Crossing the bridge: Aide makes the connection between cultures

Two welcome signs -- one in English and another in Russian -- hang alongside Pattie Quinn's kindergarten classroom door. Upstairs in second grade, Sue Hocker's "Superstar of the Week" award is printed in both languages as well. One hundred-six of the 507 students in this kindergarten-through-5th-grade school are Russian, and teachers throughout Tanaina Elementary School in Wasilla are learning to communicate with their Russian-speaking students and their families. Leading the way is Russian-born Olga Clark.

Thirty-two-year-old Clark, who married an American and came to Alaska from Moscow 10 years ago, knows what it's like to be in a strange land. Her dark eyes sparkle and she laughs lightly as she tells how she met her husband and moved to America.

"I was a mail-order bride," she said.

Clark, formerly Olga Fedotova, worked as a nurse in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union and was attending medical school to become a doctor. She said Russians knew no luxuries and very little happiness.

"Moscow was very gray," she said.

In 1991, her father, who was a medical director for Pfizer Pharmaceutical, took Clark and her mother on a trip to Belgium.

"I had a chance to see different lives, and I realized there was so much more to the world than we had in Moscow," she said.

She determined then and there to leave Russia. Unbeknownst to her father, she and her mother responded to a magazine ad for a mail-order bride service out of California. Clark said she received dozens of letters from different men, but none interested her.

Finally, after several months, she received a letter from Marvin Clark. Marvin, 18 years her senior, had the maturity she had been looking for. He was a lawyer and a writer living in Alaska. Clark was intrigued.

"I thought, wow! A writer, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky," she said.

They began corresponding regularly. But she could neither read nor write English.

"My mother and I would pour over an English dictionary to read his letters and to write back," she said.

Six months later, the couple met in Moscow and decided to marry. Her father was shocked when he learned of the courtship, but he liked Marvin. He gave the couple his blessing and then bought his daughter a round-trip plane ticket.

"He said, 'In case it doesn't work out, you can always come back,'" said Clark.

Clark flew to Alaska on Sept. 8, 1992, and was married five days later. The only English she knew was what she had taught herself from the dictionary.

"Some of my husband's friends threw a shower for me," she said. "I didn't know what that was, so I looked it up in the dictionary. I thought 'Oh, I'd better take a towel.'"

But not all of the situations the newlywed found herself in seemed so funny at the time. One morning, after Marvin left for work, Clark went to put the dog outside.

"I didn't realize the door would lock behind me," she said. "You actually had to put a key in and turn it to lock a door in Russia."

She found herself locked out in the cold, in her bathrobe and slippers. After trying unsuccessfully to pry open a window, she finally knocked on a neighbor's door. But she found it difficult to convey her predicament. Eventually she was able to use the neighbor's phone to call her husband.

When Clark arrived in the Mat-Su, she had no compatriots to help her learn English or assimilate.

"I learned by watching TV and from my husband," she said.

Six years later, when she began working at Tanaina Elementary School as a pre-school aide, the Valley's Russian population was still quite small.

It was coincidence that led this bilingual Russian immigrant to a school that was about to experience explosive growth in non-English-speaking Russian students.

"God sometimes puts us in the right place at the right time," said Clark.

Attracted by opportunities for land, jobs and a better way of life for their children, Russian immigrants began to descend upon the Mat-Su. Scott Daugharty, Tanaina principal, said the number of non-English-speaking Russian students in the school district's 33 schools climbed from fewer than 50 to more than 300 during the past four years, and it continues to grow. Nearly one-third of these students are registered at Tanaina.

The school district had no certified Russian teachers or tutors when the influx began, and it lacked the financial resources to meet the growing challenge as well.

"We were at a crisis point," said fourth-grade teacher Ann Class.

"It was obvious that we needed to use Olga beyond the 16 preschool kids she was working with," said Daugharty.

Clark's bilingual skills were soon put to task. She served as an interpreter for Russian parents when they registered their children and she tutored the children in English. She helped interpret at parent-teacher conferences, and she enlisted the help of her bilingual father, now living in the Valley, as well. When discipline became a concern, she contacted parents. And when the Russian parents had questions, they sought out Clark.

Finally, two years ago, Daugharty was able to hire Clark as a teacher's aide and Russian tutor with funding through Title I, a federal program that gives extra money to schools based on the percentage of students qualifying for free or reduced lunches.

Though Clark had been helping for nearly two years already, her new position gave her, the school and the district greater flexibility and allowed them to begin tackling the challenges that an ever-increasing Russian population presented.

"Olga became the link between all of the schools in the district and the Russian community," Daugharty said.

Clark would go to other schools to help Russian parents register their children. And she would sit in on child-study team meetings for Russian students at area high schools. These are meetings with teachers and specialists to help solve a student's learning or behavioral problems. Under district policy, parents must be notified before meetings take place, and they are invited to attend.

"Some come, and some don't," Daugharty said. "Olga relayed information to those who didn't and interpreted for those who did."

Clark also arranged a town meeting of sorts at the local Russian church. On a snowy Sunday in March 2002, a few members of Tanaina's staff and the district's assistant director of federal programs, John Wheetman, met with the Russian families to ask questions and open the lines of communications.

"We wanted to know what they expected from the schools for their children," Wheetman said.

Clark interpreted for both sides. She helped the Russian parents understand that the school welcomed their involvement and that the district wanted to help their children succeed.

And Clark helped the teachers understand the Russian families as well. She worked with faculty after school for several weeks last spring to teach Russian. She taught them the Cyrillic alphabet and some frequently used words and phrases.

When Robin Ouellette's first-grade class was reading "The Gingerbread Man," Clark brought in the Russian version, which features a doughnut hole instead of a gingerbread man, and read it to her class.

She did the same for Pattie Quinn's kindergarten class. Quinn said it was a comfort to her Russian-speaking students and a learning experience for her American students.

"They were able to see how it felt to have a grown-up talking on and on in a language they couldn't understand," said Quinn. "They were able to see how some of the Russian boys and girls feel all the time."

Many of the charts and signs that hang in Quinn"s classroom now have Russian translation alongside them, as well as the phonetic spelling, so she can pronounce the words in Russian.

"She's taught me so much about how to make it simple," said Quinn.

She said Clark taught her that little things can put both the students and their parents at ease. Today, Tanaina teachers make an effort to pronounce Russian names correctly and encourage parents and students to hold on to their Russian language and heritage, as they learn English and adapt to a new way of life.

But many feared that Clark was being spread too thin.

"Last year she looked so tired, I thought she was going to crack," said Ouellette. "But she just kept going. She's always smiling, always part of the team."

Why did she do it?

"I really love both cultures," said Clark. "To bridge that cultural gap and have both cultures understand each other is a real joy."

Tanaina received a $186,000 federal grant this year to buy books and supplies for the Russian students. In addition, the school hired a certified teacher who is fluent in Russian. Clark's workload lightened somewhat, but her significance to the school and the Russian community continued to grow.

"We receive telephone calls all the time where the person on the other end, with a heavy Russian accent, says only 'Olga Clark, please,'" said Daugharty. "She's trusted by the Russian community and she is trusted by my staff."

In addition to her role in the school, Clark is often called upon at home to help translate legal documents or to help fill out or translate other forms like insurance claims and job or loan applications.

Despite her success, Clark was among the 48 classified employees laid off in the school district's December budget cuts.

"It took over three months, but we were finally able to get her back," Daugharty said.

Clark was re-hired in April as a foreign language tutor adviser, a new job classification funded through Title I. But unlike her old job, this position requires a person to be fluent in the language of the children that he or she tutors.

Clark, who once dreamed of becoming a doctor, now hopes to go back to school and earn her teaching credentials.

"Doctors, lawyers and preachers are tough jobs," she says. "They are always dealing with problems. But with teaching, you give your heart and life to your students, and slowly you can see that you make a difference in their lives. It's a little advice here, a hug, some compassion, and you see them begin to grow."

Clark is trying to have some of her college credits from Russia transferred to the University of Alaska Anchorage. Daugharty wrote a letter last fall to the university asking that it consider her education and experience, as well as the vital role she plays in the school and community, and grant her an associate's degree.

"I don't recall ever writing a letter when I said a person was irreplaceable," said Daugharty. "But she is the one irreplaceable person on our staff."