By Richard MacKenzie
Antigonish Casket
Anna MacDonald likes to stay busy and the local Meals on Wheels program and the Wishing Wells Society are just a couple of the groups benefitting from her energy and graciousness.
“It’s interesting … you get to meet a lot of interesting people, some characters,” MacDonald said of her Meals on Wheels volunteering which she does on Tuesdays and Thursdays as well as on Mondays and Fridays where she goes a little out of the normal jurisdiction to deliver to one lady.
“And sometimes I’ll fill in a day or two if someone is missing,” she said, adding she has been volunteering with the program, run through the Victoria Order of Nurses (VON), for about six years.
“They were looking for people to volunteer. I saw the church bulletin; I think that’s how I got started.”
Her task involves delivering the meals and then returning the empty containers. Her regular Tuesdays and Thursdays involves five to six deliveries.
As for her Wishing Wells Society volunteer work, it starts at her home.
“I live up in the seniors building on Hawthorne Street, I have them all saving their [refundable] bottles,” she said. “I take them out to St. Andrews in support of the Wishing Wells Society.
“You just drop them off,” she said of the location in St. Andrews, kindly provided to the society by Bill and Marie Feltmate.
“It is people like Anna who help to keep Wishing Wells going,” society founder and volunteer Mary van den Heuvel said.
“We receive donations of money and are always grateful for those, but it is the refundables program that has continued to supply funds for water projects week after week, year after year for many years. It may seem that a donation of bottles, worth five or 10 cents each, wouldn’t amount to much, but it does because Anna, and so many others, contribute to Wishing Wells in that way.”
MacDonald has also been attempting to collect tabs from beverage cans for L’Arche fundraising and does “some part-time things over at the parish office … little odds and ends,” she said, referring to St. Ninian Cathedral Parish.
“Like I said, it’s interesting to do and it really keeps you going,” she said, summarizing her volunteering efforts and other activities such as taking part in a walking club.
“There is nothing worse than sitting around all day.”