Six Hours

There are many things you could do in six hours. You could hike about 12 miles (about 20 kilometers – I am getting good at conversions here!), you could make a loaf of bread (or two), you could watch 12 episodes of America’s Funniest Home Videos (a national favourite here), you could write a paper (ha! I don’t do that – I’m not in school anymore!), you could catch a GAZILLION fish at the mouth of the Ilulissat Icefjord, and then spend another 6 hours cleaning and filleting them. Can you guess what we did yesterday?
Silver, the little, mustached Italian man who looks eerily like my dad and whose most common comments to me are ‘Oh! Why you so beautiful?!’ and ‘Why you don’t eat?’, lent his boat to a friend for the afternoon. It was the friend, an equally short and equally wonderful Greenlandic man named Niels, who passed his half-dozen hours catching so many Atlantic Cod that I’m beginning to wonder if all the cod that have disappeared from New England waters have just migrated up here. And then it was Marie, Silver’s Greenlandic wife who is always smiling, joking and keeping her hands busy (making a seal skin purse for her daughter, knitting a sweater for Silver …), stood at the sink from 6 PM – 12 AM, chopping the heads off the fish, setting aside their stomachs and livers, and slicing the meat off the bones. Ten of the fish are hanging from a clothesline-type contraption on the porch, where they are supposed to dry (I tend to think they will freeze?). The other dozen fishy corpses are individually bagged and packed into the huge freezer that is an essential in any household in Greenland (kind of ironic, since temperatures outside often FEEL colder than temperatures in the freezer!).
OK, so obviously when I said ‘guess what WE did’, I meant that the people surrounding me did all the work and I was told to sit and look pretty. You all know how good I am at doing that … So I went for an evening stroll through town. It was about 8:30 PM and -2 degrees Celsius (28 degrees F) when I left the house in fleece pants, a puffy jacket, a hat and a scarf. The sun had just sunk below the horizon, leaving an echo of soft, horizontal bands of color that made me want to dance and cry at the same time. Of course, I did a little of both J And then? I reached the top of a public staircase (Ilulissat has lots of staircases – pedestrian shortcuts in a town built into a land that rises out of the water and into the hills) and saw the moon! As much as I wanted to swim Southwest across the bay to meet the colors of the sunset, I wanted even more to walk north until I reached the moon. It floated just above the horizon – seemed like I could have touched it, just above my head, if I had walked all the way up there! Its crescent, old-man-with-a-big-chin-profile shape was the color of caramel, if caramel could shine, and made me think of the comfort of hot chocolate after a long day of sledding. And I’m about as good at ignoring thoughts of chocolate as I am at sitting pretty, so I started home again. The walk home, away from town and up the hills, takes me past the big grocery store, the incineration plant and a field of sled dogs that are more scary than cute at 9:30 at night (or any other time of day for that matter). So I had kinda thought my stroll had ended when I turned away from the sky and back to the (SNOW COVERED!) mountains. But alas! The Northern Lights were out! So I got to watch the ribbons green dance across the tops of the mountains and weave through the stars that looked on from a distance. Needless to say it was a magical evening. And when I got home, there was hot coffee waiting.
No, I don’t spend ALL my time wandering through town dreaming about various elements of the universe. Right now, I’m at work – at my computer, in my office … in Greenland. I am working for the Ilulissat municipality, as an intern in the Environment Department. Since I am unpaid, I get to decide my hours and my projects (within reason…) – they just give me resources and occasionally take breaks to come in here and tell me all about what they do (I just learned all about sewage in Ilulissat – intriguing). It’s a pretty sweet set up.
I am working on two environmental education projects for the municipality – one focusing on tourists and one on locals. Today I am meeting with the head of all the tourist agencies to talk about the tourist industry here and how best to communicate the natural history and climatic changes of this place to the 36,000 tourists that come to this town every year. The project for local awareness-raising is inspired by my experiences and conversations with people here about nature and climate change. Everyone loves the natural world around town and all the resources and adventures they glean from it, but very few know/believe much about climate change and the affects it could have on that natural world. Part of the problem is that most of the information that they get about climate change comes from the international press, which tends to use Greenland as an example of current, drastic climate changes that disturb animal populations, human lifeways, etc. But for many people here, the melting ice cap, receding glacier and rapid Arctic warming that they hear about are inconsistent with personal experience: the glacier still calves huge icebergs into the bay regularly, there doesn’t seem to be any less ice, and it is still cold (duh, it’s Greenland). So I’m trying to figure out 1. what the reality of climate change is up here (vs. what is media exaggeration) 2. how to communicate that reality to local people. I like the idea of having public forums and publications in Greenlandic of all the research done in the area – because I meet scientists all the time who are here studying permafrost or the glacier or ice cores, but they are not required to share any of it with local people. My first experiment will come on Tuesday, when a scientist from NASA will come to one of the English classes I’ve been helping with at the adult-ed center in town…
Right, I also teach English! Well, kind of. I have been to maybe 10 classes to introduce myself and talk about America – this at the request of the teachers, whose students are intrigued by the American culture and news that bombards them every day on the TV, radio, etc. So I’ve had two discussions about 9/11, which were really interesting, and 2 about climate change at the adult ed center (hence the interest in local environmental ed). Then I’ve had a bunch of classes at the local high school, where I’ve talked about what it’s like to grow up in the States, how the US is different from and similar to Greenland, etc. I only have one class that I teach on my own and it is a group of five 9th-grade girls who are very advanced English speakers. Last week we just did an introduction and this week I am starting a unit on Native Americans with them. I’m interested to see what kinds of connections we’ll be able to draw … They’ll (hopefully!) have pen pals from the Lakota reservation where I worked during my year off.
Alright, for a girl who is ‘at work’, I haven’t gotten very much done this morning! There’s much more to talk about and, now that I have a computer and regular internet access, I’ll try to tell you about it more often! For now, it’s coffee and the IPCC IV report for me …