On Saturday, a group of local co-workers got together and made care packages for truck drivers which they handed to them at the Co-op Cardlock just north of 100 Mile House.
Jenny Gilliland Giesbrecht says she bakes for the Crafter’s Market in 100 Mile as well as different markets in the area and had been thinking about how she could get that out to the people who need it right now.
“It’s been in my mind for probably a month or so and then I just figured, you know, why don’t we get employers involved; get some morale built up within our community.”
She approached her boss, Daniel Broddy at FreshCo, and asked if he would donate towards care packages for truckers.
The idea was for packages around the $5 mark with gift cards for food, toilet paper, gum, granola bars, apples, oranges, any finger food as well as pop or water, she says (they didn’t have a permit for hot beverages).
“All we’re doing is we’re just handing out these packages. Daniel’s kids decorated the bags; they painted them up for me, made them pretty and all I’ve done is filled them up with an assembly line, stapled them up so there’s no access by anybody and they just come on in and grab a bag and go.”
They prepared 30 and gave away 11 because there wasn’t a lot of traffic on Saturday, she says, adding that the truckers advised them to do it on a Friday or a Monday.
“So we’re going to set up again this Friday.”
The truckers appreciated the bags, she says.
“We had one trucker that made a comment that really did it for me. He basically said ‘thank you very much, I haven’t eaten anything since seven this morning.’ I said, ‘that is why we’re doing this. We want to help you guys out, provide you with some munchies, you know, just something to keep you going, and as a thank you for the effort, the huge effort that they’re making to keep stuff going through our communities, keeping our grocery stores full.'”
Staff has been really good about donating and a lot of businesses in the community have reached out how they can help and they’ve received some monetary donations to help fund the bags, she says.
If anyone is looking to donate, the best way at the moment is to message her on Facebook, she says. She wanted to see what kind of response they got before setting up something more formal and hopefully a GoFundMe by next week.
“I don’t want to go too big too fast because I don’t know what’s going on. I’m watching the news faithfully to see when they’re going to do a soft opening,” she says, “because that will dictate how many more times we’re going to do this.”
