The Weyburn Paramedics With Heart volunteered their time yesterday, collecting donations for the Weyburn Salvation Army Food Bank just outside of the Wholesale Club.

"We've had one or two years where we filled multiple ambulances. That'd be great," said EMT Daniel Kelly. "Then we bring it all over at 6:00 to Salvation Army and fill up their shelves again for Christmas."

Kelly shared why they keep up with the annual tradition.

"We know there's lots of people struggling right now. Every year there is. COVID really hit everyone hard, too. So we're definitely just trying to give back trying to do our best we can. A little thing, it's a few hours of us and it makes everyone's year."

He said they sometimes do feel like local celebrities.

"We get a few people that will stop by and every year give us one big old tub of stuff because we helped them on a call or whatever, so yeah, we can be celebrities every now and again."

Kelly said they also took in cash donations. 

"At the end of the day, we'll we go in and we'll spend all the cash and more grocery fill it, fill it up and we got a few hundred dollars last year, and we spent a good hour running around grabbing everything else we kind of needed," he noted. "We have lots of baby food. They tend to need it, and nobody really thinks of that, and it's expensive. So that's what we kind of spent a lot of money on last year that people donated." 

Donations were gathered from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., after which the Paramedics with Heart delivered an ambulance filled with community donations to the food bank, as seen below in the photos taken by Mack Kohl.

In response to Canada's Online News Act and Meta (Facebook and Instagram) removing access to local news from their platforms, DiscoverWeyburn encourages you to get your news directly from your trusted source by bookmarking this page and downloading the DiscoverWeyburn app.