The Lakes District Food Bank was recently broken into and vandalized. Nothing was stolen.
“I can’t believe it, it’s insane,” said Candice Little, coordinator of the Lakes District Family Enhancement Society – organization that runs the food bank. “Maybe they thought it was fun or they just wanted to cause damage.”
Over 200 eggs were smashed all over the place.
“Eggs were thrown everywhere, into boxes, on the windows, on the walls, everywhere,” said Little. “And a whole bunch sugar was thrown on top of that.”
“The sad part is that we have a lot of volunteers who put in a lot of hours to bring food to hungry families in this community, only for someone to be foolish enough to break in and do damage.”
“That makes no sense to me,” she continued. “We are trying to help people; if someone is hungry and break into the food bank to get food, I can almost understand it, but that’s what we do - we give out food; just call me and I’ll give you food; I do it every day, it’s not a big deal.”
Little said the break-in took place between the hours of 9 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 13, 2016.
Thanks to the hard work of local volunteers, distribution day still took place on Nov. 15.
“We pushed through; we worked really hard to clean out the mess,” said Little. “We won’t be able to give out eggs this time, but we worked really hard to make sure we could open.”
Little said this break-in has put a further strain on the food bank’s already tight budget.
“Our resources are so minimal to begin with,” she said. “We don’t have money to buy things twice; we barely have the money to buy things once.”
“There’s no way we can go back and replace those eggs or anything else that was taken,” she added. “At the end of the day, it’s the folks who aren’t going home with that food that are missing out; I’m sad for the people who aren’t getting that food.”
Since the food bank’s front door was kicked and broken, it will have to be fully replaced.
“That’s money taken out of our ability to buy food,” said Little. “It’s so distressing; I don’t understand the mentality behind this, but I guess nobody would.”
As of Nov. 15, the Burns Lake detachment of the RCMP had no suspects. If anyone has any information, they should contact the RCMP at 250-692-7171.