The 24th Annual Bilingual Multicultural Education Equity Conference (BMEEC) was held in Anchorage from February 4th to the 6th. The conference took place at the Sheraton Anchorage Hotel.

I arrived in Anchorage at around 8 o'clock with 10 other students and two chaperones from the LYSD. We met our third chaperone at the airport and he helped us with our luggage and took us to the Sheraton Hotel.

When we got to the hotel we got our room numbers and the names of our roommates. After we got settled, we went to our chaperones' room to get to know each other, go over rules, get dinner money and decide where to eat.

We ended up eating at the Red Robin and got back to the hotel at midnight. The chaperones had bed check at 1:00 a.m. so everybody could get ready for bed.

The next day everyone got up at 8 o'clock, and we went down to the second floor where we registered. Then we went up to the fifteenth floor to the Gallery where we met a lot of other students from other places. Some of them were from Sitka, Gambel, Nome, Angoon, Iditarod, Delta, Teller, Fairbanks, Lower Kuskokwim and Lower Yukon. We played games that helped us get to know each other until our lunch break at noon.

At around 1:45 we went back to the Gallery with the same students and learned various kinds of Native songs, including a couple of songs from the Lower Kuskokwim and Mt. Village. The Gajaa Heen Dancers from Sitka performed some Aleut, Haida and Interior Athabaskan pieces for us there. The performance I enjoyed most that day was a Russian song by a high school student from Delta who was originally from Estonia.

At 3:30 our group met in our chaperones' room and planned what we were going to do until the banquet which was going to be held at 7:30. We decided to go to the PHS Hospital because most of the students wanted to visit their relatives. After getting lost, we finally found the hospital where we stayed for only half an hour. Then we went shopping at Fred Meyers.

Later that night in the ballroom, we all enjoyed watching different dance groups perform. One was the Anchorage East High Dancers "Dance Contempo" that danced about seven pieces from different places like the Philippines, Romania, Africa, the Middle East, the Ukraine Republic and China. Their songs were very good. The other groups I saw perform were the Gajaa Heen dancers, Wasilla Job Corps Dance Group and the King Island Dancers.

The next day all the students were shuttled in buses to UAA where we stayed for about 2 hours touring the buildings. When we were done there, we were shuttled to APU where we stayed for about three hours. Then we went back to the hotel to rest and get ready for the banquet.

The banquet started at 7:00 and lasted until 10:00 p.m. During this three hour gathering we heard a speech by Senator Georgianna Lincoln from the Alaska Legislature. Two of the things she talked about were the English as the official language issue and the theme of Global Literacy Through Local Traditions. She encouraged many of us to look into the language issue she was talking about, and, if we agreed, to help defeat it. I found her speech to be very educational, and, although I understood her feelings about the topic, I didn't really understand all the politics.

The next morning, all of the student groups went back up to the Gallery to fill out evaluation forms for the next year. While we were in the middle of choosing a student guest speaker, John Active and a Heart Beat Alaska cameraman came in and asked some students why they thought bilingualism was so important to them. Most of the students had similar answers, but others didn't know what to say.

When we were done with the evaluations, everyone was invited to the luncheon in the ballroom. It lasted for about three hours, and by then all of us students were really tired.

Shortly after we ate, most of us went to the Fireweed Theater where we watched the three-hour-long movie, Titanic. When it was over we went back to the hotel and went to bed so we wouldn't be tired the next day.

In the morning, we all got up at 6:30, then went to the airport to go home.

I really learned a lot at the conference, and I hope I get to go to another one. A few things I learned were: that Yup'ik is the only Native language in Alaska that has promise for survival, that there are 1,000's of different languages in the world, and that there are more than 100 languages in Anchorage alone! That is a lot.