Challenging, confronting, confusing

As I pass the halfway mark of my deployment up here, I'm increasingly asked about what it's like to live in a remote Aboriginal community for an extended period of time.
For me, it's best described by the three C's: challenging, confronting, confusing.
The challenge comes from the isolation (geographic, social and cultural), the climate, and the sheer complexity of the many issues facing Aboriginal communities.
The confrontation comes from the alcohol, the violence and the abject state of poverty most people live in. My colleague Virginia, a senior manager who's worked in some of the world's toughest third-world countries, says she's never seen anything like what she has here.
The confusion comes from a community that recognises its own problems and the causes of them, but does little, if anything, to begin addressing them. The confusion is compounded by the opportunities and promise the community can see for itself, despite the challenges and confrontations above.
I suspect that much of the frustration I feel is not a result of what I see and hear, but of simply not knowing where to begin. Which issue to fix first, and what to do when fixing one issue creates another two, three or four?
Having seen the reality of Aboriginal communities in the past, I didn't come up here expecting to save the world, or even come close to it, but it's the first time in my professional career that I've felt well and truly lost, miles away from any possible answer - and that's a very, very difficult thing for an armchair expert like myself.