Grise Fiord - The Most Northern Community in Canada! ... And you thought it was Resolute Bay, Didn't you?

Final destination in the high arctic! OMG Grise Fiord! There are only two flights each week that go to Grise, and of course that is weather permitting, as always. There is a very small runway nestled in the mountain side which makes landing very difficult. Nothing larger than a twin otter can land and the wind has to be below ten knots. It is very easy to be trapped in Grise for these reasons.

Grise was established in the 1950`s during the Government of Canada`s High Arctic Relocation.This is the only community in the North that actually has a decreasing population, currently there are only 114 residents. I urge you to watch the documentary Martha of The North, which shows the hardships these Inuit families faced when they were moved from their homes in Northern Quebec under false promises of fertile lands, excellent hunting and the choice to go home after two years if they wanted. 

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to have tea with one gentleman who appeared in the film. Larry received the Order Of Canada for his efforts to gain reconciliation with the government. It was not until 2010 that the government finally gave a formal apology, admitting to the inhumane treatment and forcible relocation of these families.

On a happier note, the people in Grise were amazing and very hospitable, similar to Resolute. I really enjoyed my short trip there. Here are some pictures!

I was really having second thoughts when I saw this thing.

Me at the back of a terribly small plane.

This is Grise!
The first two days we had light like this for 30 minutes,
then it was black...all night and all day.

Me.
Getting ready to drive the GN SUV.

Looty Pijamini's monument of the first Inuit settlers of 1952 and 1955 in Grise Fiord
(commissioned by the Canadian Government)
Unfinished monument. The blob on the left is supposed to be a dog.

Friday Night in Resolute Bay - Let's Go To The Dump!

Resolute Bay has a population of approximately 250 people, and many polar bears. Resolute is considered the gateway to the magnetic North Pole and, therefore, is frequented regularly by adventure tourists. There are three hotels in this small community, most communities only have one. 

The town.
A plane crashed in the mountain a couple of years ago...let's not think about that.

I have to tell you that this small community quickly became my favourite out of the nine communities I have had the opportunity to visit in the North. The people here are SO friendly and warm. You feel a great sense of family and community spirit. Everyone looks out for each-other. People even take turns on voluntary polar bear watch in order to keep the children and community safe. 

It goes on forever!
Watch out for polar bears!

Speaking of polar bears....It is Friday night, so what do we do for fun in the High North? Well, we decide to drive down to the dump to watch polar bears, of course! Four of us piled into a van, with cameras in tow, hoping to get a glimpse of a real, live polar bear. There are so many polar bears in Resolute that the community has 30 tags per year, (compared to 20 in most). Half of these are sold to Southerners who hunt for sport. The dump had some arctic foxes and a polar bear popping up in the background. Honestly, I couldn't differentiate the bear from the piles of snow.

This photo was taken a couple of days before I arrived by a man staying at the hotel.
The bears go to the dump to eat, they don't seem to care if it is still hot and on fire.

At the airport.
This is the closest I got to a polar bear.

We worked in clinic for a mere two days before we decided to head to our next destination, Grise Fiord. 

Health Clinic

Proof I was in Resolute.
Arctic ocean in the background.

High Arctic Adventure - Arctic Bay

After leaving Pond Inlet, I arrived home for a four day mini vacation. Next stop was Iqaluit to meet my new dentist for the high arctic trip. Our first stop was Arctic Bay on Northern Baffin Island. The plan was to stay for two weeks, but we cut our visit down to ten days due to the fact that we were struggling to get patients in. There was a dental team in just a couple of weeks ago, and the community seems to have been over-serviced. I welcomed the slower pace since I have been working a lot of overtime and could use a bit of a break. Did I also mention that I caught a horrible flu that made it's way around town not once, but twice. Not fun to be sick in the Arctic!

Arctic Bay has a population of approximately 1000. There is a Northern Store, a Co-Op, a couple of convienient stores, and a heritage centre where they sell local carvings, mittens and artwork. There are also three churches in the community.

Street and Skidoo.

Northern Store, just three houses from the health centre

The Bay. Too frozen to use these. Two dog teams are tied up on the ice.

Church to the right of the health centre

Stuart and I had the opportunity to visit the school and meet some great kids in grade 5 and 6. This school has a dental therapist who takes care of all of the children's oral health needs, so instead of doing a dental presentation Stuart showed pictures from his trip to Africa, which the kids loved!

Grade 5/6

All giggles. They loved having their picture taken.

I was thrilled to see the toothbrushes in the classroom!

Inuit Languages

My past trips were in the Kitikmeot region towards the West. There the dialect was called Inuinnaqtun. In the Baffin region it is Inuktitut. My wonderful clerks, Julia in Clyde, and Ruthie in Pond, haves been trying to teach me the basics. I am pretty bad and get laughed at on occasion. It's a hard language to speak!

I found that very few people chose to speak Inuit languages in the communities I had visited before. Mostly, just elders spoke their native language. I had no problems speaking to people in English as it was preffered. There was even concern that the language and culture were in risk of dying. Here in Baffin, Inuktitut is definitely the language of preference, especially young children who often do not speak English at all. I am so grateful to have my interpreters!

Also, syllabics are used here, where they were not in the Kitkmeot region.

Pond elementary school

Lesson:

ullaku - good morning
atii - please
qruyannami - thank you
qanuippi - how are you
ii - yes
aaka - no
kiigu - bite (important for me!)
taima - all done (VERY important)

I am noticing that there are slight differences in dialect from Clyde River to Pond Inlet, even though they are only a short hour plane ride away from each other, which is making leaning Inuktitut even more difficult.

Inuktitut Syllabics

Million Dollar View

Let's get you up to speed. I have been in Pond Inlet since October 18th. I have been trying to get caught up on writing, but it has been a bit difficult while working 75 hour weeks. I'm just a bit tired!

Pond Inlet has a population of about 1700 people. This is the largest community I have worked in, so far. It is located on the Northeastern tip of Baffin Island. I only had two days with picture opportunities where the sun was shining. It has been very overcast weather since I have arrived.

Mountain range

Small piece of a large iceberg that floated in last week.

Moon and mountains

Nanuq

Clyde River is regularly frequented by polar bears. Sometimes they will come right in town to the Northern store! I was told when I first arrived that I should not walk to and from the clinic because of this danger. However, I like to walk, so in the day, when there were lots of people around, I would take the ten minute walk, risking being eaten by a nanuq (polar bear). Sadly, two days later there was a sighting near the airport which is very close to where I was staying, so my walks were short lived.

The week before I arrived there were two nanuqs hanging around town. There are always people on lookout. Eventually one got too close and was killed for obvious safety reasons. Polar bear pie was being passed around town, or so I heard (not a joke). The other bear was clearly worried he too would also become pie and decided to leave.

Nanuq hunting seems to be well regulated in the North. Names are drawn at random for tags that expire in a couple of days when a new name is then drawn. Each community has an allotment for tags, Clyde has around 20. If bears are killed in selfdefense, the number of tags subsequently goes down.

Nanuq is considered country food here. However, the big prize is getting paid for the skin from buyers down South. A young lady I met got $12 000 for her polar bear skin. The price can be much higher depending on the size of bear.

Google image. I did not encounter these cute bears.

Clinic

We were off to a bumpy start as far as clinic went. When we arrived we had no instruments; no forceps, elevators, or restoration material, we didn't even have lidocaine (freezing). We tried to see some patients, but we could only perform an exam and tell them to come back when we got our supplies and anaesthetic in. By Saturday we had all of our shipments and were able to start properly seeing patients. Let the 12 hour + shifts begin!

Our little op

Health Centre and Dental Waiting Room

We see a lot of deep decay and perform a lot of extractions and fillings. We have patients as young as 17 months old coming in with decay so far gone that we have no choice but to remove the teeth that are causing abscesses. We sometimes take newly erupted adult teeth (6 year molars) out of 7 year old children. Obviously we see  lot of tears in the day. This makes some people uncomfortable, but the patients are just scared and should be allowed to cry. As Julia said "I don't mean to be rude, but this is some scary shit!". We are fortunate enough down South to have sedation, here there is nothing. There are waiting list of young patients to be flown to Iqaluit or Ottawa to have sedation, but it can take up to two years to be seen. By that time it is really too late, people can only suffer from a tooth ache for so long. In a perfect world there would be no tooth aches, especially for children.

Piqqusilirivvik

The hotel in Clyde is under renovations. I have the pleasure of staying at the piqqusilirivvik cultural learning centre. It is a beautiful building established in 2010. People from all communities come here to learn about traditional Inuit culture. There are sewing, woodworking, hunting as well as other traditional skills and values classes. I often arrived after work to the sounds of beautiful traditional throat singing and drumming.

Sunrise view from my room over the piqqu centre.

Seal skin bench

My little room. Please note my essentials! Blue yoga mat, zero water filter, humidifier and kettle.

http://www.piqqusilirivvik.ca/apps/authoring/dspPage.aspx?page=home

This wind barrier is the latest project in Clyde. Many locals have told me that it is a huge waste of money and will likely not work. They feel that the $1.3 MILLION could have been spent on building something more useful, such as a swimming pool for the children.

The health centre is a short ten minute walk from the learning centre. The nursing staff here are fantastic. There are no permanent doctors in the North, only nurse practitioners, they are doing an amazing job of looking after the community.

On My Way To Clyde River

Thursday, the skies were bright and clear with not a cloud in the sky. Perfect for flying to our first community, Clyde River. The temperature is approximately -10C.

It is back to my favourite little turboprop planes that take us to the small communities. Is my sarcasm coming through? Maybe not. I am not a fan of these small cargo planes, they are VERY turbulent and very noisy.

I am sitting in the last row. This proved to be a bad choice of seats as they were one short for lunch service and since I was at the back I was out of luck. Too bad because First Air has yummy food.

As I peered through my window flying towards Clyde, I felt a sense of awe and wonder. The land looked like a gigantic bowl of freshly whipped meringue! The sun was shining brightly on the West face of the snowy white peaks, casting a shadow on the East. When we passed over bodies of water I noticed the smaller ones starting to freeze over slightly. (Sorry, I was too busy staring to grab my camera.) 

We arrived in Clyde River and it is so beautiful. Mountains to the West and a vast barren snow covered land to the East. The inlet is surrounded by fjords. The community lies in the Baffin mountains off Patricia's Bay in the Qikiqtaalu region (AKA Baffin Region) of Nunavut. There are approximately 800 people living here, half are under the age of 18. I heard that this community has one of the largest childrens population in the region.

Clyde River

Trip To Baffin Island Communities

Tuesday October 8, 2013

It has been a while since I have been in the North. I guess I forgot a few things, like weather delays at airports are a given.

The plan was to leave Ottawa at 9:15 for Iqaluit, have a two hour layover before heading to our final destination of Clyde River, Nunavut at 4 pm.

The reality: I tried to check in with First Air, but was informed that there was a three hour delay. Canadian North, the only other airline to Iqaluit that day, had already cancelled their flight, due to 100 km/h winds and because Iqaluit had no power. I opted to go home for a couple of hours, rather than sit in an airport which will be my fate for the next couple of weeks.

I continually checked my flight progress, which was still on delayed schedule, so I hopped in a cab and headed back to the airport. The First Air attendant asked me to wait another fifteen minutes because there is still a chance of the flight being cancelled. Tick Toc. An announcement comes on the PA "First Air flight 820 to Iqaluit has been cancelled due to bad weather and power outages". At least I have another day to eat some fruits and vegetables before I am stuck with my freeze-dry diet.

Lets Try This Again

Wednesday morning the flight to Iqaluit is a go! My flight neighbour was the cutest inuk girl called Kunuk. As she says "it's spelled the same forwards as backwards". She was on a shopping trip to Ottawa with her cousins. She kept asking me if I new various people in Ottawa, assuming since I live there that I should know everyone she met. I had to tell her Ottawa is too big for me to know everyone.

We arrived in Iqaluit and I was greeted by Joanne and finally met Chan, the dentist I am to work with. Joanne had some documents for us to bring to Clyde River, she gave us her phone number in case of any problems and said goodbye.

Ten minutes to boarding the PA comes on "Low visibility in Clyde, may not be able to land, will likely fly over and stay in Pond Inlet". Great. Long story short we opted to stay in Iqaluit for the night. The only problem was that there were miners in town so all of the hotel beds were completely booked up! FYI when you stay in a hotel in the North you are buying a bed, not a room. There is aways a chance you could be bunking with a random roomie.

Thankfully, I was able to call Joanne. She was kind enough to open her home to two complete strangers and allowed us to stay the night. She lives in a newer part of town where they are starting to bury the water and sewage pipes. Joanne is thrilled, because now she does not have to worry about the water truck coming (see older posts).

Joanne's lovely home in Iqaluit

I qaluit is stunning!!!

The city surrounded by hills and lakes

Of course I have to have an animal picture