She’s a real Greenie
Apart from Santa Claus, Hannah Christiansen might be the first Greenlander to visit Porirua – but unlike St Nick she has stayed and got to know our city.
Hannah, 17, has been living in Ranui since January as an exchange student at Bishop Viard College.
She wishes everybody would visit her home country – that way, she wouldn’t have to constantly explain what life is like in a country that’s a total mystery to most.
‘‘ Nobody knows very much about our culture and our nature. Mostly people have so many questions,’’ she said. ‘‘Sometimes we get quite tired of explaining who we are.’’
Not many people would know that Santa comes from Greenland – the Arctic nation has capitalised on the Christmas story, building a Santa house and a mailbox to collect wish lists from all the world’s children.
Hannah is the only Greenlandic exchange student in New Zealand: with only 200 high school students in her home town, capi- tal city Nuuk, Hannah would know if any of her peers were nearby.
Her first impression of New Zealand was that it was warm and very green – there are no trees in Greenland, just grass and scrubland, and a huge ice sheet that covers most of the country.
Summer temperatures at home are 15 to 20 degrees on average, but with such dry air it could feel colder, she said.
New Zealand’s landscapes and wildlife attracted Hannah to New Zealand.
She wants to be a marine biologist and has spent a lot of time studying our natural world this year. Life is pretty much the same for Nuuk teenagers as those in Porirua, Hannah said.
Everybody has TV and the internet, and children do normal things on the weekend – go to the movies or go shopping. ‘‘We just live like normal.’’ Football and handball are popular sports, and many people sail in the summer.
Boat skills come in handy when travelling the country: there are no roads connecting Greenland’s towns, so people fly, take a ferry or sail from place to place.
Food is quite different back home, Hannah said. Reindeer and seal are eaten frequently, and
Christmas din- ner is traditionally raw whale meat.
Nuuk is a city of 16,000 people and is far enough south that it’s not dark all day in winter, but life would be very different in the tiny villages in the north of the huge country.
Even there though, people didn’t live in igloos like the stereotypes, Hannah said.
Polar bears did sometimes wander into villages but were quickly shot or tranquilised, she said.
Greenland has a huge ethnic mix, from the native Greenlandic tribes to ethnic Europeans, Jamaicans, Asians and mixes of all the above. Hannah’s builder father is Danish and her statistician mother is Icelandic.
All Greenlanders call themselves ‘‘Inuit’’, much like people identify as ‘‘Kiwi’’ in New Zealand.
In Nuuk people lived in modern houses, much warmer than homes in New Zealand, Hannah said.
Nobody locked their doors at night, she said.
‘‘Because it’s so small, people know each other by face. We just trust people because it’s so small.’’