Heartfelt welcome for evacuees

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/12/2011 (5075 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

GIMLI — Kids are in school. Parents are working. And Misty Lake Lodge is happy housing evacuees from an Interlake First Nations community.

“Here, we’re basically turning into a huge family,” lodge manager Retha Dykes said Thursday. “You heard so much about Lake St. Martin and all the other communities, but nothing about Little Saskatchewan.”

The lodge, just minutes north of Gimli, took in 130 evacuees from Little Saskatchewan in May after flood water forced people from their homes. Currently, about 50 remain at the lodge.

Flood water overwhelmed the water-treatment plant, contaminating water sources. An E. coli outbreak sent one man to hospital for nearly a month with kidney damage, and sickened others.

The uncertain future — Little Saskatchewan evacuees have been warned they could be out of their own homes for a year or more — means the lodge on the lake is more than just a safe space to stay.

“The people who own the building and the workers, they’re always kind,” Little Saskatchewan elder Marie McKay said.

Next week, Santa Claus will visit kids and a tall Christmas tree is decorated in the main dining room. Staff are planning to work on a toboggan hill and a skating rink.

April Bird said she spent a couple of weeks at a Winnipeg hotel with her daughters, aged five and two, avoiding drunks and trying to protect her children from bedbugs, before settling in at Gimli.

“It’s nice here. They make us feel at home. The cook even makes us bannock, sometimes,” Bird said.

Lodge staff, who normally cater weddings and social events, have converted space for a laundry room and created an after-school room to tutor students and hold craft classes. A small movie theatre screens videos a few times a week, with popcorn and gummy bears served. Televised Winnipeg Jets games draw big crowds.

Little Saskatchewan Chief Gerald Anderson said the staff’s kind, welcoming approach has been a blessing.

“Right now, we don’t have a time frame to return home. There are winter flood fears and we have no homes to go home to,” he said. “In this crisis situation, we’re happy to get that support from Misty Lake.

“It relieves the stress in you.”

Six parents hold down jobs in the lodge and more are working on a cottage construction site that lodge owner Michael Bruneau is developing north of Gimli, with plans to set up job training in the trades for more.

While she credits her staff, Dykes is the driving force behind turning Misty Lake into a home away from home for the displaced families.

For example, she co-ordinated school enrolment. In fact, a day before school started, Dykes, along with staff and parents, piled 25 kids from kindergarten to Grade 11 into vehicles and drove them to the Evergreen School Division office eight kilometres away in Gimli.

Every student was enrolled by the end of the day. The authorities — First Nations, federal and provincial — settled the details later.

The new kids fit right in, said Paul Cuthbert, Evergreen superintendent. “It’s an enriching experience for both sides.”

Seventeen of the original students remain. Eight left Gimli when their families relocated.

Lodge flood co-ordinator Randy Anderson is a fisherman at home. As the main contact for evacuees, chief and council and the Manitoba Association of Native Firefighters — who co-ordinate First Nations evacuees in 14 Manitoba hotels — Anderson’s on the go most days, settling minor upsets, acting as chauffeur and working with hotel staff. “Everyone still gets homesick,” Anderson said. “And at first, for everyone, it was like, ‘Hey, it’s a vacation,’ and after a while, you just want to go home. But Misty Lake makes us feel at home. It’s not part of their job. They just do it.”

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca