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Volume 7, Issue 14
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
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Bloom SOCCER & Celebration BASEBALL Arrivals at DutchCanadian Friendship Tulip Garden 9 Erie St. N. Leamington 519-326-2222
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The Leamington Horticultural Society is hosting a Bloom Celebration at the 70th Anniversary Dutch-Canadian Friendship Tulip Garden on Thursday, May 5 at 11 a.m. at Rick Atkin Park, located next to Leamington Marina.
Leamington
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Last fall, to commemorate the 70th Anniversary of the liberation of Holland during World War II, the Leamington Horticultural Society planted 700 red and white tulips at the entrance to the park with plans to hold a Bloom Celebration May 5, which is also Liberation Day in Holland. Speakers at the event will be Ret’d Lt. Col. Morris Brause of the Essex-Kent Scottish and Philomene Rowan, who as a child was liberated in Holland in 1945 by the Essex Scottish. Everyone is welcome to attend the celebration.
By Bryan Jessop It seemed only fitting to relocate a program based on addressing global hunger to a facility driven by the same objective. For the first time ever, Leamington’s Southwestern Ontario Gleaners at 40 Industrial Road hosted the Mennonite Central Committee’s mobile canner. The Meat Canner-Leamington Committee made arrangements with more than 400 volunteers from across Essex County and ChathamKent who offered their time to filling, cleaning, sealing, cooking, drying, labeling and packaging 10,000 cans of chunked, dark-meat chicken. Like the other 29 stops on the annual MCC canning tour, Leamington’s contribution will be shipped to a storage facility until an impoverished region is selected to receive the muchneeded source of food. In each of the communities listed as MCC meat canner stops, local committees take on the duties of recruiting volunteers and raising the money necessary to finance their region’s donations. Leamington’s canning committee includes 30 members, most of whom balance the group’s meetings with fulltime jobs. Members take on responsibilities ranging from arranging trucking to purchasing and delivering meat, scheduling breaks and meals for volunteers, washing coats and rags and numerous other tasks. “This is pretty complicated machinery, so it can be complicated to get volunteers to do a complicated task, but that’s what we do,” explained MCC canning and trucking manager John Hillegass. “The local committees are what make it possible for us to run this. The MCC provides the canner, but it’s useless without the work from all the towns we visit.”
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A group of volunteers dries and labels filled cans of chicken for the Mennonite Central Committee’s annual canning ‘tour’ stop in Leamington Wednesday, Apr. 20. The Southwestern Ontario Gleaners hosted this year’s local stop for the first time. (SUN Photo)
Hillegass, a resident of the Lancaster, Pennsylvania area, travels from destination to destination along with the mobile canner and four service workers who operate its machinery. Last year, a new canner — the MCC’s fourth since the program began Stateside in 1946 — was built according to Hillegass’s design as a replacement for a unit that had served the program for the previous 21 years. The change led to the absence of Canadian locations on the canning tour for the first time since 1997. Leamington, which has been an MCC mobile canning location since 1999, is now one of only two Canadian stops. After spending two days in the Tomato Capital, this year’s campaign ended in Elmira, ON, where 60,000 pounds of chicken was canned over a five-day period. Manitoba is the storage destination for Canadian-
prepared meat. The supply of chicken will be stored in Plumcoulee, MB, until the MCC selects the next region to accept the massive food contributions. In previous years, chicken, turkey, beef and pork from the MCC operation have been sent to South Africa, Cuba, Bosnia, Haiti, North Korea, Congo, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia, Jordan, Iraq and communities in Ontario. The choice of which type of meat to can often depends on price and availability, although Hillegass noted that the choice is sometimes made based on connections with farming operations and the MCC’s intention on supporting local operations. This year, the Leamington committee purchased 20,000 pounds of chicken from Tender Choice Foods Inc. out of Burlington, ON. The Meat Canner-Leamington committee has established a budget of $80,000 this year. The
organization is accepting donations at the Mennonite Savings and Credit Union. Volunteers and committee members for the Leamington operation hail from 30 churches representing Catholic, Latter Day Saints, Lutheran, Mennonite, Pentecostal and United denominations. Other volunteers arrive from several high schools across the Essex-Kent region. Following the closure of Heinz, the Leamington committee had to find a replacement location for the mobile canner. The group approached SWO Gleaners, which accepted the request to be the local host. “We’re really happy to be going there this year,” said Marlene Schmidtgall, co-chair of Meat-Canner Leamington along with Jacob Neufeld. “It’s a really good fit for us. Our volunteers are sticking with us, which is great.”
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