She explained that most of the Greenlanders arriving in Denmark have everything they need, including education and social security. Citing the functional aspects of the schools and universities in Denmark, she explains that many Greenlandic students are able to easily live in Denmark during their academic years, while some Greenlanders arrive with pre-existing alcohol problems on top of language difficulties and social exclusion. For these reasons, they end up living on the streets. According to her, “the problem with alcohol in Greenland is not so dramatic compared to Denmark, where there are more alcoholics per capita.”
Those who live in the villages around Nuuk, are trying to find better a ccommodation here. But this does not always happen, and Ronn explains how often these people can wait a year before registering with the Danish job offices. This problem has already been taken into a ccount by the Danish People’s Party and by the former M inister of Social Affairs, Martin Henriksen, who tried to identify the number of socially disadvantaged Greenlanders in D enmark. During the last, years many livelihood projects have been initiated and funded by the Danish government, but the result does not seem to have changed.
Some volunteers from the homeless point are not of the same opinion. Soren Peterson, a worker at hotel C alifornia, explains to me that the numer of homeless Greenlanders in Denmark is growing at an alarming rate. A good e xample is Kofoed, Aalborg, a center for people with social intergration issues, where the demand from Greenlanders is getting increasingly longer. What Ronn Helle, an official at the centre, defines a “social tragedy” is illustrated by the statistics: in 2009, the number 90 while in 2011, it increased to 139 and has been stadily rising since.
The situation in Aarhus
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Moreover the problem has also been studied ethnologically. This has also been observed by Tina Kjeldgaard, who s tudied the problem of Greenland’s socially disadvantaged population, affirming that these people have the same problems as socially vulnerable Danish citizens. What aggravates their c ondition is often the difficulty of learning the language and the d ifferences of the two social realities. Often, people arriving in Denmark who lived in small communities or villages on the island