Description
Seeing the local population existing with very little, Mr. Allaire tells of how he and fellow comrades came together to improve their methods of transporting goods.
Denis Allaire
Mr. Denis Allaire was born December 25, 1962 in Timmons, Ontario. As a young man, Mr. Allaire recalls his decision to join the military as a selfish opportunity for financial and security reasons and enlisted on a bet. He trained as a medic receiving trades training in Cornwallis, Ontario, OJT in Trenton, Ontario and then six month training at Borden, Ontario Medical School. Joining the 5 Field Ambulance Division as an army medic, Mr. Allaire deployed overseas, his first deployment being in 1993 to Croatia, then Rwanda followed by two tours to Bosnia. After 24 years of military service, he discharged from the military. Mr. Allaire retires having a great sense of pride for his contribution and is thankful that he made that decision in life to join the Canadian Forces.
Transcript
You see those tours I saw the worst of humanity but as well I saw the best of humanity. For example, when I was in Bosnia, that was in 2004, and it was very low risk for any type of things to happen but I remember I went around. A reservist captain, he was from Cape Breton, and his job was for enhancing relationship between our military presence and with the local population and I’d go around with him and visit. In Bosnia, the poor people, all they had was wheelbarrows to get around and a lot of the people and the villagers used their wheelbarrow as a means of transport. They put their groceries on it, whatever, they would walk around with their kids and they would walk around the village. In a lot of the village there was an unequal balance of the population. It was the extremely old population or the very young population and it seems anyone between twenty to twenty-five they all left the area because of the war so you had the very young and the very old. And a lot of them were poor and house, broken place and what we did was… a lot of people from our brigade group started making pay allotment and I remember I went down, he’s Corporal Hodder now but he was Private Hodder at the time and he got together to organize this and we made a pool of money and we went down to a hardware store and bought a whole bunch of wheelbarrows and we gave it to the local population to use so they could use that as a method of transportation. Later on, I think we did the same thing. They bought a whole lot of bicycles if I remember right and gave it to the kids and all that stuff. So that’s the good part of seeing the best of humanity.