A Blast From the Past
I knew that the work in the Canadian Arctic among the Inuit people wasn’t the first time that the Mission (Ethnos360) had considered that people group. There is a couple who work here in Sanford, Florida, who were some of the first ones to work in the Arctic areas: Ron and Terresa Hiebert.
Ron went to Greenland, with Gary Ferch in 1988 to do some repairs on a missionary family’s house. Then in 1989, the same two did a survey in Nunavut, Canada, in the same area where Joel and I visited. In the late fall of 1991, the Hieberts moved to Greenland. I asked, “Why Greenland?” Terresa responded, “We were close friends with Gary and Donna Ferch, who were excited about and planning to go to Greenland. It seemed like a good fit because I couldn’t handle hot weather (now we’re in Florida!), and after Ron came back from Greenland very excited, we decided that’s where we wanted to go. No blinding light or still, small voice — just calm assurance.”
Ron and Terresa were only there for three years because attempts to renew their visas were denied. Besides the Ferch family, they worked with five other couples and two singles.
The Hieberts were ministering to the Inuit of western Greenland. After seeing what the Inuktitut language looked and sounded like, I asked what language the Hieberts learned. Terresa said, “We learned mostly Danish because we weren’t full-time language learners, and you don’t just pick up Greenlandic, the people’s heart language.”
For the average Greenlander (including the missionaries), the daily mode of transportation was on foot; few people could afford a car. If they wanted to travel between towns, it had to be done by coastal boats. Once again, there were no roads connecting the towns. And what about food and fuel back then? “Food prices were higher, especially for anything ‘raw.’ Fresh fruit was kind of an oxymoron. Milk was mostly shelf-life box milk or powdered whole milk, peanut butter was rare, and black licorice of all sorts seemed to be a favorite. Since we didn’t own a car, we only bought fuel for heating our home — by the liter! Too many years ago to compare prices with today.”
Even though the style of ministry was different from that of tropical countries, the main emphasis was still on building relationships. God allowed Terresa to develop a friendship in order to learn the language; Ron built relationships as he worked with the men in the kayak-building club. As they said, “This was all in the very early stages of life in a town instead of a tribal village. People didn’t need the missionary or his stuff or his help; that made it harder to connect.”
I was given a small glimpse of what life is like in the Arctic today, but I asked the Hieberts what made the culture unique when they were there 30 years ago. “The people lived and looked like the Danes,” they said. “These were town and city people, not remote jungle village people. Literacy was probably lower among the people over 70, but pretty much everyone could read, and they learned English from TV and movies.” Looking back at life then, Terresa said, “One cultural thing that was so different for us was that mothers would leave their babies outside the store in their pram [or stroller] and go inside to shop, never worrying that someone would steal them — or that they would get too cold when it was near zero outside!”
Today? The national airline of Greenland makes regular flights to Nunavut, to the same town that Joel and I visited. The Hieberts said, “We have two couples working in Greenland to reach the people there. The language is similar, but it’s still a dialect that would require a different Bible translation, especially when you consider the cultural differences between the two people groups.”
Pray that the work among the Inuit will go forward to see a thriving church established in many communities both in Canada and in Greenland.
