'I wanted the memories to survive': New book details founding of Évangéline Region community care home

Lorraine Gallant still remembers when the seed of the idea for a community care home in the Évangéline Region of P.E.I. was planted in her mind. 

She was working as a nurse at a long-term care home in Summerside in the 1970s. 

One night, a woman from Mont-Carmel who didn't speak English woke up and started yelling and making noise, Gallant said. 

"You could hear her talking to herself and rattling the rails of her bed," she said. 

Gallant was working on a different wing, but another nurse who didn't speak French called for her to come and talk to the woman. 

The woman in the bed was yelling out in French, "Open the gate! Open the gate!" said Gallant. She then told Gallant the cows were out in the field and needed to be brought in. 

"I said, 'OK, I'll go get them. You stay here where it's nice and quiet and I'll go get them and I'll put them in the barn.'"

After the woman calmed down and fell back asleep, Gallant's colleague told her she should build a manor in the Évangéline Region so French seniors could receive care in their own language. 

"That hit me," Gallant said. "I said, 'One day, one day.'" 

That day came in 1993 when The Coopérative Le Chez-Nous opened its doors in Wellington. 

Gallant has now written a book of her memories from those early days planning for and founding the Chez-Nous, called Les débuts du Chez-Nous (The Beginnings of the Chez-Nous). 

The book is co-written by Raymond J. Arsenault.

"I wanted the memories of how we began to be known," said Gallant, one of two women who began the campaign to create a community care home in the region in the early '90s. 

"It was not for glory or so people [could] say I was smart or that — it had nothing to do with me. But I wanted the memory."