Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I just want to say to the people in my region and to a lot of people in the Northwest Territories who contacted me over the last couple of months, I’m certainly glad to be alive today.
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I want to express my appreciation to the people who have made phone calls to me, who have talked to my wife. I really listened to some of the Members who made condolences to some of their own constituents who have passed away and people who have passed away in the past, and certainly my own people in the Sahtu region, of some of the difficulties that we as people go through when a loved one passes away.
Yet we still have a job to do. We still have to stand there and hold it together and continue on and make decisions. Sometimes, when I saw the anguish and the hurt in my wife’s face or my little boy’s face, I was really scared. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I guess the big guy upstairs didn’t want me today, because he said, go back down there and do some more work. That’s the way I look at it. Or someone saying, I’m glad we’re not talking about you, we’re still talking with you.
These kinds of things wake me up in terms of how life is taken for granted sometimes. I look at that and I wanted to say to the people of the Northwest Territories, we really appreciate the phone calls and the prayers that the elders said. Prayers are so powerful today that when I went into my region, I wanted to thank the elders and the people who came up to me and said, we prayed for you, we prayed for you things would work out well for you, we also prayed for people in our meetings that things will work out good for them. There are people right now in the hospital that need our prayers and we need to think about those situations.
I want to say thank you to the hospital and the wonderful staff in the Northwest Territories and Yellowknife for really helping me out here and helping my family. Also for the Members here I wanted to also say I appreciated the time off to recover. However, I want to also say that life goes on. I’m back up in good form again and going to be representing my people in this Assembly, hopefully for a long, long time to come.
I want to say I really appreciate my family and I really appreciate especially my little boy.
Thank you, Mr. Yakeleya. I’m sure I speak on behalf of all Members when I say we’re happy to be talking with you and not about you as well.
The honourable Member for Nahendeh, Mr. Menicoche.
