The Portapique Community Build Up project took a big step on Sunday, unveiling a new playground in the community for people to gather and play.
The project is aimed at shining a positive light on the area rather than having it be remembered for the April 2020 mass shooting, when 22 lives and an unborn baby were taken.
The playground sits on the property of the community hall.
“This project is really about hope and resilience,” says Alana Hirtle, the Rotary Club of Truro Rotary Cares Committee Chair. “And enabling these people to feel that they play a part in their own healing process, to enable them to change the light which has been shone on this community.
“Such a terrible thing to have happened, and to give them the opportunity to change the story and to chart their own path forward is beyond description.”
“We told the residents to dream big,” Andrew MacDonald, the president of the Trustees of the Portapique Community Hall, told the crowd. “We would build it together.”
The mass shooting cast darkness on the Colchester County community, says John Hudson, a Portapique resident of 33 years.
“We need to brighten that back up, do things throughout the community, have the people come together, put that in our past,” he tells Global News. “I’m just very grateful the way everything worked out today.”
“We’ve been working and striving towards betterment of Portapique,” he says. “This is a good first step.”
Giving community members a chance to rebuild and come back stronger than ever.
“It means something because of all the stuff that happened in this area,” says 11-year-old Emmitt MacKinnon. “It’s really nice to have it, to see the kids having their fun.”
Hirtle, the committee chair, estimates about 100 people have been part of the project so far, including rotarians, community members and donors.
But a significant part of the build-up project remains.
A total facelift — and major expansion — for the Portapique Community Hall is coming, and Hirtle says work should be finished in late spring or early summer.
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“It’ll be a space where the community can come together, have community dinners, have weddings, whatever they want to do,” she says.
Hirtle says the total cost of the project is currently at $822,000, of which $175,000 went to playground costs.
She says fundraising is ongoing to help cover the total cost.
“One of the biggest things is that, after everything happened, we rallied together,” says Erin MacKinnon, who has lived in Portapique for 23 years. “And we really are defining what ‘community’ means.”
“You see ‘Nova Scotia Strong’ all the time, but it means much more when you realize that you’re a really big part of that, everybody in Nova Scotia is pulling together,” Erin says.
“Not only Nova Scotia Strong,” Hudson says, “we’re, in this area, Portapique Proud.”
Rebuilding the community and offering hope for the future.
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