Video duration: 3 min, 40 sec
(Shot of Corporal Mark Vigneault sitting in a brown armchair. He has a round face and wears his blue Royal Canadian Air Force uniform)
Corporal Mark Vigneault: I’m Corporal Mark Vigneault and at that time I was an Aviation Life Support Equipment Technician for the flight crew. That is, for pilot’s equipment, between 2014 and early 2015, for 425 Tactical Squadron fighter jets.
(The words “Social involvement” appear on-screen)
Corporal Mark Vigneault: When independence was restored in Lithuania in '91, it may have seemed that everything was back to business as usual. In all three Baltic countries really… but you could still feel the aftershock, if I may, of what had happened over those many years. It’s important to be aware that this is a people that endured suffering. You have to respect them. We could see it in the infrastructure. In the areas around the capital, or a bit further out, things were still very rustic, very rudimentary. Attachment to land-based values, a result of the political system they experienced.
When we transferred from Romania to Lithuania, which became Operation REASSURANCE, at that time we had to get involved at the societal level. We decided to send people in. We saw an orphanage in Šiauliai and said to ourselves: “Well, maybe we could help them out.” You know, it’s a country where things were very difficult, economically speaking, but it was doing everything possible to keep its head above water. And, when we got there, things were very expensive because we're talking about young kids, newborns to age six. Kids who had nothing, who’d been abandoned. We wanted to try to give them some good times. For example, on the weekends, we went to visit them and brought them diapers. Those were hard to get. We take them for granted, but over there diapers were worth their weight in gold. And with dozens, maybe even hundreds of little ones there, they were very expensive. They weren’t always able to afford them.
The stories we heard over there were really hard… I didn’t think things like that could even happen. We saw a kid, I thought he was maybe thirteen, but he was six. He had trouble moving. He’d been abused… abandoned by his parents, then taken away from his grandmother. We heard all kinds of stories like that. It’s hard to believe. So, you take the time to go out there, to see that kid, who’s sleeping peacefully. You go to him, take care of him. Even if he doesn’t understand you, you talk to him. And it makes you feel better too, maybe just to hear someone else’s voice. Even if he doesn’t understand, he feels that someone is taking interest in him. But that’s just how it was for all the kids that were there.
And then… well, everyone deserves to celebrate Christmas. Whether we believe in Santa or not. That’s how it was for us. The authority figures, the firefighters, police and our partners too… we were with Portugal. They came to see us and we had a merry Christmas in mid-December 2014. We bought gifts, Santa was there, there were all kinds of activities… Take for example, just playing with a kid… you put on a small hand puppet and play with a kid. You don’t have to talk to each other. He doesn’t understand French or English…he speaks Lithuanian… but just to spend ten minutes and make up a little story with that person. Looking into each other’s eyes… that little kid’s smile.