Mikaela MacKenzie

In pictures: Truth and Reconciliation Day in Winnipeg

Events marking Truth and Reconciliation Day took place around Winnipeg today.  Here's how it looked.

Hockey takes centre stage at Rainbow Stage production

The winters of my childhood were long, long seasons. We lived in three places — the school, the church and the skating-rink — but our life was on the skating-rink.

So begins Roch Carrier’s beloved book The Hockey Sweater, which recounts his childhood memory and the furor that arose following the unintended delivery of a Toronto Maple Leafs jersey to his home in Quebec, where Maurice ‘Rocket’ Richard and the Montreal Canadiens ruled.

The classic tale later became a widely popular National Film Board animated short and was adapted for the stage.

The musical production kicks off Rainbow Stage’s season.

Winnipeg-born Michael Rubenfeld helping to keep Ukraine’s broken hearts beating through art

KRAKOW — On Feb. 15, nine days before Russia invaded Ukraine, Oksana Pyzh and her husband packed up their kid, their car and a few of their things, and began the long drive west from their home in Kharkiv, towards Poland, stopping every few hours along the way. A leisurely pace, compared to the flight of those who came after, but there were no bombs then.

Still, it was obvious to Pyzh that something bad was about to happen. Russia was massing its troops on the border. Foreign countries were moving diplomats out of Kyiv and U.S. President Joe Biden warned of an imminent invasion. Pyzh’s friends weren’t too worried — “nothing will start,” they said — but she was gripped by an urgent and terrible feeling.

“I’m a really anxious person,” she says, bluntly. “In my world, there is nothing so terrifying like war.”

Mentally, she’d given herself another reason to go. Six years earlier, Pyzh, an architect and artist, had held an exhibition of her works at a gallery in Warsaw, a collection of pieces reflecting on what Ukraine had been left with after the Soviet Union collapsed. One of the largest paintings from that show was still in Poland, and she thought she might take it back.

Refugee Ukrainians far from defeated

RZESZÓW, Poland — From the outside, the guest house on the edge of Rzeszów looks quiet, tucked on a narrow road that meanders past quaint homes nestled beside sprawling green gardens. A few cars are parked in front, some with Ukrainian licence plates, but the atmosphere here is idyllic and suburban, bordering on rustic.

And in any normal time, Rzeszów — pronounced “Zheshoof” — is a laid-back, albeit growing, sort of place. It’s a city of about 200,000 people, a college town in the southeastern corner of Poland, booming lately with business investments and tourism but still far from the hustle of the capital city of Warsaw. It is comfortable, but not famous. Not in a normal time, anyway.

But this is not a normal time for Rzeszów, because Rzeszów sits just 100 km from the border with Ukraine.

Now, all the donated weapons of the West flow through Rzeszów, and much of its humanitarian aid. The airport north of the city hosts a constant parade of foreign military planes, and when U.S. President Joe Biden visited Poland in March, he came first to Rzeszów, where American troops manage the Patriot missile system freshly installed on the airport’s western flank.

Manitoba-bound mothers fleeing Ukraine with children are terrified, exhausted - but put on a brave face

WARSAW — On the long bus ride out of Ukraine, Nataliia Cherevko’s son, 11-year-old Bohdan, stopped eating. His stomach hurt. Behind them on the bus was another mother, with two sons, and one of them couldn’t eat, either. It was the stress, their mothers thought. It was being a child, and leaving everything they knew behind them.

As the bus rolled west from the heart of the country, Cherevko worried about her son. She worried as the bus came to a stop for a night somewhere near Cherkasy, after hearing that there might be danger ahead. She didn’t know where exactly it was; road signs had been taken down by Ukrainian forces, in an attempt to disorient Russian soldiers.

And she worried as they approached Lviv, where she planned to stay for a few nights so her son could rest and maybe even feel better. But when she asked the bus driver what she should do, he urged her to keep going, straight to the Polish border. There were volunteers there who could help them, he said. He hadn’t been there, but that’s what he’d heard.

Cherevko asked her son if he thought he could manage the journey just a little while longer.

Ukrainian refugee on her way to new life in Winnipeg

WARSAW — It’s a bitterly cold morning in Poland’s capital, at the heart of the city’s diplomatic row. Outside the concrete-and-glass edifice of the Canadian embassy, about four dozen people are waiting, mostly women with children in tow.

They huddle together under two black tents, hastily erected by security guards for protection from the swirling, wet snow.

As they wait, some greet each other in Ukrainian, others in Russian. New people arrive and ask questions about what to do and where to go.

They’re all in this together in a way, all of them displaced by war and, now, trying to navigate the steps to come to Canada; even after the federal government simplified the process for Ukrainian refugees, it can be slow.

Inuit sculptor honours creative mother in massive piece outside WAG’s Qaumajuq

ELIE — Goota Ashoona prefers to work outside.

That’s where she first learned to make her art as a child growing up in an Inuit outpost camp on the shores of Baffin Island, Nunavut, transforming snow into miniature igloos and polar bears under a sky that danced at night.

Today, Ashoona is seated at her outdoor workbench at her home much further south near Elie, her tiny 4-foot-11 frame bundled into a bright-blue hoodie emblazoned with the word “Nunavut” against the red inuksuk and the blue star (the Niqirtsuituq, or North Star) from the territorial flag. She’s surrounded by trees and, beyond them, open prairie.

It’s early afternoon in the small community about 45 kilometres west of Winnipeg, but already, the November sunlight is long and low. Ashoona is carving faces, among her favourite things to carve, into beluga whalebone. It’s silent out here, save for the whine of her rotary tool.

Drought, late frost filling ursine orphanage beyond capacity

A few choice morsels of fruit is all it takes to lure Vinny into his new home. Grapes work wonders.

The rough-and-tumble cub was the first orphan brought to Black Bear Rescue Manitoba this spring; he’s since been joined by 26 other young bears who have lost their mother for one reason or another. Space is at a premium and this season has been one long game of musical chairs for rescue operators Judy and Roger Stearns.

“The cubs were arriving so fast and furious,” Judy says. “Sometimes we were scrambling because we were having to shift bears around to make room for everyone.”

Like all new intakes, Vinny’s journey started in the nursery, where cubs feed on formula and bide their time in quarantine, before he was moved into a covered, open-air enclosure in the Bear Building — nicknamed the ‘Bob Barker Building’ after the former Price Is Right host who donated $50,000 to help the Stonewall-area rescue centre get started. Vinny has been living outside full-time since the end of June and recently graduated to a large new pen with 11 of his adoptive siblings.

For Gimli, relaxed health restrictions a boon to businesses

GIMLI — The patio at Comodo had been quiet for months until Ying Jie Zhen grabbed hold of the hose late Friday afternoon.

With a turn of the spigot, water rushed through the rubber snake and streamed out the other end in a focused mist, as Zhen washed away the dust and leaves that for several months had been the only things sitting outside the Chinese restaurant right at the centre of this Interlake town.

Nobody ever looked happier doing dirty work.

There was a reason for the man’s joy: the next day, people could finally sit on the freshly washed green furniture and eat, the result of an updated and relaxed set of public health measures, issued by the province as COVID-19 infection rates decreased somewhat and as vaccination rates grew steadily. The size of permitted outdoor gatherings was set to grow to a maximum of 25 people.

Couple 'cub scout leaders' for orphan bears

A Stonewall-area couple are 'cub scout leaders' of sorts who care for orphaned bear cubs until they're ready to survive on their own.

Manitoba's freshly minted Canadian junior champs receive hero's welcome

Even in a province steeped in curling history, it was a momentous occasion when Manitoba welcomed its latest national champions home after they touched down at James Richardson International Airport Monday afternoon.

Bagpiper Hilda Towerzey, who since 1970 has escorted virtually every one of the province's national and world champions off an airplane to a hero's welcome, was on the job again — this time with two Canadian titleists in tow.

Twenty-four hours earlier, Altona’s Mackenzie Zacharias and Winnipeg's Jacques Gauthier had claimed national junior championships in Langley, B.C. Both teams have earned to right to represent Canada at the worlds in Krasnoyarsk, Russia next month.

"It still hasn't sunk in completely that we'll get to represent Canada in a couple of weeks in Russia," said Zacharias, who capped an astonishing 11-0 week with a 10-3 win over Abby Marks of Alberta in the women's final. "It's pretty incredible and we're just so excited to go."

Good things come in trees

When I arrive at the Rainbow Stage parking lot at Kildonan Park on Jan. 2, there are probably 30 Christmas trees beneath a sign that reads NO DUMPING, threatening a $300 fine.

But this isn’t illegal dumping. From Dec. 27 to Jan. 31, this parking lot is one of 10 City of Winnipeg Christmas tree recycling depots for the Let’s Chip In program.

Over the course of the month, more than 10,000 trees will be dropped off at these depots.

I’m waiting to talk to Mark Kinsley, the city’s supervisor of waste diversion, but I’m early. While I wait, I decide to indulge my curiosity about the trees, which are still green and fragrant.