By Alan Sorensen
Area residents are encouraged to be ready and waiting for ELF volunteers gathering food throughout Havre Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.
ELF (Everyone Loves a Firefighter) is sponsored by Havre Firefighters Local #601 with tons of help from school and church youth groups. The groups will be traveling through various Havre neighborhoods in fire trucks and ambulances and back up trucks from 6:30 to 8 p.m. each evening.
Area residents are asked to be ready with their food donations in bags as the volunteers enter their neighborhoods. There is no schedule available for the collection of the canned and other non-perishable food items that will go to feed the needy this holiday season.
"The community has been great in helping the needy people in Havre," Engineer Bob Bergren of firefighter local #601 said. "It's a wonderful gesture, especially during the holidays, and the firefighters and volunteers are always eager to help out."
Volunteers must be at least sixth-graders for the door-to-door, after-dark campaign that is expected to blanket the community. Each private vehicle being used to assist in moving the food donations must have at least one adult chaperone in case the firefighters are called away to an emergency.
Volunteers will help pick up the donations and will also be needed to help sort donations at the Feed My Sheep Soup Kitchen from 7 to 9:30 p.m.
The food will be redistribution to The Salvation Army and North Havre Community Service Food Bank the following mornings where other volunteers will put it away. The Wednesday and Thursday morning work sessions are from 9 to 11 a.m.
For more information or to volunteer to help, call The Salvation Army at 265-6411 between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
