two adult sons and young grandsons, each family in their own room. Stone said she helps take care of her grandsons and is happy the family was able to stay together after the disaster.
“It was gonna be heartbreaking if they didn't come with me,” Stone said. “I'm really happy. That's what I was praying about.”
Stone said the hotel provides them free meals three times a day, as well as snacks. She takes buses to go to the store and to play bingo. Her grandsons attend the Yuip’ik immersion program at College Gate Elementary School.
Her son, Alexie Aqumkallak Stone, said he even brought his boys to Dave and Buster’s a few times.
“My kids are having a lot of fun here. They're enjoying their stay here,” he said. “It's not fun for me, that's for sure, because it's not my kind of life. My life was subsistence.”
He said he’s trying to keep himself busy and is applying for jobs because he expects they’ll be in Anchorage for a while, until it’s safe to go back to Kipnuk.
But he also cannot stop thinking about his home. He misses fishing and hunting and wishes he could have stayed to help with repairs.
He still has nightmares about the storm, about watching his house flood and feeling it float away. His mom said she also can’t stop thinking about helping with the emergency response and listening to the calls from people who were trapped in their houses.
“I'm so happy that nobody got hurt, we (had) no loss in Kipnuk, but everybody's struggling, day by day, and I know everybody's traumatized, especially little kids,” she said. “Nightmare. It's like a nightmare.”
“We're living inside the dream, but at the same time, it really happened,” her son said.
“Yeah,” she responded. “ Every day we wake up, ‘Oh, are we home? No, we're not. We're somewhere else. We’re in Anchorage.’”
The family takes one step at a time, Julia Tuutaq Stone said. They are preparing for the holiday season, too.
“Different kind this year to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas away from home,” she said. “That's the tough thing we're gonna have to tolerate this year.”
Waiting for homes
In South Anchorage, Kristen Amik’s family of seven will spend holidays in their relatives’ home.
After evacuating from Kipnuk, the family spent several nights at a mass shelter set up at the Alaska Airlines Center, an arena in Anchorage. Then they reached out to relatives and now live with them.
“Even if we're far from home, we still feel blessed to be here with them, because they help a lot,” she said.
But the feeling is bittersweet, Amik said, because she knows not everyone is as fortunate.
“It felt kinda sad at the same time,” she said, because she knows so many other evacuees don’t have relatives to stay with.
For Amik’s family, life in the big city is different than in the village, but they are adjusting. She said her oldest daughter enjoys going to school and already made several friends, though it did take time for her to get used to it.
“When we first got here, she was crying here and there, and I told her to cry when she has to, that it'll make her feel better. Better to cry than keeping it in,” she said. “I guess that kind of helped her.”
The family applied for assistance through Cook Inlet Housing Authority, to help pay for an Anchorage apartment. She said they’re waiting for a response.
“I hope we hear back from them soon,” Amik said.
Back at the Wingate, Shangin said her family has been looking at apartments already. They went on several apartment viewings and filled out paperwork to receive assistance for rent and a deposit.
“We're just waiting,” she said. “But some of us are tired of waiting.”
The family especially liked a two-bedroom apartment they looked at. Shangin said it was big enough for the three older children to have their own room, and it had an open area in the living room so they could just run around.
“It was perfect,” she said. “My family will be happy. I'll be happy because I'll be able to cook my family food.”
She already knows what their first meal will be.
“I get a cake pan, and I put my meat in, then I put my rice and my seasonings, and then I put the water in and just throw it in,” she said. “It's enough for all of us.”
