Stephanie of Coventry (Part 2 of 2)
'I can't believe how tame and well behaved everybody was...just insanely beautiful.'
Part 1: Stephanie of Coventry
After being thrown out of work by a COVID vaccine mandate, Stephanie - a bilingual northern Ontario office worker - became a core volunteer at Coventry. At one point, it was smoky in the kitchen tent, she says. So Martin, another volunteer who happened to be a licensed electrician, fixed the problem,
I’m telling you, overnight he built them a platform, him and a couple other dudes. They built a platform to put the kitchen stuff on. And then he took a metal barrel, cut it, and made an exhaust for the kitchen. I was like, ‘Are you serious? This is amazing. I can't believe I'm surrounded by all these incredible people.’ I have pictures. At the beginning they're just cooking in the parking lot in the freezing cold. And then one day there's a kitchen with a platform and an exhaust.
Amongst those doing the cooking were an uncle and nephew from Levis, near Quebec City. Stephanie explains,
They had a restaurant, and a cube van. They’d packed up all the food that they had left in their restaurant. They packed everything. Fryers, cooking grills. And they ended up at Coventry. So we had two kitchens inside the main tent. They started cooking around noon, and they sometimes stayed there until two in the morning. Every day, they were cooking. They rented themselves an Airbnb. Not far, about a kilometer from Coventry. So they spent tons of money to be there.
They were serving burgers, fries, and whatever other donations we got. When they ran out of food, I think maybe a week after they got there, we were calling out to Quebecers. People that were doing the livestreams, they’d be like, ‘We need French fries.’ So people would show up with 20 pounds of potatoes, or potatoes that were already in bags, already fries, so they didn’t have to peel them.
We were getting boxes of cheese curds, and donations from other restaurants. We had boxes of sausages one time. Just boxes and boxes.
The trash was also managed by a dedicated team. Someone who owned a bins company “wasn't in the Convoy, but he supported us, a super nice guy,” Stephanie explains. He’d delivered several bins to Coventry and soon,
Everybody downtown kind of knew where the garbage drop-off points were. One of the guys was from Prince Edward Island and his kids were there - teenagers, not little kids. So at night they would be going downtown, they knew all the cops, they knew all the roads.
At first he was going in with his truck. The cops would let him pass, even if there's a little barricade, they’d let him go, pick up all the garbage. Later, they had to use big sleighs that you pull by hand. The garbage would be put in our bins at Coventry, and they'd come and empty them once they were full.
In her view, the Freedom Convoy protest was an extraordinary moment of national unity. She believes it changed Canada. “There was a shift. It shifted. The love increased. I think it’s still there.” Having traveled across this vast, highly-regionalized country for work, she says she knows firsthand that folks from Quebec don’t usually bond with folks from the prairies. “Seeing French guys that don’t speak any English, talking to English guys that don’t speak any French, seeing them just trying to figure it out. One time I was sitting there watching them, ‘Yeah, le fire.’ It was funny to watch, but it was just so beautiful at the same time.”
Members of the public were constantly dropping off donations. “Every day,” says Stephanie. “Pastors, military people, cops. One group, they wanted to be anonymous, but it was a bunch of cops. Six hundred bucks. We had a bunch of 53-foot trailers at the end. I gained a lot of muscle moving stuff in and out of those trailers. Cases of water, canned goods.”
A friend recently reminded Stephanie that her own behaviour had been that of a thoughtful manager, “Every single day, I’d go around and make sure everyone was OK. ‘Did you take a break? Do you need a beverage, a smoke break?’ Often, she says, the people doing the cooking weren’t eating much. “So I was like, ‘What did you eat today?’”
She describes Coventry as a place for the truckers “to relax. They were safe. One of the parking lots was just for trucks. So they could turn around, park properly.” She herself often stayed until the wee hours of the morning, making sure everything was tidy and ready for the next day.
Also, she says, “There was a rule. No drinking or drugs on the property. Because alcohol is not good when you mix it with large groups of people.” Other than a few folks she describes as weekend warriors, she says it never became an issue,
To be honest, I can't believe how tame and well behaved everybody was. The amount of people that we had. It was just insanely beautiful.
It had melted one day, it was warm the one day. And there was water everywhere. Well, all of a sudden there's ten dudes with shovels shoveling the water out of the tents. It was cohesive. Everyone was loving, patient, helpful, kind.
She smiles, “That month changed my life.”
When asked if there’s any incident or person she’ll never forget, Stephanie goes quiet. When she resumes, her voice is thick with emotion,
There’s this lady. She’s a Polish lady. She came into the admin tent. She’s like, ‘Wow, you’re doing so good.’ She was all happy. And she told me about when she was young, and how things had started to go bad in her country, back in the day. And how she’s seeing the same signs here, and that we’ve got to do something about it.
So it’s discouraging, but encouraging. We talked for a good while. Then she went and had lunch, came back and talked to me some more. And she was crying. She said, ‘Please don’t leave. Keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t give up.’
A day or so later, the same woman returned. She’d brought a few items she’d seen on a Coventry wish list, Stephanie remembers,
And then she hands me a bag, ‘This is for you.’ I said, ‘I don’t need anything, I don’t want anything.’
‘No, you don’t have a choice. This is for you. I want you to have this.’
So I open it. And one of my favourite things in life is blankets. Don’t ask me why, I love blankets. So I open the bag and it’s a knitted blanket that she made. All different colours. It was perfect, absolutely my style. I’m like, ‘I love it! Oh my God!’ I’m losing my mind.
The blanket’s always in my car, and I’m never going to forget that. ‘This is for you.’ She doesn’t know me from anything. She didn’t know I love blankets. And now it reminds me of the Polish lady, and how she fled her country to come here for a better life. I remember her eyes. They were so red, so full of tears. She was holding my hand, ‘Don’t leave.’
I'm sitting here fighting a kidney stone. Too much pain to breath right or sit straight and it's Stephanie's polish lady story that brings tears. Good stuff Donna.
Insanely beautiful!