Southern food donors learn hard lesson on Nunavut shipping costs

This is some of the children’s clothing meant to be shipped to Gjoa Haven. (PHOTO COURTESY OF KELLI O’BRIEN)

Volunteers in Curran, Ont. have collected 60 boxes of goods destined for Gjoa Haven, but say they can’t afford to ship them to the Kitikmeot community. (PHOTO COURTESY OF KELLI O’BRIEN)

Updated at 2:00 p.m.

Over the last few weeks, Kelli O’Brien has helped collect hundreds of dollars worth of food and household items, destined for Gjoa Haven.

She and six other neighbours in the farming hamlet of Curran, Ont., about an hour east of Ottawa, are just some of the 13,000 to have joined the Helping Our Northern Neighbours movement sending care packages north, mostly to Nunavut communities.

But O’Brien’s group hit a roadblock this week: when volunteers prepared to send 60 boxes of supplies up north, they discovered it would cost about $12,000 to send the boxes to the Kitikmeot community of Gjoa Haven.

“We went out and got what they needed,” O’Brien said. “Here we are with everything that the community needs, and they’re left just waiting. I don’t want to break their hearts.”

Among the items: toys, school supplies, children’s clothing and their “favourite treat” — 100 boxes of Kraft dinner.

Now, the chapter is looking for any help or support they can get to help ship the boxes north, O’Brien said.

“People are telling me, if you can’t afford to send it, just donate it to your local food bank,” she said. “But that’s not right. We’ve got stuff specific to the community’s needs. And we can’t wait, because these people are starving.”

O’Brien said she’s always had a close connection with the North, mostly though it’s Facebook Sell/Swap and Auction pages, where she’s a regular customer.

O’Brien said she had recently asked a seamstress in Gjoa Haven to make new mitts for her daughter, when the Inuk woman told her she couldn’t afford to buy the materials.

“So I talked to her a little about her family and she told me her mom has no coat to wear,” she said. “And how, to curb hunger, the adults in her family will re-use tea bags and save their food for the children to eat.

“I thought, this is ridiculous.”

That’s when O’Brien and some of her neighbours joined the Helping Our Northern Neighbours movement, by collecting food and other supplies to send North.

But now O’Brien, and other volunteers with the Facebook group, find themselves in a similar position to many of the people they are trying to help, as they struggle with the real price of acquiring material goods in the North.

“We are a very caring community,” O’Brien said, adding her group would like to continue sending items.

“But I find Canada Post and the airlines are taking extreme advantage of the situation, because they know how desperate people are. It’s a bigger problem.”

But the Helping Our Northern Neighbours movement is running into its own internal problems.

After Nunatsiaq News published this story, the group’s coordinator and Facebook page administrator, Jennifer Gwilliam, contacted the newspaper to say that O’Brien was no longer a member of the Ottawa chapter of the group.

Membership relies on HONN pairing sponsors with a northern family, so Gwilliam can track who has requested, and received, help.

Gwilliam said that as word of the group spreads, more and more she is hearing of different groups and individuals raising money under her group’s banner, without her permission or even knowledge.

“Incidences such as this which use our name but have nothing to do with us put all our hard work and our charitable registration in serious jeopardy,” she said.