Alain Larose and Sylvain Perrier: The Food Drive

Here, read the transcript of the interview with Alain Larose and Sylvain Perrier, a firefighter and an eligible firefighter in the Saint-Eustache Fire Safety Department.

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Alain: I have a big speaker.

Sylvain: Oh yeah?

Alain: It’s a lot of fun, we get everyone into the spirit. I have a big speaker that… that’s rechargeable, and you can plug it into a phone.

Sylvain: A radio.

Alain: It has a radio in it too. We put it on our trucks. Or once, I remember, we put it in front of a business in Saint-Eustache, they were really nice.

Sylvain: Yeah.

Alain: One of our colleagues and I had a little radio with a CD player. We’d been in the store. They gave us a Christmas CD, and we played Christmas tunes and sang, and… we kind of…

Sylvain: Yeah. And at the beginning, you know, the stores were a bit …

Alain: The firefighters…

Sylvain: Not reluctant, but you know, they were still thinking, “It’s going to disturb our customers who are coming in.” At the beginning we had… not “a bit of a tough time,” but you know, it was hard to find stores to participate. And when they saw us, you know, with the firefighter Santa hats, getting into the spirit.

Alain: Yeah.

Sylvain: People were happy, the store managers, and everyone told us, you know, “You’re not only helping people, you’re getting people into the Christmas spirit and…” Now we don’t even have to ask the store owners if we can go there. Often, it’s already done in advance: they ask us the date for the next year… This…. for the last two, three years, we’ve started setting up a lot of roadblocks. We can see that it works really well. But we still do our fundraising outside the stores who’ve been with us for years.

Alain: Yeah, and as I was saying, sometimes the firefighters, with their Santa hats, they even start dancing. And often the firefighters will bring their young kids along …

Sylvain: Yeah.

Alain: And that’s good too because, you know, the young kids, seeing people volunteer when they’re young, it’s… It’s always a happy time.

Sylvain: It instills good values in the kids. And you know, even the people who give money, they’re interested to see a young person involved. We explain to them.

Alain: Once, a gentleman gave us $100, in front of a store. And he said, “I needed the food bank once, and it was there for me.”

Sylvain: Exactly.

Alain: That man must have done well since then because…

Sylvain: Yeah, that’s what he said.

Alain: Giving $100, that’s something. He was really, really, really proud to do it, too.