HAMMERFEST // After hiding below the horizon for two long months, the sun has finally risen in Hammerfest, casting a pale pink hue over the Arctic landscape surrounding the world's northernmost refugee shelter.
Rami Saad, a 23-year-old Syrian from Damascus with a neatly groomed beard and tight slacks, says workers at the shelter warned him about the polar night but he didn't believe them until late November, when "suddenly there was no sun".
The lack of daylight messed up his body clock, like the day when he rolled out of bed at 11 and ambled to the cafeteria to have lunch.
"But there was nobody there," Rami says, laughing. "It was 11pm."
The wooden barracks where Rami lives used to house oil workers until Europe's refugee crisis reached the jagged shores of northern Norway, where the continent drops dramatically into the Arctic Ocean.
Waiting for their asylum claims to be processed, hundreds of people in emergency shelters in Hammerfest and neighbouring towns are slowly getting used to the extreme climate and unfamiliar customs of the High North.
They say they have adapted to the cold - the temperature rarely drops below minus 10ºC along the coast, though it gets much colder further inland. It's the darkness that throws them off.
Few of the asylum seekers expected to end up here, 460 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, when they left their homelands in the Middle East, Africa and Asia to escape violence, poverty, forced marriages or armies they didn't want to join.
Some were relocated by Norwegian authorities after entering the country from Sweden in the south. Others blazed a new trail into Western Europe by first entering Russia and then crossing its Arctic border with Norway.
More than 5,000 people, mostly Syrians and Afghans, used that route last year before the government tightened the border in November and started deporting those who were not deemed to be in need of protection in Norway.
Though that's just a trickle compared to the 1 million people who entered Europe last year from the south across the Mediterranean Sea, it forced Norwegian authorities to quickly set up refugee shelters in small towns separated by mile upon mile of untouched wilderness.
In Alta, a scenic two-hour drive to the south, the Northern Lights Hotel was converted into a shelter for unaccompanied minors. On Seiland island, a nature reserve west of Hammerfest, Stig Erland Hansen was asked to temporarily house dozens of asylum seekers in a remote lodge where he hosts adventure tourists during the summer.
"At first I thought it was crazy," Stig says, clasping a cup of black coffee inside the main cabin. "Is it possible to have people in darkness on an island?"
Not only was it possible, it was a big success, according to Stig and Paal Mannsverk, who manages the camp, a cluster of wooden houses facing a pristine fjord. Reachable only by boat, the isolated location gives you a sense of being at the end of the world - or as Paal put it: "north of the middle of nowhere."
Yet the 36 asylum seekers staying here, all but one from Afghanistan, seem surprisingly at ease. Stig and Paal say it's because they try to keep them active: fishing, chopping wood, sledding, skiing, and hiking instead of just sitting around waiting for a decision by the Norwegian immigration directorate, which can take more than a year.
The camp on Seiland is a far cry from the crowded and prison-like refugee centres in some parts of Europe. Afghan children laugh and holler as they sled down the slope from the camp to the rocky shoreline, where men speaking Dari rinse fish caught in the icy fjord.
Later, as the sun drops behind the mountains, they will cook them over an open fire with onion, tomatoes, eggs and spices brought in from the mainland.
Inside the camp, 62-year-old Shukria Nawabi tears up as she recalls the hardship her family faced in Kabul. She has lived on Seiland since October with her husband, daughter and granddaughter Helenar, a seven-year-old with pigtails, pink tights and a sheepish smile.
"We escaped from enemies in our life," Shukria says through an interpreter, declining to go into the details.
Wrapped in a shawl, her daughter, Sufya, seems almost offended when asked whether the family struggled to adjust to the darkness on this desolate island.
"If you were in my place," she says, "where bombs are going off in the street, where women are treated badly, and you come to this place, would you worry about the darkness and the isolation?"
* Associated Press
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