A faint birdlike call in the darkness rouses me and I reach for my phone. It’s three in the morning. The pale yellow light guides me through the darkness and, in its glow, I see the smooth contours of his face resting in the cot, eyes half closed, like mine, still half way from sleep. …
Tiny, idyllic-looking settlements are sparsely scattered along the coast and fjords of west Greenland. They’re beautiful, but there’s not much work. One of the few jobs is working as an attendant at the local shop. We visited a settlement at the head of a long fjord, small colourful houses dotting the hills, looking down to …
In hindsight, it wasn’t a very good idea. Earlier in the day moving between one boat and the other had been easy. After two weeks together, navigating along the coast and fjords of South Greenland, the skippers were adept at manouvering their boats close in the water, pulling up to cliffed walls, delivering passengers onto …
The surprises one meets in Greenland might be out of the ordinary, but the responses one becomes accustomed to are perhaps even more surprising. Such was the case last week. The scene unfolding in our bathroom stopped me in my tracks and the phrase, ‘Destroying the evidence,’ popped into my head momentarily. Then I registered …
Sometimes good things come from bad places. Three years ago, almost to the day, I slipped on a gravelly surface while trekking in the mountains near Maniitsoq on the west coast of Greenland. I heard my fibula snap as I fell screaming and then I lay there on a rocky slab for six hours with …
Our second son was born in Nuuk three weeks ago. At the hospital, I was given a document stating his social security number and date and place of birth. So I went to the council office to register his name – to convert him from a purely numbered to a named human. “Has he been …
Greenland is full of interesting characters and P is one of them – a Greenlander who has worked with my husband on and off on mineral exploration projects for many years. P is one of those rare guys who, with limited formal qualifications of any kind, is nonetheless utterly indispensible. Like toornaarsuk – a Greenlandic …
In the past two weeks, while awaiting the arrival of our second son, our first was finally learning a love of the outdoors. The local council in Nuuk runs a series of free activities and courses, particularly for kids on their summer holidays. So we excitedly signed him up for an ‘experience nature’ course run …
A shard of black rock hangs impossibly in the air, detached from its steep mountain slopes below by heavy grey cloud. I feel some of the same heaviness inside, wrapped in a cloud of expectation, uncertainty. The child waits silently for his time, like a stone in my belly. Years ago, I sat in a …