Nearly three months after being driven out of their Winnipeg apartment building at risk of collapse, tenants are still working to rebuild their lives. For Shyanne Carriere and her mother Mala, the evacuation from their home at the Birchwood Terrace apartments on Portage Avenue in May – and the time elapsed since then – has forced them to make difficult personal decisions. “I thought it would be just like, a month, we would be able to go back in, grab our belongings and then have it all be done with,” Shyanne said.
Shyanne, a professional world-champion Latin dancer of salsa and bachata, is forced to skip an entire dance season as the family attempts to recover financially. “It’s difficult because it’s not just like, a couple months of preparation for competition,” she explained. “It’s years.
You train for years in order to compete. So to say no to it is very difficult.” The decision to put dancing on hold for financial reasons was also difficult for Mala, who dances as well.
The mother-daughter duo competed together for the first time at the Calgary International Salsa Congress in April, winning first prize. “It was amazing. Like a dream come true to me,” Mala described.
“I wanted to take it to the next level, and that’s the Canada (International) Salsa Congress. You get a Canada title if you win first there, so that was really hard for us.” Now that dream is on hold until further notice.
“We’d have to save every cent,” Mala explained. �.