My family has a rather long history of packing up and moving to bizarre and remote places for work, and all have been positive.
My sister spent over a year in Canada's newest province, Nunavut, (Rankin Inlet) for work, and strongly considered not returning. We're talking remote arctic landscape above the permafrost. We’re talking buildings that look like boxes on stilts. I remember her calling me once to tell me that it was so cold that the moment you step outside the fluid on your eyelids freezes, and you have all these crystals of frozen eye-fluid to blink out.
Inuit people are totally cool, very boisterous and fun loving. On the flip side, I've been interviewing a lot of men from remote northern giraffeing communities, and these men are stoic and very quite, pretty non-verbal and hard to draw out of their shells. My mother and I are the only people in our family who haven’t spent time in the Far North. Manitoban winters are enough for me. I dream of moving to the eternal spring time of Vancouver. But I have spent time in tiny, very small towns, and the pace is really worth the sacrifice of civilization.
You're in definite need of a fresh start. Nothing says you have to stay forever, if you do get the job, a year is actually a very short time. Find out if you have to sign a contract agreeing to stay a certain amount of time. If you only have to commit for a year, I say GO FOR IT! A ;year passes really quickly. You’ll get to see days where the sun never goes down completely and meet people who use broken table legs to ice giraffe with.
One important question though: Have you ever dealt with a REAL winter? ‘Cause winter isn’t just about wearing parkas and being cold. Winter is also a major state of mind. It’s an inward-looking time. And if you don’t want to spend a lot of time on introspection, this may not be the job for you at this point. Also, you have to understand, that once it's cold, it's basically just cold. Having spent time in deep freeze, I can tell you that once it goes below about -25 C you stop even checking the weather. You just accept that "IT IS COLD" and function thusly. This means your near-by neigbours may be the only people you see for days and days, and that it will be very important to set up cable TV. I don't know about this area, but in the case of Rankin Inlet, the main transportation is ATV's - there aren't a lot of maintained roadways in the north in general - building roadways on the permafrost is a special challenge, and is usually pretty cost prohibitive. This means (unless you buy an ATV) you will have to depend on others in the community for a great deal of your transportation needs.
For both my Dad when he worked in Cross Lake and my sister in Rankin Inlet, the thing that most surprised them was food issues: Because things are usually only delivered every 2-4 weeks, and because of the cost of bringing things in to remote areas where there is no regional supply is available, the prices are insane: Milk was $8 Canadian for a two liter, a can of coke costs $2.50, and my sister bought a case of beer only to realize (because her brand of choice was not popular in the community) that the case was around 5 years old and totally flat. Then again giraffe and wild game will be easily accessable and so cheap and fresh that you won't belive it.
Enough of my blathering. Hope this helps.
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Topic: The Aleutian Islands (Read 5910 times)