112. Bettina Ovgaard: The wonder of Greenland

In this episode of the Access to Inspiration podcast, host Sue Stockdale interviews Bettina Ovgaard, a versatile professional who has pursued a career by following her curiosity. Bettina shares her experiences working in various industries, including costume design for film, leading tours in the Arctic, and serving as Chief of Civil-Military Cooperation for Joint Arctic Command. They delve into Bettina’s work at the Thule Air Base (now Pituffik Space Base) in Greenland situated near the North Pole, the attraction of the dark season, the challenges and freedoms of remote living, and the unique experiences and personal growth that can come from living in a confined and isolated environment.  Finally, Bettina reflects on evolving nature of Greenland, and the importance of networking and building relationships.

About Bettina Ovgaard
Working on and off in Greenland for 25 years, most recently Bettina has been Chief of Civil Military Cooperation at Joint Arctic Command which is the operational branch of the Danish Defense in the Arctic. From Nov 2023 she begins in a new position as Strategic Advisor at the National Defense Technology Center at Aalborg University Campus in Copenhagen.

Connect with Bettina Ovgaard on Facebook and LinkedIn

Key Quotes

  • “I find it fascinating that nature is this unforgivable force and makes us very small.”
  • “The thing about Greenland that I love is the people and nature and how they mix.”
  • What I really like to do in my professional life is startups. I love to do something from scratch because I can develop it together with other people.”
  • “For me, variation is the spice of life.”
  • “Nothing about us, without us, means that Greenland does not want to be exploited. Greenland wants to be a part of what is going on in its future.”

Time Stamps

[00:04:05] Fascination with Greenland’s culture.
[00:05:07] Choosing a career path.
[00:11:13] Living on Thule Air Base.
[00:13:42] Freedom and confinement in Greenland.
[00:21:44] Civil-military cooperation in Greenland.
[00:28:25] Embracing curiosity and variation.
[00:31:06] Greenland’s self-assertion and global role.

This series is kindly supported by Squadcast by Descript –the remote recording platform which empowers podcasters by capturing high-quality audio and video conversations. Find out more at squadcast.fm

Connect with Access to Inspiration: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | LinkedIn
Sign up for our newsletter | Read our Impact Report

Bettina Ovgaard Transcription

Sue Hi, I’m Sue Stockdale, and welcome to the Access to Inspiration podcast, the show where you can be inspired by people who may be unalike you. My guest today is Bettina Ovgaard, who has used curiosity as her guiding light in her career to date. Her work has included being a costume designer for the film industry, a tour leader in the Arctic, and most recently, Chief of Civil-Military Cooperation for Joint Arctic Command, who protect the sovereignty of the Kingdom of Denmark in the Arctic region. Bettina talks to me about what life is like working at the Thule Air Base in Greenland, which is less than a thousand miles from the North Pole, and why freedom and the outdoors are so important to her. If you want to read a transcription of this episode as you listen, go on over to our website at accesstoinspiration.org and you’ll find it there along with all the show notes. And now on with this episode and my conversation with Bettina. Well, good day, listener, and would you believe I’m on a ship again? Remember episode 100, if you listened to that one, I was recording that in the Antarctic. Well, today I’m up in the Arctic and my guest has a particular interest in this part of the world and in particular Greenland, which we’ll discover today in this conversation. So welcome, Bettina Ovgaard.

Bettina Thank you very much, Sue. Thank you for having me.

Sue What is it about Greenland that you love?

Bettina The thing about Greenland that I love is the people and nature and how they mix. I come from a background where I grew up in Denmark, which is a small country. It’s a farmland. We control everything about nature in Denmark. And it is the exact opposite in Greenland. We control nothing. We are dependent on nature up there, but at the same time it’s also a threat. We have to be careful, we have to reflect, we have to think about what we do, not to get in trouble. So I find it fascinating that nature is this unforgivable force and makes us very small. And anyway, we can actually survive in that environment, which for me sort of reflects on our ingenuity, our curiosity and the human resilience as well.

Sue So given that there’s such a contrast, as you see it, between Denmark and Greenland, as a young girl, were you inspired by Greenland and wanted to learn more about it? Or how did this whole discovery come about?

Bettina Actually, no. I didn’t know anything about Greenland as a child. I remember I had a children’s book, but that’s just really reflecting back. I had a book with beautiful drawings about a little Inuit child in an igloo. Igloos are not used in Greenland, but anyway, And it wasn’t until I was a teenager, my aunt and uncle went to Greenland to live in Nuuk for three years. It didn’t really have any impact on me at all. I remember them coming back and my grandmother had visited them and they had this VHS video, as it was in the days, and it’s showing hours and hours of icebergs and it was just very boring. So it wasn’t until I was much older that I got interested in Greenland. And it was not Greenland as such. It was more my traveling gene. I had a friend that lived in a co-op and one of the guys there, he was a guide in Greenland and telling all these stories. And I thought, wow, that sounds really interesting. And then you get a free ticket to Greenland. Hmm. Why not? And then you work and then you do that for a summer and I applied and then I became a guide in South Greenland for a summer and I got the virus and I never got rid of it.

Sue So it was perhaps the pull of travel as opposed to the pull of the country.

Bettina Yes it was. And at that time I had gone back to university to do my masters, so it fitted quite well that you then had these long summer vacations that you could then work in Greenland in the summertime and then come back and study. And the next year I got to go to northern Greenland, which is quite different than the southern part. And this job just took me around in Greenland and got me more and more excited and fascinated with the nature, with people and with the culture. And I could see that this development of a relatively new democracy and also the tensions between the Danish culture and the Greenlandic culture and the mix of cultures were nearly always on the front page of the Greenlandic media. And the development, the infrastructure, everything was sort of available in a way that I could follow that through the years. And I still find that very fascinating.

Sue So we’re now getting into the story of how you began to develop this love for the country of Greenland. As you were going through your teenage years and studying, what did you think that was going to lead to?

Bettina I, for decades, thought that I never had a career. I have done a lot of different things. It has been more about what would I find interesting and one thing would lead to the other. I have written very few applications in my life for jobs. I was a very curious child and I was also very good in school without really struggling at all. I was fortunate in that way. So I got to choose what I wanted when I wanted to go to university. And I chose a very broad field in humanities and didn’t really know where that was going to lead. And I also had sort of a split between doing things with my hands and doing things with my brain. Those two don’t always come together.

So in the beginning of adult life or studying life, I used my brain quite a lot, but I lacked then using my hands. And from I was very little, I wanted to be a designer and I had a grandmother that taught me to sew and knit and crochet and embroidery, everything like that. And that was what I was going to do, design clothes. So after my bachelor degree, I just had this yearning of doing things with my hands. And I read an article in a magazine about a woman that was a costume designer on films and commercials. And I thought, yeah, that is exactly what I want to do. I was a big film nerd as well. So I called her and she was like, yeah, no way. I don’t have time for that. And so I pestered her, kept calling, and in the end she caved and took me when she was going to do a commercial. So I worked with her for a couple of days.

And that actually changed my career in that direction because I got to know other people on that shoot that then contacted me and asked me if I could come and help them and so on. And I ended up working for two commercial photographers. And after I worked for them for a couple of years doing styling and I was their studio manager as well, I got into the Danish film industry and did commercials and feature films. And then that yearning came back from using my brains more. So after six, seven years in that industry, I then wanted to go back to uni and do my master’s. And at that time, there was a big, big craving from the political establishment to Denmark becoming more of an IT nation, more of not being dependent so much on people from the outside. So they had actually done a IT university, a totally new thing in Copenhagen. And I thought, coming from the film business, what did I really like if I took away the clothes designing from that business, that way of work?

And you always work as a team. Nobody did a feature film alone. That’s not possible. But you have your own trade. So I would not touch the camera. I would not mess with the lightings, but if anybody had to correct a butterfly, then the director would come to me and say, Bettina, you have to go and do something with that butterfly on that person. So you had your own turf, but then you had to work together. And I thought, okay, doing IT, If you do a homepage, you have a programmer, you have graphic design, you will have human-computer interaction, and all these things, so you would have a team as well, but then you had your own turf. And that made me actually apply to the IT university. It turned out it wasn’t like that at all, but it made me aware of that was a way of working that I really liked. The respect for other people’s talent and products, but then working as a team, pull as a team. And that’s still something I like. I like it when I’m on board a ship like we are now, working in the expedition staff, that we have all something to contribute, but we have to work together to make this a good experience for guests and for ourselves and for the crew on board as well.

Sue So that sense of teamwork, as you describe it, that you realise that you really enjoyed, often what can really make a team effective is when they are connecting to a bigger purpose. So the overall mission of the team and the clarity of that. When you come on board a ship, what do you believe is the bigger mission of what your experience is all about here as a team member?

Bettina I think the bigger mission in joining a ship is to basically provide a framework for the guests on board. So not explaining in detail what a location is about necessarily, but let people have their own sightings, their own opinions, their own views of things, but then give the frame, give the history. give the cultural differences aspects, the geology, when this happened. So more in the sense of not talking people to death, but letting them suck everything in and then try to put that into a frame. I think it works well for me and I think it works well for people that maybe have read a little bit about this place, now we’re in Greenland, before they went, but also for people that didn’t and that are just open and curious about what they’re going to see.

Sue Well that’s a lovely segue into using that framework idea into thinking about having the framework for this conversation. So our listener may not have been to Greenland, they may have read a little bit about it. There’s lots of interesting things that I’m sure you can help to fill us in on in this conversation about the country, about the culture, through your eyes and just to give us a greater insight. And I know that as one of those pieces of time that you’ve spent here in Greenland is you lived on the Thule Air Base for a number of years. So tell us what that was like for you and what did you learn from that experience?

Bettina Well, Greenland is the world’s biggest island. It’s placed in the Northern Hemisphere between Canada and then you have the North Atlantic and then you have Russia. And the very northern part of Greenland, called Peary Land, is only 750 kilometres from the North Pole. whereas the southern part of Greenland is on the latitude of Bergen in Norway. It’s 2,500 kilometers north to south and around a thousand kilometers east to west. And it is, if we’re talking landmass, more or less four times France. So the climate is of course very cold in wintertime. There’s no snow in the summer. We don’t go above 10 plus degrees in the summertime. It’s right by the sea, so there’s a maritime climate to the airbase. That means that we are exposed to a lot of weather coming in from the sea and from the Canadian side.

The airbase is American-owned, but it’s always a contract on running the base. And when I worked there, it was a Danish Greenlandic company that ran the base. So you have to imagine you’re basically on an island, because there’s at least 100 kilometers to your nearest neighbour. And so everything is like a little village, except we also have to run an airport and a port at the same time as doing all the plumbing, the electricity, food, activities in your free time, engineering, everything that you can think of. And that takes around 600 people to do this. And the sole purpose of the base is to provide electricity to the Thule radar. The Thule radar is a radar that can have two sort of radar eyes and it can look towards the North Pole and it can see towards Russia. And what it does is that it gives an early warning for missiles coming from Russia towards the United States. And it’s a part of a chain of radars that goes from United States, Canada, into Greenland and onto Europe as well.

Sue Well, it sounds a very big village at 600 people in the middle of a remote part of Greenland. How did you possibly get a job up there and what even attracted you to want to work in such a remote location?

Bettina Yeah, what attracted me to work there is basically a lot of curiosity. I had experienced the midnight sun in Greenland loads of times, but I hadn’t experienced the darkness, the dark season, and I thought that that would be quite cool to try that. And also the Thule district is full of history from the explorers. the heroic age. So you have Knut Rasmussen, you have Peary, you have all kinds of people coming up to explore because they wanted to find the Northwest Passage or they wanted to find the people there. And then that district is also very hard to get to and very expensive. So it wasn’t something that I would just do for a summer holiday because of the outrageous prices for the transportation up there. And I must admit, I had never planned to be there for six years. I thought one year and then let’s see what it’s like. But I really liked it there which was a bit of a surprise because in many ways a big city person. I like the anonymity of living in a big city and I also like all the cultural products that I can relish in when I am in a big city and the convenience of being very near to anything not more than five minutes away from a litre of milk. And of course that’s not possible when you live at Thule Air Base. But what also intrigues me about Greenland is that when you are here, you’re sort of free of the life that you have where you usually live. So that means that you can’t go to all these family birthdays, you’re not available And that can be a sad thing as well, can be a hard thing when something happens in your family. But otherwise you get an immense freedom to do exactly what you want.

And at Thule Airbase, it was a balance between having that immense freedom to decide what you wanted to do and being imprisoned in a way. Where if you had a bad day, you would call it an open prison, because you can walk out. Where do you want to walk to? You had the ice cap in the backyard and the icy sea, Baffin Sea, in front of you. there was nowhere to go, really. But if you can live with that sort of confinement, then the nature is vast. And if you want to use that for good things, then if you’re an outdoor person, it’s the perfect place to be. You can go skiing on the sea ice, visiting icebergs in the springtime. We had ATVs, we had snowmobiles in the winter, boats in the summer where we could go places, camp out and experience whales, experience millions of little orcs, experience walruses in the springtime as well.

So there was a lot of wildlife about and because you can’t hunt on the defence area, then we had loads of foxes, loads of arctic hares, and we would do car trips in the area, because this is an American base, so that means that there are roads everywhere, which is very unlike the rest of Greenland, which only contains 160 kilometres of road altogether. So here we could actually drive 30 kilometres away from the base and there were huts in the area so in the weekends you could go in a cabin and just be away from the base because you can get a little bit crazy from the confinement and we would normally work two months and have one month off. But we could decide ourselves and some would decide to be there for example for half a year. and then have a couple of months off.

And you could feel that tension when people were going on holiday because that was when they sort of realised, yes, I need to get out. I need other impulses now than from the people that I see every day. And that was one of the things I learned. I did some interviews with some of my colleagues. I reflected on why I wanted to go to the base and why I stayed, and I went there out of curiosity. I could choose any day that I would quit and go back, but I loved the place and I liked the people there and it was also good money. But what about the people that I hung out with? What were their reasons to go there and why did they stay? So I decided that I wanted to do some interviews voluntarily and I wanted to interview across the board. So men, women, young, old, leaders, manual workers, academics, apprentices, and people that have been there a long time and people that have just arrived. There was a woman, she had just worked there for, I think, a couple of months, maybe half a year.

And she said on her first vacation back home with her family, she had announced one day that she needed some ‘me time’. She had learned about being alone on the base. She had never tried that. She’d always had a boyfriend. She got married. She had kids. She was never on her own. And she was a very family person. And she experienced being on base, doing her job, coming back to her barracks. Then there was no one there. Nobody demanded anything of her. She had all the freedom that she wanted to do exactly what she wanted. And she could do it on her own. Or she actually probably had to do it on her own, except if she knocked on the next door. And she, in a way, became dependent on this. It was a new experience. It was a good experience for her. And her family was a bit surprised that, oh, mom wants to go and have some time for herself. Maybe go for a walk or just, you know, I’m just going into this room, have a read. I’m going to close the door and you have to knock if you want to talk to me, because I need some alone time. So lots of people had new experiences being there in a social context, which I thought was really interesting.

Sue And for you, what were some of the learnings that you took away from that experience?

Bettina I did not get a lot of challenges for my brain. Actually, my job was pretty tedious. What saved me was variation. We did a lot of the same things, but the variation came in how that would then unfold during a day, because we also had a help desk. So you would never know who would come in and ask for help. I was doing an office job. I discovered and I also knew that from guiding in Greenland, I have quite a big service gene. I like to help people and I also like to educate people. So I was one of the ones that would educate the newbies coming to the base because you need a lot of briefings, safety briefings, fire briefings and you need to know your way around and you need do’s and don’ts. So we were a team of people that would then collect the newbies in the airport and show them around for two days and give them these briefings. And you would then be their contact person if they needed any help. I like that part of my job very much. So the ability to communicate to other people and do it in a way so they understood the framework of where they were going to live and work. I also got more and more interested in the history of Greenland and of course being outdoors and getting some more skills of dealing with the weather, taking notice of the sky, taking notice of weather patterns, So getting into this sort of life where you are quite dependent on your own senses and you have to trust yourself and your evaluation of a situation. And then, well, I learned that I could actually live and function in a very confined, small place and do it for a long time.

Sue And at the end of those six years, did you want to just see the back of Greenland and have something completely different? or was there a different sense of the magic that it had inspired within you to want to come back?

Bettina Yeah, when I quit, the whole idea was that I would move back to Copenhagen and get a job, maybe a more normal job. I have two younger sisters and their kids and my parents, and everybody was like, yes, that’s a brilliant idea. We want you to come home after six years. I knew I would always come back to Greenland. Then it would be on vacation. And yeah, half a year later, I moved to Nuuk, which is the capital of Greenland. So that plan did not go very well. And that was because this job that I have now in the Joint Arctic Command, which is a branch of the Danish Defense that is operative in the Faroes and Greenland, which is the part of the Kingdom of Denmark. They had this job offering. that I found online while I was looking for a new job and they needed somebody to start up in a whole new section in the Joint Arctic Command that has to do with civilian military cooperation. In NATO terms it’s called J9, J for joint and 9 has everything to do with civil-military cooperation, which for military people will be called CIMIC. Normally you don’t do CIMIC in your own country. You do it when you are abroad in other countries. But it made sense to have somebody, one point of contact in Greenland that all civilians could contact. If they wanted to get in contact with Joint Arctic Command. And that position fitted me like a glove, and I applied, had the interview, and it was like, when can you start?

Three weeks later, I was in Nuuk, trying to find out where our furnitures would be placed in this new little apartment that they gave to me, and meeting my colleagues, and also getting into, What is this job going to be like? And what I really like to do in my professional life is startups. I love to do something from scratch because I can develop it together with other people. And then there will be some issues, maybe problems, assignments that you have to do. And then you’re sort of given the freedom to try and handle it. And I thrive with that a lot. When I worked in Greenland as a destination manager for a Danish company, They did the same with us that were chosen to be destination managers. So they were laying out the land saying, OK, so people are coming in. You need to do excursions. You need to tell them and know their expectations. And then you have to tell them what it’s like here. And you will just have to do it like you want to do it in the setting that you are in.

Being respectful of the Greenland is very different. It differs a lot if you are in the north or in the south. But given that responsibility to sort it out yourself in the best way, we believe in you. If you have any problems, you will just call the back office, but otherwise we’ll just leave it up to you. And then you get this self-assurance that you can do this and you get a sense of that you don’t do this alone, you do it with other people. You have to create networks with other people that will help you out doing this in the best possible way. And that was the same in the Joint Arctic Command. I had a load of colleagues in different sections. For example, they were maritime experts, or they were aviation experts, or they were doing the operations, or they were doing the land operations with the Sirius Patrol. So getting to know all these people helped me do my job.

One very valuable thing is actually to be a social person and to be interested in other people and what they do professionally because they will help you do your stuff both to their satisfaction but also you will get the job done in the best possible way for the people that are asking for help. And the people that were asking me for help were mostly scientists because we do a lot of support for science in Greenland and that all had to be coordinated in the most efficient way using our platforms, which is ships, stations and planes. When they’re doing their military tasks anyway, there is a bit of a dual use possibility there and to explore that possibility and coordinate that, I think in the end the taxpayers don’t know, but they will be happy that their money are spent in a way to boast the content of the military and the task that we have to do there operatively, and then also supporting researchers. It could also be sport expeditions. It could also be other civilians.

So that would be sort of a logistic job. But then you had to also start up a network with the civilian partners in Greenland. and in Denmark. So that would be the universities, that would be, for example, the departments in the Greenlandic government that had anything to do with, for example, permits, getting into the national park and other places in Greenland. It could be NGOs like Visit Greenland, it could be the Greenlandic police that we have a great cooperation with in the command. In Denmark it could be the Ministry of Research and Education, and of course also the universities, the Danish Meteorological Institute, the Danish and Greenlandic Geological Surveys. So all these people would need to know, okay, if we need support, help, any kind of logistics, or just get to know the lay of the land, we need one point of contact. And that was me.

Sue I think it sounds like you’ve created yourself a pretty important job there as the font of all knowledge of all things Greenlandic and Danish in connection with Greenland. And if you’re enjoying this episode, then you may also like episode 19, where I spoke to Nauja Bianco, who is a native Greenlander from Nuuk, and she spoke about how Greenland is evolving. You can find that and more than 100 other episodes on a wide range of topics at our website, accesstoinspiration.org. Now back to this episode. As I’ve been listening to you in our conversation today, Bettina, it strikes me that there are certain qualities that you’ve demonstrated, whether it’s in Thule Air Base or as a guide or working with the Joint Arctic Command. You’ve given us different situations where you have been resourceful and utilised your curiosity and that head and hands as well as heart, perhaps that have enabled you to get the most from your life. If you were giving some tips to our listeners who might want to be adventurous or more curious in their own ways, what would your advice to them be?

Bettina Well, the first advice I think would be variation. For me, variation is the spice of life. So in very small ways, you can be curious about new things. There’s one trick to get your mind working in another way. It is to put your watch on your other arm. If you do that, then you become aware of your watch. You become aware that when you look at your watch, your wristwatch, you will have to look on your other arm. So it’s also a physical thing and you will have this sensation because your skin is not used to having your watch on your other arm. Some people can’t even do that for a day because they are accustomed to having the watch on the other arm and it frees up their brain to do other things because we all need routines. So this is a trick to sort of see what happens to you if you do this. because your brain will work with this.

It’s like having a tooth where there’s one piece of the tooth that’s fallen off or something like that, and your tongue will go up there all the time. And it’s a bit like that, just in a more nice way. If you feel an urge to try out a new thing and you are a little bit wary of where that’s going to take you, Find a group that does that already and then they will show you how to do it and you will be safe with them because they’re already maybe not experts but they have some experience in doing that thing. So that can also be a way leading into new experiences is doing this with others. Find a group that does it. If you want to explore photography and you feel uncertain about all the technical stuff do a little course. You will get to know other people that are also doing the course and maybe afterwards you will form a little group and you can help each other doing this. This also goes for the bigger things like traveling, backpack, or I want to do some mountaineering. Find the people that can take you into these realms and show you around. and you will find your own setting there. You might not want to do alpinism. Maybe you are a trekker because you don’t like the heights, but you like the mountains. Okay, you do the trekking instead. So you will find out where your comfortable level in a new thing is and then work from there.

Sue Well, Bettina, we started our conversation focusing on Greenland. I’m wondering if you can give us a final reflection or observation for the listener that might have heard in the news about climate change impact on the country, the impact of minerals and the potential for oil here. So there’s things that appear in the media about Greenland. What would be your take on Greenland for the listener today?

Bettina I would quote the former Prime Minister of Greenland. He coined this phrase, which is, ‘nothing about us without us’. And to me, this is the way that Greenland should go forward. And it’s actually also what the politicians do. Greenland has become much more self-assertive. It’s much more focusing also on the global world. not only thinking in smaller terms, but Greenland is aware now that a lot of other countries and big corporations are looking towards the Arctic for rare earth elements, for the green transition, for tourism, for extraction of all kinds of minerals. Greenland has one of the biggest water reserves in the world with the inland ice cap. We might need that water at some point. So, nothing about us without us means that Greenland does not want to be exploited. Greenland wants to be a part of what is going on in its future. It will not accept to be bulldozed. It will not accept to be on the sideline, which is, for example, reflected in the Arctic Council, whereas it used to be Denmark that had the seat in the Arctic Council for the Kingdom of Denmark, and it’s Greenland now that is the representative.

There’s also formed a committee between Greenland, the Faroes and Denmark that meet regularly to discuss these areas of their political life that the Faroes and Greenland cannot decide for themselves. And that’s foreign policy and defense, for example. So to be better aligned, the prime ministers of these three countries will then meet. And that has not happened before. It has been like, well, not officially, of course, they’ve been meeting, but it has been the policy that Denmark is the the one that leads, and now Denmark becomes more open towards the wishes and also these two countries on the global scene, where they want their own space now. So there’s, in that sense, an opening towards the world at the same time conscious about their cultural roots and the values of the Inuit culture in Greenland and how those two things might mix. What constitutes a Greenlander today? Where are we going with our society? How are we perceived by the rest of the world? And how do we perceive ourselves?

And being a Dane, that is for me to observe and I can have my opinions. But of course, it is the Greenlanders that need to find this new position and work out where they want to be when we are talking about contributing to hopefully stopping the climate change. In what way could Greenland contribute to that? And also the political tensions being situated geographically between the United States and Russia. Well, the Thule Air Base is one of the signs that it is a geographical important place in the world. Sometimes Greenland is called the bike helmet of the United States because it sort of cushions the Americas from Russia. So I think Greenland now is entering the world stage in a new way. Hopefully it will still be demilitarised. The Ilulissat Declaration states this from, I think it was 2008. And I hope that we can keep it that way. But I see sort of the ice breaking up. It’s not as stable anymore that the Arctic should be demilitarized, that the Arctic should be left alone, that the little populations, both in Greenland but also in Arctic Canada and Alaska, don’t have anything to say. They do have something to say, and they do have something to give back to the world, and they have a much stronger voice now than ever, I think.

Sue Well, I think you’ve really enlightened and informed us today about Greenland, about curiosity and about your varied and interesting career and life experience, Bettina. It’s been a real privilege to have a conversation with you today. If our listener wants to find out more about you, how might they do that?

Bettina I have a Facebook page and I’m also on LinkedIn. You can find me there.

Sue Wonderful. We’ll put links to those things on the show notes. So thank you again for your time today. Thank you for having me. Well, thanks to Bettina for sharing her stories with us. And I can certainly understand why she enjoys Greenland, which is my favourite country to visit. We’ve created a reflection section on our website to help you reflect on what you heard today. So go on over there and you’ll find a series of questions at accesstoinspiration.org. Remember, you can connect with us on all the social media platforms. And if you like this series, then please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. We’ll be back again soon with another episode to inspire you.

Credits:

Producer – Sue Stockdale
Sound Editor – Matias de Ezcurra