Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 10/6/2017 (1203 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

NORWAY HOUSE CREE NATION — Jordin Bailey was an eight-year-old girl with the soul of a wise elder.

But last summer, a doctor told her mother, Lisa Kematch, that Jordin probably wouldn’t live to be nine years old. And by autumn, before the brain cancer’s progression crippled her, a Winnipeg charity that tries to make dreams come true for gravely sick children asked Jordin if she wanted to go to Disney World. Maybe even become a "Princess for a Day."

But she didn’t want that, or anything for herself, she told Howard Koks, the executive director of The Dream Factory.

All she wanted was a playground for the friends she would leave behind; a park in a Norway House subdivision on this sprawling First Nation of more than 6,000 perched at the top of Lake Winnipeg, where, despite its progressive ways and recreation focus, boredom can be a curse for the youth. Such boredom can bring on an early end for vandalized playgrounds that become so damaged and dangerous they have to be torn down.

As early as February, the community, the local RCMP, The Dream Factory and other donors had combined to raise $60,000 to cover the cost of her dream, and probably then some. By then, though, the cancer had taken her sight and later that same month it would take her life.

Four months would pass.

Finally, on Friday morning, as her mother watched more than 400 school children mob the play structure and swings and pile on the horseless merry-go-round, the vandal-resistant Jordin’s Wish Play Park officially opened with a blessing, a ribbon-cutting and a balloon release into the blue and misty white heavens.

Oh, yes, and with speeches, as a pair of red-coated honour guard Mounties looked on.

"I’m very thankful that Jordin’s park came together," Lisa, the proud mother, said before her nerves and emotions stopped her from saying much more. There was so much more she wanted to say, though. About building more playgrounds to keep the legacy alive. About who Jordin was, although most everybody knew by then.

"She was everybody’s friend," Lisa told me, saying Jordin often wandered the community, looking for families in need of food. "We called her ‘the old lady,’" her mother laughed, "because she was nosy."

But there was more to her than being an "old lady." There aren’t many playgrounds left in Norway House, although Lisa recalled how she would take Jordin to the one at the local school named after Helen Betty Osborne, the teenager from Norway House who, in 1971, was abducted from a street in The Pas and murdered. Jordin didn’t know about her. But soon after she was diagnosed, Jordin learned about Christine Wood, another young indigenous woman who went missing 10 months ago, and whose body was located in a ditch outside Winnipeg last week.

"She talked a lot about her," Lisa said.

"She wanted to go find her. And then when I saw on the news she was found, it just hurt. Because I knew my daughter wanted to find her."

Howard Koks, for one, wouldn’t be surprised to hear that. Koks spoke here, too, Friday, just as he had at Jordin’s memorial service when he referred to what he called her caring essence. Because it wasn’t just the wish she asked him for that amazed him that day in his office. He recalled something else in particular.

"Her mom got sad at one point — just crying maybe a little bit — and Jordin reached out and took her mom’s hand and was sort of petting it. Comforting her."

RUTH BONNEVILLE / WINNIPEG FREE PRESS files Jordin Bailey holds an artist’s rendering of the playground as her mom, Lisa Kematch, comforts her at her bedside in Winnipeg in February.

Crystal Bonner, who also spoke Friday, is the patient advocate at 333 Maryland St., the Norway House-owned residential building in Winnipeg where the family stayed and Jordin was cared for during her last months.

And where Jordin took her last breath.

Crystal’s office is located in the basement, and when Jordin was still able, she would visit every day.

"We’d talk," Crystal told me, "about the things that affected her throughout her lifetime as a child."

And Jordin would draw.

"She was drawing a picture all the time. She’d be drawing the sun. And she’d be drawing her mom. As she was drawing she would be talking about these things that bother her. And what she hoped for all the time."

Early on, Jordin told Crystal she wanted to live.

"And then she said, ‘I know I can’t have that wish. But I want my mom to be OK. I want my family to be OK all the time. And I want kids to be happy.’ Like you know, she would talk like that all the time. And she would also talk about how alcohol and drugs affected a lot of people. And I told her, ‘You know, people make choices.’"

Lisa can see the playground from her back window.

"There are maybe a hundred kids that are playing on her play structure right now," she told me over the phone the day before it officially opened.

Obviously, that’s why Jordin wanted the park there because she knew there was nothing else for the kids to do but wander the way she had when she was looking out for everyone she met.

But I wondered — given how Jordin seemed to have grown up so fast and was always concerned about others — if there was a deeper meaning for why she wanted a playground for the friends she left behind. I asked Lisa if she thought Jordin wanted it because it was a place where kids didn’t have to deal with what was happening in the adult world.

"Yes," she said, "I think so."

I think so, too, but Jordin might have said it differently.

A place where kids can just be kids.

And wise elders, too.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca