Guest post by Winnie Romeril, Red Cross volunteer
Fort McMurray people are resilient. When wildfires, which scorched an area 100 times the size of Manhattan, destroyed some 2,500 town buildings and resulted in a month-long evacuation, even the strongest residents were tested. Meet one person the Canadian Red Cross had the privilege to support, Eva Janvier.
We first met Eva in one of the information centres which the regional government set up in Fort McMurray to welcome evacuees home. Mostly in schools, they served as one-stop-shopping for donated supplies like water, clean up kits, groceries, meals and snacks as well as agency representatives that could deliver information or concrete assistance. Everyone came by the Red Cross tables to register their return and sort out other assistance.
“My parents taught me to do for myself or do without,” Eva said as she stepped out of the line of people waiting to talk to a Red Cross case worker. My Canadian Red Cross counterpart Jennifer Ouellette and I noticed her discomfort and offered a friendly ear. “Other people need it more,” Eva explained, “I shouldn’t be here.” We asked if she had a place to go.
“I’m homeless right now. I can’t believe I just said that,” she shook her head in disbelief. “I have a place, but I can’t get in. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” At her first stop in town, Eva found her Timberlea apartment sealed up “for the next 5 weeks,” she was told, while safety checks were carried out. Suddenly with nowhere to live, she came to the Composite High School Information Center in Fort McMurray.
While the other 90,000+ wildfire evacuees fled every which way across Canada, Eva spent 30 days alone in her truck on a highway. “I just needed to get away from all that chaos,” she said. Her only visitor was a bear who came by from time to time looking for food. “I told him I was not there to hurt him,” Eva said, “And I kept working on my drum. I gave it to the fire department to thank them for all they did.”
“I’ve never asked for help before, I’m the one who helps others,” she told us. While only a child herself, she protected younger children from harm at a residential school. A mother to six of her own children, Eva took in, and raised, a total of 43 children. She worked for a time at the hospital and delivered 44 babies in her community.
It wasn’t until days later that we learned Eva is a Chipewyan Elder, a pipe carrier, and a teacher. She speaks her native Dene, and learned Navajo and Cherokee at the Canadian Indigenous Languages and Literacy Development Institute (CILLDI, sil’-deh) at the University of Alberta. At one point, she worked as an economic development officer in Saskatchewan for the Big Island Lake Band. She most enjoys being out on the open road driving truck and bus, but as she said, “It’s hard to get driving jobs when you’re a 65-year-old woman and the oil economy has collapsed.”
“I’ve never taken a hand out. We weren’t raised like that,” Eva, one of 14 children explained. “Our father said, ‘Take away only the good from life, let bad things in life flow away from you like water down the river.'”
“I don’t want to go back to living in my truck,” she continued. “I just need a place to stay for a few days to get a plan together.” We guided her to a chair and two Red Cross case workers found her a hotel room for 8 nights. “You are my angels,” she said through hugs and tears. We were all pretty teary by that point, but relieved that she had a bed and supplies to get through the next days.
A few days later, Eva gave up her hotel room, “because someone else needs it more,” and moved in with one of the children she raised and her little son.