For the past three years, Fred and Susan Bergmann of Niverville have passionately poured themselves into coordinating the seniors’ lunch program held at the Golden Friendship Centre every Tuesday.

On August 6, the Bergmanns, along with more than 20 dedicated senior volunteers, served up their last lunch to a crowd of about 120 regulars of the program.

“We loved it,” says Susan. “There’s a huge satisfaction in seeing people so thankful.”

But while the program filled a deep need in the community and surrounding area, the Bergmanns admit that, at 80 and 72 years of age, they’re tired and it’s time for the baton to be passed to someone new.

As they said their final farewell, the couple was showered with hugs and well-wishes.

Service to Seniors coordinator Damien Gagne will soon head up a new program, but it will be scaled back to once-per-month in order to allow him to fit the extra responsibilities into his already crowded schedule.

“When I found out that [the Bergmanns] were stepping away… [I realized the program] was going to die,” Gagne says. “The responsibility that these volunteers took on is really unbelievable. I feel bad that I can’t do more, but that’s all I can do right now.”

Indeed, with regular attendance of anywhere from 100 to 150 people every Tuesday, it became a place where seniors could bond and build lasting friendships around home-cooked meals and great local entertainment.

Attendance wasn’t exclusive to Niverville seniors. The Bergmanns say regulars also came from Vita, La Broquerie, Ste. Anne, Winnipeg, and Steinbach every week.

Susan recalls one Steinbach couple, in their nineties and long-time attendees of the lunch program, who chose to celebrate their sixtieth wedding anniversary at one of the seniors’ lunches since so many of their friends would already be there.

It’s just one testament, she says, to the relevance of a program such as this.

“That’s why I had a hard time giving it up, and hopefully people will come back for [Damien’s] program,” Susan says.

“Today, saying goodbye to the French Connection was the hardest for me,” Fred adds.

The French Connection, he says, is a playful title that a regular group of French-speaking seniors had given themselves. They attended every week without fail and Fred often joined them, finding an opportunity to build new friendships and practice the second language he’d learned as a child.

Fred says the community built around these senior lunches also provided a meaningful support group when attendees fell sick or were going through a difficult time. It’s something the Bergmanns will surely miss, along with their dedicated team of volunteers.

When the Bergmanns announced their resignation, all but four volunteers decided that their time was done as well.

“They all said to me, ‘We’re [getting older] and we’d rather step down when it’s been going so well,’” Susan says. “They’re tired because every week is a lot [of work].”

Food prep, she says, usually required hours of work the day before. On lunch day, it wasn’t uncommon for volunteers to arrive as early as 6:00 a.m. and put in a six- to eight-hour shift, going nonstop with dining room setup, cooking, baking, serving, washing dishes, and concluding with teardown of the entire dining room once everyone was gone.

As coordinators, much of the rest of the Bergmanns’ week was consumed with meal-planning, grocery-shopping, assigning volunteer tasks, booking entertainers, and taking RSVPs for the weekly meal.

Shopping trips alone could consume more than a day as they searched for deals in Niverville and at warehouses in Winnipeg, buying 50-pound bags of potatoes and carrots and large-lot quantities of non-perishable food items. Susan says they got some stares and curious inquiries as they piled their carts high every week.

To the best of their memory, the Niverville seniors’ lunch program began some 30 to 40 years ago by a group of local women who wanted to provide a social setting for seniors, and it’s been going ever since.

The program was eventually picked up by Abe Goertzen, the community’s first Service to Seniors coordinator, and for a while it became an integral part of that position’s role.

It remained a part of that organization’s mandate until 2016 when the Service to Seniors programming was growing at such a pace that the coordinator felt it necessary to drop the lunch program.

That’s when the Bergmanns stepped up and assumed full responsibility for keeping the program going. The couple had already been volunteering with the lunch program for 14 years, Fred as chief cook and Susan as admissions collector. For 12 years Susan, also worked as coordinator of the adult day program.

“The people here kind of bombarded me and said, ‘We don’t want this program to die,’” says Susan. “This has become a community [of seniors] and that’s why it’s so important.”

As the new program coordinator, Gagne is seeking volunteers to keep this institution alive. Any age can help, he says. He’d even be glad for organizations that want to make a further investment of time into the seniors that built this community.

Opportunities will be available for meal prep, cooking, baking, setup, and takedown—and he wouldn’t say no to anyone interested in coordinating a specific part of the program with his help.

In the meantime, the Bergmanns are looking forward to spending a little extra time with their four grandkids. Susan will continue her volunteer work at the MCC Thrift Store and Fred gets excited at the thought of spending this fall helping out on his brother’s farm.

Very soon, the seniors’ lunch committee will be using up their excess funds to make significant donations to other local organizations and causes within the community.