Next week the residents of this city will be invited to attend a party at St. Joseph's Hospital, a celebration of 75 years of providing health care in the city.
We don't know how many Sisters of St. Joseph will be there to acknowledge us or to mark their contribution, but numbers won't matter. What they have done for this community does.
The last time local residents had an opportunity to visit with the sisters was in 1976, and at that event, held in the ECS Cafetorium, when a few dozen nuns walked quietly into the reception area, they were greeted with an impromptu standing ovation by close to 500 grateful people.
At that time, there were still many among local residents who could recall as far back as 1938 when the sisters stepped up and filled a huge health-care gap that couldn't be filled by local administration and wouldn't be filled by a Depression-laden provincial government.
The Town of Estevan was virtually bankrupt back then and a renovated business block, owned by a couple of local doctors that had served as a partial hospital, had been destroyed by fire.
The plea went out and the Sisters of St. Joseph, in Peterborough, Ont., heard the call and responded with care, expertise and a willingness to go out on the limb and even fund the construction of a brand new hospital to the tune of $165,000. In the Depression-era, it was the equivalent of several millions of 2013 dollars.
That commitment was unbelievable then, and is pretty well unbelievable now.
The sisters took up leading management and administrative roles in the new facility, built in less than six months, and within a few years they were committing themselves and moving the community toward an expansion, and they did it again and then again. In fact, it wasn't until the third or fourth expansion in the 1960s that a provincial government got involved in funding a health-care facility in Estevan. Up until then, it was the sisters, and us and a capacity to withstand all logistical and financial blows.
To top it off, with diminishing numbers in the order, the Sisters of St. Joseph committed themselves to lead the way for a brand new hospital, the one we have now. This one came in with a $37 million price tag and again, the sisters provided the huge commitment that measured in the millions of dollars as well as providing fundraising skills, spirit and dedication plus a final $500,000 to get the local contributions to the $12 million target.
With lowered numbers in the order and a new era of administration entering the provincial picture in the early 1990s, the Sisters of St. Joseph exited the local scene and active participation in the daily operations of the hospital with its 200 or more employees. Their work was done.
We have one more opportunity to not only say thank you to the sisters, but also to celebrate the spirit of the Energy City that reaped the benefits of a gracious and giving cloister of nuns way back then, when there was no other way out.
The significance of their contribution has no doubt faded over the decades, but that is what historical records are for just for these occasions. They can be trotted out as a gentle reminder of what happened in 1938 that made it possible for us to be where we are today with one of this province's premier health care facilities.
