Facing the COVID-19 pandemic in Manitoba was worrisome enough, but for many people in the province and the country as a whole, first they had to get back to the Great White North.
This was true of Rick and Lori Fraser of Minto. They had been taking what was to be a month long vacation in Australia when things changed and changed fast. This meant a rather harried race to get back to Canada in a time of great uncertainty. They made it, but not without challenges.
Lori Fraser said they arrived Down Under on March 1. They were visiting their daughter Lisa who lives in Western Australia. They were aware of the coronavirus, which had begun ravaging Wuhan, China, but was threatening to move on. However, they were not particularly worried initially, comparing it to another virus that came out of the Chinese nation.
“No, I just felt awful. It just drained me. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.”
That is the message of Grant Harder of Boissevain. As far as anyone knows at this point, he is the community’s only victim of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although he has been recovered for some time now, he figures he will always remember his brush with the sickness that has impacted the world.
Harder feels he must have contracted the coronavirus during he and his wife Kathy’s travels in the spring of 2020. They took a trip to Florida from March 3 to 10. This was before COVID took hold in North America.
Luella Noble recently celebrated a very special graduation ceremony.
The Boissevain native was in Brandon on June 13 to visit Lorna Workman. They are two-thirds of the surviving class of nurses of 1945 in what Noble said will be their last reunion.
“We probably started having them about 20 years after, because some of them were working,” Noble stated. “It was really after they retired we started doing the anniversaries. We did them every five years.”
Noble (nee Patterson) said she originally applied for teacher’s training after finishing high school in Boissevain, but when she was turned down there, she switched over to nursing. She was accepted into the training in Brandon General Hospital on her 18th birthday, a week behind some of her classmates. Her schooling began in 1942, for three years of training.
All graduating classes build memories that last a lifetime. The Boissevain Class of 2020 is no different. What is unique is not what they have built for themselves, but what the world has built for them.
What would have been just another graduating class, smaller than many, became the COVID Class. Due to a worldwide coronavirus pandemic, schools in Manitoba were shuttered in March to try to stem the spread. Originally, no one knew for sure how long the schools would be closed, but in the meantime, students went on spring break and remained home while being taught in a remote-learning situation. It was unprecedented, and left June graduation ceremonies up in the air.
