This story started two years ago and I think will impact me for the rest of my life, so it is an ongoing story. I was a new resident to the City of Pitt Meadows and at the time a student looking for something that I could focus my thesis on. My goal is to study water health, water quality so one day I went shopping and stumbled across this waterway that was absolutely and completely degraded and it broke my heart because seeing our resource being treated that way is sad. I wanted to know why -- so it turns out that the Katzie Slough ended up being my thesis project for two years and I am now part of community organizations involved in restoring the Katzie Slough.

I think a lot of people when they're looking at a waterbody, they think it's normal but its not. I mean we had a blue-green algae problem and people didn't understand that it wasn't just water plants growing on the surface. And so when you point out to people what they're looking at and how its not so good, it affects them personally, then they become emotionally involved and want to help -- so we have volunteers come out and do water sampling, cleaning up and just talking about it -- we do events and a lot of people don't understand what the Katzie Slough is. They just think its a ditch for farming and its not, its been part of Katzie First Nation heritage for thousands and thousands of years. So people get involved and become part of the community.