Donated pandemic visitation shelter will house Manitoba community's first food bank
Volunteers in Vita, Man., are working to get the shipping container set up as a food bank
Volunteers in Vita are using a pandemic cast-off to help fight hunger, as they work to transform one of the province's decommissioned visitation pods into the town's first food bank.
Repurposed shipping containers were used to visit loved ones at personal care homes during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but then stopped being used.
When Jane Roman heard the province was giving the pods away, she rushed to apply for the one set up outside the Vita and District Personal Care Home.
"To have it be available just when we needed it was kind of a miracle," she said.
Roman and a group of volunteers had recently started meeting to make plans for a food bank in Vita, which is about 90 kilometres southeast of Winnipeg, and soon realized the small town is short on spare buildings to house it.
"It just seemed to be the right thing for us," she said.
Right now, people who need food hampers have to drive all the way to Grunthal, an hour-long round trip.
"You're not getting as much from that food donation as if it were right here in Vita," she said.
Roman said while a local church group has been helping drive some of those food baskets down to Vita, it's time the town — which has a population of just over 500, according to the latest census — had its own food bank.
She said as word began to spread, the number of households picking up food at the church nearly doubled in just a few months.
The new reeve of the rural municipality of Stuartburn, Michelle Gawronsky, said she's grateful for the volunteers' budding initiative. While financial need has been growing in Vita, the economy has not.
"We are a very low-income area, so poverty is quite high," she said. "It's a definite boost to the community."
The RM has offered space behind the Vita fire hall to put the pod, which still has to be renovated and outfitted with refrigerators and other equipment.
Roman said her group is considering the RM's offer, and is welcoming donations to raise roughly $10,000 to get the food bank up and running.
Growing crops to meet growing need
One thing the food bank won't be short on is potatoes, according to Melvin Kachur.
The retired farmer has devoted about half of his two-hectare (five-acre) property in nearby Pansy to growing veggies for food banks.
"My wife thinks I'm nuts," said Kachur. "But I love horticulture and I love spending time in a garden."
"We're growing a lot of peaches and cream corn, and a lot of potatoes," he said while looking across dozens of rows of plants.
"And then we'll have a lot of yellow beans."
Kachur said he wanted to make sure food bank users had quality produce to nourish them.
"The food banks around here are always short on fresh veggies, and we'd like to fill that void," he said.
Local farm stores gave Kachur seed and supplies, and volunteers have been dropping in to help weed the expansive plot of land he dubbed the Garden of Eden.
Kachur said many of the helpers are newcomers who recently arrived from Ukraine.
"One day we had four families, some of them with five or six kids," said Kachur, a Ukrainian Canadian himself.
"They just love to come here and pull weeds or plant potatoes."
He said the garden could always use more help, and said everyone who lends a hand will be sent home with fresh vegetables.
"The fun part is going to be harvesting," said the 76-year-old, adding that a teenage ringette team from Steinbach plans to pitch in later this month.
Kachur expects to produce lots of potatoes for local food banks, including the new one starting up in Vita.
He estimates the garden will yield enough spuds to supply the food bank all year.
A grateful community
Back in town, the reeve commended Kachur, as well as the committee putting the food bank together.
"They give to people they don't know, they give without expecting thank you's," said Gawronsky.
"It definitely shows the wonderful human beings we have around our community, making sure everyone is fed."
She also thanked MLA Dennis Smook, who she said helped pitch the volunteers' request for the visitation pod to provincial officials in charge of giving them away.
Gawronsky called the repurposing of the pods a silver lining, following the pandemic.
"COVID was absolutely horrendous," she said. "But something like this turns a negative into a positive."
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