Shannen's Dream became a reality

NDP MP Charlie Angus, The Huffington Post:

The children were running alongside me as we trudged along the hot and dusty road through Attawapiskat. They could hardly contain themselves. After 13 long years of heartache and struggle, the community was finally getting a real grade school. 

As we walked to the site where the first shovels would ceremonially dig into the earth, the children were bubbling over with visions of what this school would be like. Lockers -- there will be lockers and we will make them pretty. A hallway -- we will have a real hallway where we can walk from class to class without worrying about the cold. There'll be a science room, a music room, a real cafeteria where mice won't eat our lunches. It was almost heartbreaking to see through their eyes the years of neglect they had faced in dilapidated portables on a heavily toxic site.

For these youngsters, the walk to the site of the new school had all the energy of Christmas morning. You could see this energy in the pictures they had painted to celebrate their new school. Colourful rainbow pictures with stick children full of smiles and little dogs and whales taking the place of clouds in the skies. Paintings to make Chagall weep.

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