Christmas comes to care home

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This article was published 19/12/2020 (1737 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Residents of the Rossburn Health Centre got a festive surprise on Wednesday when staff member Rachelle Chwaluk, alongside a team of volunteers, decided to plant some Christmas trees right outside their window.

Chwaluk told the Sun on Friday that this idea came to her after she stumbled across a similar gesture on Facebook and figured that the denizens of the building’s personal care home could also use a morale boost, since the site has been under constant lockdown for months due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s been a hard year,” said Chwaluk, who works as a medical lab assistant at the facility. “There’s been lots of restrictions. Some residents have had visitors and some have not, depending on how far away their families live.”

To make matters worse, Chwaluk revealed that the residents don’t even have the opportunity to decorate their rooms this holiday season, since the process of bringing in and sanitizing holiday ornaments would be too much for the already overburdened staff.

In an effort to resolve this problem, Chwaluk and her family spent last weekend cutting down approximately 30 Christmas trees near their home of Oakburn and used the following Wednesday to set them up outside each resident’s window at the Rossburn Health Centre.

Additionally, Chwaluk said her family received a lot of support from the community of Rossburn as a whole, with organizations like the local Lions Club, Knights of Columbus and Dollar Store all pitching in to help make this idea a reality.

The team of volunteers even went to the trouble of decorating the trees with Christmas lights, which proved to be the only major complication throughout the process.

“It was a little bit of a struggle with only four outlets on the outside of the entire building,” Chwaluk said. “So we had to run a lot of cords and it was all donated, so we have to return them.”

In the end, Chwaluk said that all of this hard work was worth it after seeing each resident’s reaction.

“It’s pretty hard to put into words. One of the ladies was just mesmerized sitting on her walker right by her window, watching the guys set up these trees. … So there were some wet eyes. There was a lot of emotion, for sure.”

Brandon resident Amber Hrubeniuk echoed a similar experience after witnessing her husband’s 100-year-old grandmother receive her tree, saying that she hasn’t smiled like that in months.

“She’s obviously excited to see her family, but to see that smile this week was pretty awesome,” Hrubeniuk said.

Chwaluk added that the online reaction to this gesture has been nothing short of astounding, with her initial Facebook post documenting the process being shared more than 160 times since it was published on Wednesday.

Because of this increased exposure, various members of the community have since dropped by the personal care home to add their own homemade decorations into the mix, including students from nearby Rossburn Elementary School.

While Chwaluk hopes that this initiative inspires additional acts of kindness in and around Rossburn, she encourages communities across Canada to follow suit, with this upcoming holiday season shaping up to be a particularly lonely time for certain segments of the population.

“If people just see this and it makes them feel good, then pay it forward,” she said. “Do something in your own community and do something good for your neighbour, because everybody needs some good right now with everything that’s going on.”

Rossburn is located approximately 150 kilometres north-west of Brandon.

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