Day 1 – Saturday 10 August - Arrival

Day 1 – Saturday 10 August

Content by joanne

We all arrived safe and sound to a slightly-overcast and 7-degree day in Iqaluit. Our mounds of luggage also arrived, which was a good thing since we were on the plane with a large group of hockey coaches going to Iqaluit for their yearly hockey camp, and their priority-status bags could have bumped some of ours.

We were welcomed at the airport by our very-well organized and enthusiastic affiliate team and driven to our two townhouses on Green Row, after which we had a brief overview of the week with Melanie (our Habitat Affiliate contact) and then went on a 2-hour tour of the city with Eric, who has volunteered his tour for all of the GV groups.

Iqaluit is not a big city – but we went everywhere – from Apex to the town dump. Eric (also known as George) explained some of the challenges of living in the north, about the history of the town, and even the differences between global warming and climate change from the perspective of the town residents. It was an excellent tour and very informative.  

Eric pointing out the sights

One of the things we learned about was the ‘road to nowhere’ which is an actual road name (apparently they have great difficulty keeping the road signs up since they keep getting stolen for keepsakes). There is a shortage of gravel in Iqaluit, and for much of the development they had to take rocks and crush them – which is very costly. When a source of gravel was found not too far outside town, there was not surprisingly a lot of interest in developing it – so a road was built to allow trucks to get there. The only problem was that when they built the road – they used up all the gravel! As a result, the road goes … nowhere.

Original Hudson's Bay Store in Apex

The old,and the new - just waiting for the ice to come back..

There was also a lot of discussion about land and land-use on our tour. There is a huge need for affordable housing in Iqaluit, but the Habitat affiliate said that they may not have a build next year because there is a shortage of land. Wait – no land? There is more undeveloped land here than anything else! The problem is exactly that – the land is undeveloped – no road access, no electricity, no water or sewage. Even the area that our current build is in – Apex – is ‘truck-fill’ – which means that the water comes by truck. It costs huge amounts of money to develop a tract of land, and the money is not there.

The home-owner for our build is Joanna, who lives and works in Iqaluit and spends countless hours helping at the build site. She has a special-needs child who lives in Ottawa for specialized care, and comes to Iqaluit for visits. The house is being built with a wheelchair ramp, large-size doors, and specialized bathroom facilities to allow Joanna to eventually live with her child. We may be building the wheelchair ramp this week – which will be very special.

For supper we were invited to a barbeque at the house of a good friend of Joanna’s. It was excellent, very tasty, and we even had strawberry-shortcake for dessert! Some of the group walked back along the Apex Trail to take in more of this beautiful scenery, while the rest went to the grocery store.

The store has ‘Saturday door-crasher specials’ from 6-9 and we arrived just in time to miss the deals but get in at the end of the line for checkout. One family in front of us got three carts-full of groceries (boxes of Gatorade, Chipits, flour, pudding – on and on) for $275 while we got about a quarter of a cart for about $130, including two 2.6 liter jugs of orange juice for 20 – each! Obviously it would take some planning to live here on a budget!

Yes, that is the price for the case of Coke!

Crazy Indeed!!!