Helping hands reach northward

EDMONTON -- A Sea-Can shipping container, jam-packed with 4,600 pounds of food and 700 pounds of clothing from Edmonton, is on a two-month journey to a remote community in the Northwest Territories.

The container is being shipped some 3,000 kilometres over land and sea to Fort Good Hope, a community of about 500. 

“Food will be the biggest benefit. It’s urgently needed; the poverty is very evident,” said Roger Plouffe, who serves in the community as a lay minister with the Church of Our Lady of Good Hope.

Plouffe is a former chair with the liturgy committee at St. Thomas More Parish in Edmonton, where the Sea-Can was filled. 

This is the second container the Society of St. Vincent de Paul has shipped to the town as part of its North of 60 project, which has been helping communities in Canada’s North for more than a decade. The first was sent in 2016. 

Once the container arrives at Our Lady of Good Help Church, the items will be sorted, unloaded and stored there for the community. 

Heather Bourassa, who was born and raised in Fort Good Hope, said the container will be a huge help to the people of Fort Good Hope, a largely Dene community that has an unemployment rate of 22.9 per cent and is grappling with poverty and homelessness.

“It’s very exciting to know that the help is there and that our parish can do more for our community,” she said. “Instead of just wishing we could do something, we now have the support of a larger centre to make a big difference.”

Last spring, Lou Normand, a member of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul at St. Thomas More, volunteered to take the lead with this charitable initiative. 

“There are some kids up there who don’t eat for a day or two, so that’s really the focus,” said Normand. “But we only wanted to send the things they need and then bring that information back to our parish. We want to make sure we don’t send up too much food to encroach on the local businesses up there.”

After appealing for donations at the beginning of May, society volunteers were quickly met with hundreds of contributions from Edmonton and across Canada.

Hardware supplies, tools and lumber are also being sent in the container as well as donated hockey sticks, pads and other sports equipment for kindergarten to Grade 12 students at Chief T’Selehye School.

Thanks to the help of some young Catholics at St. Thomas More, the container features a colourful depiction of Our Lady of Guadalupe, a patroness of Indigenous peoples.

“I feel really blessed,” said Emma Wang, a Grade 9 student at Louis St. Laurent Catholic School who helped paint the image. “My artwork will be somewhere out there and a lot of people will see it. It feels really good that it will have all these things that can help people — I think they’ll appreciate it a lot.”

While the water transportation costs are covered by the Northwest Territories government, the Society of St. Vincent de Paul paid a total of $60,000 for the Sea-Can, some materials and the land transport.

The shipment is expected to arrive in mid-July. This year the Society of St. Vincent de Paul is sending containers to seven other communities in the North.

(Grandin Media)