When retired teacher Barb Ardern made the 2900-kilometer trip from Ottawa to Thompson to volunteer for the 2026 Manitoba Games, it didn't feel like a visit – it felt like being back home. That is because for a time, Thompson was her home.

Barb admits that she didn’t come all this way just to volunteer. She took the opportunity to not only watch her daughter, a playwright and actress, perform in Winnipeg before heading 750 kilometers north to Thompson; the northerner-at-heart was also excited to catch up with her longtime friends, Harold Smith and Pauline MacDonald-Smith.

Barb can’t say enough positive things about Thompson.

“It is an amazing community,” she said. “It is so easy to make friends here. And there are ties that bind. I mean...I’m not the only one…who has come back just to volunteer for this.”

Barb speaks of how the community would show up for their people without hesitation.

“Somebody is sick, people just surround them. Somebody is putting up shingles on a roof. Well, before you know it, there’s three people on the ladder helping you, and somebody is in the kitchen making muffins as a snack. I have never seen, anywhere else, that degree of kindness and helpfulness.”

When you hear Barb speak of Thompson so fondly, it is no surprise that she made the long trip to give back. It was a difficult decision for her and her family to move away from Thompson in the first place.

After marrying her husband Brian, who was already teaching in Thompson, Barb joined him there. She taught grade 8 for a time, and then grade 6, before taking some time off to have her daughters. Their two daughters were born in Thompson and received what Barb calls a “superior education”. While their daughters were still in school, the family relocated to Winnipeg for Brian to follow a job. They struggled to recreate the same sense of belonging that they had experienced in Thompson.

“We found it very difficult to make friends. And that never happened (in Thompson).”

The connections Barb built in the North remain strong even after the decades that have passed. For the duration of the Games, she is staying with friends Harold and Pauline, who she has known for forty years. Barb joyfully describes them as the kind of friends that “you can call…up any time of day or night, no questions asked, and they are there for you.”

Barb will be spending the entire week volunteering in Food Services alongside other committed volunteers in the busy kitchen. She commends the supervisors of Food Services, and Food Services Chair Harold, for their efficiency and good training of the volunteer workforce.

“Yesterday was our first morning making breakfast and we were all newbies. Within twenty minutes, people just looked like they knew what they were doing.”

Though she now calls Ottawa her home, Thompson still has a special spot in her heart. Some communities leave a lasting mark, and for Barb, this northern city will always be one.