#facesofedmonton

“It's a place where you can work side by side and bond with the community members. Sometimes they’ve got a lot in their lives that’s against them and they're not open to opening up. A garden like this becomes a common ground where you can work along side them and then eventually they start talking. I love using metaphors: you gotta trim the suckers off of a tomato plant to make it flourish more because the suckers steal nutrients from the plant producing the better stuff at the top. And sometimes you need to take the suckers out of your life, you gotta remove them. I thought of that one day when I was at my mother’s pruning a bunch of apple trees, and God started talking to me about that, about trimming the trees and how you gotta take the bad branches that don’t produce anything so that the ones the do produce can produce bigger, better, and larger fruit."

"I’ll show you guys a trick that I learned at Elk Island National Park. And this is a real good one because there’s some around here. If you’ve got any kind of bug bite, you chew on this lightly and then rub it on the bite and it’s gone almost immediately."

She laughs and says, "Things have been really good. I don't have anything left on my teaching bucket list that I think I have to do ... I'm going to do some travelling with our family. I think we'd all like to go to Europe."

“Beyond a strong friend base, one of the most important resources I had growing up was the Canadian Institute for the Blind (CNIB). They were a really strong support system for me because with so much negativity living as someone with low vision and with so many naysayers, having my parents, friends and the CNIB supporting me in every decision I made really made a difference and I’ll always be so grateful for that ... I wanted to give back to the CNIB so I started volunteering with them so I could help kids and give them similar opportunities. Just this summer I was able to organize a basketball camp for children with low vision ... To me, the miracle of the camp was seeing these kids transform from having no confidence, to their state when they left where they were inspired to go out and try new things and realize their potential, because they didn’t have any basketball skills when they came in and they left with the ability to dribble the ball and make some baskets, all those basketball skills, and they lit up ... To see them building towards something they didn’t even think was possible was a great experience."

"Everyone has a story and a reason for why they are where they are. I learned a long time ago that bad things can happen to good people. Just like a book, never judge a person by their appearance."

“I had a family sign custom-made for my wife with our names on it, and it made her cry. So that’s got to be the best thing I’ve given someone. It was a wood, rustic panel sign for the house. It was awesome. She really loved it.”

"Ideally, I would have all of my family move here to Alberta. I would never move back to Vancouver. I find that people are more friendly in Alberta and I love the community feeling of Edmonton ... I love that family feeling that I have here opposed to Vancouver. Nobody really talks to each other there."

“Her name is Athena. She’s a husky keeshond cross ... We were looking for a rescue dog for a really long time and we applied for a bunch of them but people kept one-upping us—they had acreages and stay-at-home moms or something like that, so it was really hard to find one. But we were just on Kijiji and I didn’t even really know that I had messaged this woman but she called me one day and was like, ‘Hey, I have one dog left. Would you like to come see her?’ And we did.”