Rhythm of the Tides: my arctic experience

Our Team

Twelve individuals don't necessarily make a team, but we do; we quickly learn to live and work together. Four of us are new to Habitat for Humanity; the others are veterans. They've been on previous builds together and some have many builds under their belts. Joshua, our team leader has been doing three or four per year for the last three years.

Our team is equally divided along gender lines, and with the exception of four people (Philip and Loraine from Nova Scotia, Virginia from Windsor, Ontario, and Roman from the nation's capital) we're all from the Greater Toronto Area. It doesn't take long to develop a sense of camaraderie.

HfH has rented two, three-bedroom apartments, in different buildings, and they become our living quarters. The apartment where Don and I share a room has a spacious kitchen, dining room and living room and becomes our bonding place. We have all arrived with an abundance of good will and good humour; and working together, eating together and living together it soon feels like one big, happy family. Some evenings we all congregate in one apartment to pass the time together playing games. Other evenings, after dinner, we come back to our separate apartments, where we talk, play cards or do our own thing. It doesn't take long before it starts to feel like home. We're an interesting group of individuals from all walks of life and we each have different stories to tell.

When we arrive on the jobsite, on Monday morning, the house is already framed. Three other teams have been here before us. It sits three to four feet above ground, on stilts that go down to the permafrost. The space between the floor and the ground allows the cold wind to keep the permafrost layer from warming up. In the arctic, if they were built right on the ground, the heat generated inside the house would cause the permafrost to melt and the house to sink, unless it was built on bedrock.

Pease, the project supervisor, is not here and won't return until Thursday, and his replacement, Liberty, is not familiar with the job. While he figures out what needs to be done and what to do with twelve eager beavers, we start cleaning up the work site. It is littered with scraps of wood, building materials are spread all over the place, and so we stack them up in neat piles out of the way of the work areas. Within an hour, the site is clean and orderly and would pass safety inspection, if there were any.

Scoffy, a teacher at a technical school in the Greater Toronto Area, becomes our de facto safety inspector. Although he's the youngest team member, he becomes our mother hen making sure that everyone is working safely and is comfortable with using power tools. It's hard to imagine the team without him! He is the team's greatest asset not only for his safety-first approach and technical skills, but also for being the team's driver for the entire week.

The Nunavut Construction Corporation, which employs both Liberty and Pease, made available a van for transporting the team to and from the site. For this week, it's Scoffy's van! Some of us enjoy walking to the site, but the van comes in handy, particularly on rainy days.

Before we know it, we're all busy measuring, cutting, nailing, and installing insulation both inside and out. Building a house in the arctic is about three things: insulation, insulation, and insulation! We work day in and day out stuffing piles of it into the floors, walls, and ceilings. Of course, one can put all the insulation in the world, but if the house is not well sealed it doesn't mean much.

We put vapour barriers both on the inside and the outside to keep the humidity in and the cold air out. When it's –40, the outside air has practically no moisture and living in a house with very little humidity is a challenge for the human body. We need to keep the moisture generated from cooking and breathing inside the house so our lungs don't dry up. So, we pay careful attention to window frames and doors by gluing the vapour barrier to the frames to ensure a good seal. This house is well sealed!