Lottery for a life

ST. THERESA POINT -- Zach Harper waited 75 years for a house with running water and a flush toilet.

One week after Harper got it, he died.

Asked last year whether he believed the federal government would ever fund proper plumbing for him, the widower was skeptical.

"He'll ask God that question," said his son-in-law Geordie Rae, translating the elder's Oji-Cree.

Misery and indifference

WASAGAMACK -- Richard Andrews is a man of few words and a fan of understatement.

Standing in the gloom of his sagging trailer, he surveys the muddy floor, the goopy flypaper dangling from the kitchen ceiling, the piles of dirty clothes and the dishes stacked in a sink with no faucet. Graffiti and children's scribbles cover what remains of the walls, around holes that allow pink insulation to peek out. It's freezing in the winter, mouldy when the furnace kicks in and worse than even the slummiest apartment in Winnipeg.

"This place should be condemned already," Andrews says with a shrug.

Andrews lives, often with five other adults and his seven or eight grandchildren in what is likely the most squalid home on the reserve with the most pressing sanitation problems in the province. There is no running water to wash clothes, bathe the gaggle of muddy toddlers, do dishes or keep the floors clean. The family shares a slop pail, lined with a garbage bag, in what passes for a bathroom.

Easy to judge, difficult to escape

When we stepped into Richard Andrews' home in Wasagamack, we had only one question: Why the hell are you living here?

For Free Press photojournalist Joe Bryksa, who has visited two dozen homes without running water all across this province, it was the worst he'd seen. Dirty clothes piled everywhere, floors gritty with mud, window frames crusted with mould. Most walls were covered with scribbles, and every piece of furniture looked like something left beside a dumpster.

There are six adults and seven kids under the age of nine who live, off-and-on, in the old trailer, with no indoor toilet or running water. A few of the toddlers were so caked with mud I, to my own shame, paused for a second before lifting one up to help him onto a rickety porch in a yard strewn with garbage.

Why would anyone allow their children to live in a home like this? Why not pay for a water tank or a septic field? Or find another house? Or move to Winnipeg? Or Thompson?

Degrading third-world conditions one more hurdle for disabled man on reserve

ST. THERESA POINT -- A little whistle means Kevin Taylor has managed to hoist himself over the slop pail by himself and doesn't need his mother's help.

Taylor, a shy 30-year-old who has cerebral palsy and can't walk on his own, has a few bathroom options in his St. Theresa Point home, and they're all a humiliating hassle.

He can use his crutches to get from his perch on the living room sofa to the small room that serves as the bathroom. That's where the new slop pail is parked under the chair-like commode, near the plastic basin that serves as a makeshift sink. If Taylor's in a hurry, though, he usually drags his body down the hall in a scooching motion he's perfected and heaves himself up onto the commode.

A tough life without running water, but others have it worse

WASAGAMACK -- Rubena Harper meticulously dries every fork, every knife, a ladle and a pizza slicer, wheeling back and forth from the sink to a small table in her kitchen.

"If you keep the body in motion, it stays in motion," says the 65-year-old.

Harper, whose hands are clawed from the same arthritis that keeps her mostly wheelchair-bound, has no running water in her tidy kitchen, so she does her dishes using water hauled from the communal tap or trucked to a water tank.

In the mudroom just a few feet from where she's drying her dishes stand the slop pail and the commode. It's tricky for Harper, who has three metal plates in one leg and is quite thin, to manoeuvre herself from her wheelchair onto the commode.