Olle Westlund: The Man Restoring Greenland’s Forgotten Hospital Ship

In the Port of Nuuk, a large, sturdy wooden dock features wooden beams connected to a cliff that borders the port and the water. The wooden dock is home to over 50 large ships, fishing boats and tourism boats. Off the edges of the dock are 20-foot stepladders that go down into the ships. A red wooden tourism boat has been out of commission for eight years. The boat is owned by Olle Westlund, a Swedish native who arrived in Greenland in 1984.

“I haven’t been taking many tours,” Westlund said. “I have had the boat out for about eight years to repair it. My main occupation is actually flying the Dash 8s [airplanes] here, and I used to fly the helicopters with tourists and everything.”

Inside the boat, the wood was freshly installed, and power tools were scattered throughout the main common area inside the cabin. Over a green couch is a black-and-white framed picture of an elderly woman, and over the picture is a sign with the name of the woman in the picture, Signe Vest, and a sign where the boat was built, Angmagssalik.

Westlund said the boat was named after Vest when it was built in 1964. Vest was a nurse from East Greenland, back when there was “no real health care system” in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, according to Westlund.

“There was a medical doctor with his nurse on board, and it sailed mostly around the east coast of Greenland, visiting the small settlements there,” Westlund said.

Inside the cabin of the ship, medical staff, including Vest, performed surgeries on patients on a table that now houses tourists below the common area. A hole in one of the floors of the ship was used to lower a stretcher to put on the surgery table.

The ship also had an X-ray machine in a room next to the common area, where the doctors and nurses took X-rays of the lungs of tuberculosis patients. Westlund noted that the walls of the room used to be covered in lead, which was destroyed as he continues to remodel the ship.

“They did everything because there was nothing else,” Westlund said. “[A] broken leg, they fixed that. [If] it was [an] appendix, they tried that.”

Westlund said the boat can hold 4,000 liters of fuel, and with the old engine, the boat could be at sea for “easily three weeks,” but could not run continuously.

When Westlund first arrived in Greenland in 1984, it was less developed, and there were not as many buildings as there are today. He said back in 1984, there was a “very big tourist season” in the summer months. Due to Greenland’s recent spotlight in the news, Westlund has seen an increased interest in Greenland.

“It definitely has raised the interest [in] Greenland because more people hear about it,” Westlund said. “There has always been an interest from people who wanted to see nature, and also from the American people who want to visit the old military bases. Also, [boat] captains [who] have been sailing here. Lots of people are interest[ed] in the ice retreating.”

Westlund said that he wouldn’t like for Greenland to be independent, but be in “good cooperation” with other countries. He doesn’t see independence viable due to the low population, lack of airports, hospitals, and community services, asking, “Who’s going to pay for all that?”

“At what service level can you expect if you go completely independent?” Westlund said. “Well, if they start drilling for oil and pick it up here, and there’s tons of minerals here, so you could do a lot of mining, but it’s expensive to get it out from here.”

Westlund claimed there is already a mining industry in Greenland. He said there are “two, maybe three active ones,” and he can see the industry expanding in recent years. Despite the Greenlandic government passing legislation banning uranium mining in 2021, Westlund said he would support the increased mining presence.

“If it’s done responsibly,” Westlund said. “It’s done all over the world, so why shouldn’t it be possible here?”

When Media Milwaukee asked Greenlanders for their thoughts on U.S. President Donald Trump, the questions were answered with sharp, punchy lines of displeasure, but for Westlund, not so much.

“He’s got some good ideas, but definitely some strange ways to implement them,” Westlund said. “But some of his thoughts are not that bad, but maybe the way of doing it. Nobody has only good ideas.”

Westlund pointed to Trump’s efforts to “clean up” the government. He said implementing “too many rules” could lead to citizens disobeying the rules, and the willingness to change past precedent is “good.” Westlund made a connection to the smaller government in Greenland that is willing to revise past decisions.

“Smaller government here is more adaptable,” Westlund said. “In some instances, you run into a person that says, ‘That’s what it says.’ You can see a lot of books that says something, and then come[s] a revision because somebody realizes that was not right.”

Threats from Trump to purchase Greenland, or even take Greenland, is something that makes Westlund shy away from the American president, but Westlund isn’t completely opposed to the idea.

“You can’t just go and take a country if you want to be friends with it,” Westlund said. “I can’t go up to my neighbor and say, ‘hey, I need your care, I’ll take it.”

Westlund said it would “depend on the conditions.” He said potential offers of $10,000 per Greenlander would be “cheap” for a country made up of roughly 57,000 people, but if Westlund was given a million dollars for the U.S. to buy the territory, “it would be a great deal for me.”

Denmark supplies Greenlanders with free health care and education, but under U.S. ownership, Greenlanders would have to pay for the services. Essentially, the hypothetical money given to Greenlanders would go to paying for health care and education, diluting the financial benefit of being under U.S. rule.

“Getting $10,000 or a million, not really a good idea for the younger people,” Westlund said. “[But], for me that has a limited time left.”

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This story is part of a semester-long investigative reporting project into Greenland’s people, history, and culture. It was created by an advanced reporting class in the Journalism, Advertising, and Media Studies program at UW-Milwaukee. Other stories from the project are available on Edge of the Arctic: Greenland, the Land of the People.

This work was made possible through the support of MPC Endowment Ltd., the philanthropic affiliate of the Milwaukee Press Club, and a private donor.