MHV Says Thanks To Volunteers

(Photos by Mennonite Heritage Village)

Mennonite Heritage Village in Steinbach would like to say thank you to its volunteers. The museum is holding its volunteer appreciation evening Thursday night.

Program Director Anne Toews says the museum has a volunteer list of about 300 people. In just the festivals alone, the museum needs to fill more than 900 volunteer slots and in the course of a single year the museum will accumulate more than 10,000 volunteer hours.

2014 has marked 50 years of existence for MHV. Toews says volunteers today are much different from those five decades ago.

"A lot of them were instrumental in getting this place going and set up, a lot of that was volunteer work," notes Toews when describing the work of the early volunteers. "The current volunteers are instrumental in keeping the place running and operating for us throughout the year."

Toews says it's a scary thought to consider what the museum would look like today without volunteers.

"It would be sad actually," she says. "There would be lineups and there would be nobody to serve them. There would be nobody to help them and we just know that we could not run this place without the volunteers."

Toews says it's always been challenging finding volunteers. But she says with some of their volunteers getting up there in age, there is a new base of younger volunteers that put in many hours on festival days or helping out with the education program.

Evelyn Friesen (left inset) was the museum's first hired Volunteer Coordinator more than thirty years ago. She says with the increase in tours, guests and school children, there was a need for her service. Friesen says one of her memories of a special volunteer over the years was a lady that once lived across the road from the museum. When bus tours would pull up the museum driveway, John C. Reimer would contact her to make lunch for the guests. So, this lady would make perogies and gravy, wrap them with towels in a roaster and run them across the road to be served warm to the museum's guests.

(John C. Reimer and Eugene Doerksen) Friesen says being hired as Volunteer Coordinator sparked her interest in the story of the Mennonites. She says to be able to share that story with visitors is very satisfying.

Thursday's event is open to anyone who volunteered in 2014 or for longtime volunteers. According to Toews there are some families that have four generations of volunteers at the museum.