Feel Good Friday: Global BC’s highlights of the week

Here are five stories we want to share:

Toddler’s drowning averted at Okanagan Lake, off-duty Mountie credited

A young family was taking a break on an Okanagan beach last weekend when they narrowly averted tragedy, RCMP say.

It was around 2 p.m., Saturday, when a couple’s two-year-old child misstepped while walking along a Naramata beach dock and fell into the water.

“The child was having great difficulty staying afloat in the extremely cold water,” RCMP said in a press release.

Yoda, Batman, Optimus Prime: Surrey man’s pop culture collection displayed at B.C. museum

Dilber Mann’s hobby is collecting statues of famous characters from the 1980s. Recently, they were packaged up, put on a truck and moved to the Museum of Surrey.

Except for Yoda, who rode shotgun in his car.

“I didn’t have the box anymore and I didn’t want to take it apart,” Mann said.

The exhibit includes statues of Batman, X-Men, Optimus Prime, Predator and a couple of well-known Jedis.

While it’s a showcase of ’80s pop culture, there’s also a narrative on the wall describing Mann’s experiences during those years growing up in the diverse city of Surrey and how these franchises brought people together.

‘A perfect marriage’: 2 First Nations to gain park ranger authority on B.C.’s northwest coast

In the lush forests and misty waters of British Columbia’s northwest coast, First Nations people have been keeping watch since time immemorial.

Their territories, part of which are now known as the Great Bear Rainforest, are home not only to their people but to all kinds of extraordinary wildlife, from spirit bears to breaching humpback whales.

For more than a decade, the Coastal Guardian Watchmen have patrolled its waters, documenting the health of ecosystems and watching for poachers and other illegal activity.

On Wednesday, some of those watchmen — from the Kitasoo/Xai’xais and Nuxalk Nations — inked a historic deal with the provincial government to launch a pilot project that gives them all the authority of park rangers under the B.C. Park Act and Ecological Reserve Act.

From Dingle Bingle Hill to Bergen-Op-Zoom, Nanaimo B.C.’s unusual street names

It’s no secret that the City of Nanaimo, B.C., has some unusual street names.

A new exhibit of the names is now on display at the Nanaimo Museum, put together by a group of history students at Vancouver Island University (VIU).

Dr. Katharine Rollwagen, a professor at VIU, said last semester she was working with another professor at the university, Dr. Kelly Black, both teaching history, and they decided they wanted to work together on a project involving Nanaimo.

Chance airport encounter with Vancouver man sparks food-aid network to Ukraine

Twice a day, Olena manages to video chat with her daughters, Leeza and Katya, who are staying with family in Prague.

It’s a chance for the family to stay connected and for the girls to see their new baby brother Richard, who was born in Vancouver just over a month ago.

With her pregnancy nearly at full-term and concerned about the wait time for newborn documents in the Czech Republic, she booked a flight to B.C. to stay with a distant contact. But things changed when she met a Vancouver man at the airport.