Big day in the north!

Oh my goodness! Imec, this is one of the coolest things that's ever been posted on this forum!

Everybody is having such a good time and seem so glad to have been included in the torch passing.

I love the pictures of the terrain, too -- bleak, but beautiful and interesting. Your nephew inherited his Uncle Imec's photo talent! Be sure to let us know what he says about this thread. Better yet, persuade him to get on AnyPort. It would be fascinating to hear about life up there.

That's a great event for such a place, but it has a very nice airport terminal. The first time I landed in the Maldives, the terminal had no walls -- it was just a roofed shack open to the wind. The airport bar was a man sitting at a table in front of a refrigerator.

Wow, thanks for sharing those, imec. So interesting. I have a cousin who lives in Yellow Knife, she works in a hospital up there. I imagine the winters must be quite harsh, although one gets used to them.

When is the torch coming to you, Deyana?

I have not, but Mrs. I has been. Each year she has a couple of her students assigned to the Northern Health Unit in Repulse Bay, which is managed by the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority.

She's on the left in this pic:

Fabulous photos, imec. Thanks so much for your Facebook thievery!

Btw, my SIL lived in the booming metropolis of Iqaluit, Nunavut for almost 10 years when she was in the RCMP. She described having non-perishable food items delivered 2 or 3 times a year and having a sea-locker to store it in - basically a trailer home filled with flour, rice, beans etc. I imagine your nephew and his wife live a similar experience?

I have a cousin (who's mum is an Inuk) who is working up in Iqaluit. I've never been to Nunavut, but I have worked up in Nunavik - Arctic Québec. The tropics compared to these pics - it is at the tree line and there are little conifers like bushes.

Oh, how I love the traditional parkas, handmade from sealskin and other furs!

People who have hunters in the family and still eat a traditional game-based diet are in good health, but the stuff that comes up from the "South" (down here) have very severe nutritional problems, as do northern First Nations (Indian) communities. There is as you can imagine a lot of diabetes and heart disease among those communities - there have been a few success stories about such communities turning this around - a documentary was made about one. Another problem - less known than abuse of alcohol, illegal drugs and solvents when the former are banned (alas a problem in Indigenous communities around the world), is the harm done by second-hand smoke, as people are smoking indoors in close quarters. The little windows of those houses have triple glazing.

Some of you may have read an amazing story - it was in the Guardian as well as Canadian papers - about a 17-year-old Inuit hunter who managed to survive on an ice floe for almost 3 days and actually shot a polar bear who was on the same bit of ice floe. The young man and his uncle, an experienced hunter, were rescued and are recovering in hospital in Churchill, northern Manitoba. Imec, have you been up to Churchill?

Churchill is named for John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, an ancestor of Winston Churchill, who was governor of the Hudson's Bay Company in the late seventeenth century. (No, it is not a renaming from the postwar period, as many might think). A railway goes up there, and it isn't just for tourists - also for exports and as a shipping point to Arctic communities.