Dr. Myron and Elaine Semkuley were bestowed the Prime Minister’s Volunteer Award for Lifelong Achievement.
For two decades, Myron and Elaine Semkuley used their retirement years and savings to help refugees from Myanmar and poor Ukrainians. When catastrophic flooding struck Alberta in the summer of 2013, the couple did not hesitate to add that relief effort to their burden. Their 50th wedding anniversary was quickly turned into a fundraiser to help with the rebuilding and their international efforts.
As the two retired health professionals, both in their mid-70s, were working with refugees in the Himalayan country of Nepal on March 18, they received the Prime Minister's Volunteer Award for Lifelong Achievement.
Dr. Semkuley, a family physician, and Ms. Semkuley, a pharmacist, packed their suitcases with medical supplies and left Calgary for regions near Myanmar's borders for the first time in 1992 to work with local doctors there. Decades earlier, before they married, they had promised they would eventually help overseas.
"They met a doctor on the [Myanmar] border and were told that people came to help, but never came back. Myron is a tall, burly man, and he picked up this small woman and gave her a big bear hug and said, 'That's not the way we work.' Of course, 20 years later, we're still heading back," said Joanne Neweduk, president of Medical Mercy Canada, the charity the Semkuleys founded to finance health care projects and do other humanitarian work.
The supplies they gathered to take with them had fit in their suitcases that first year. By the next year, they had a garage full. By the mid-1990s, the garages of friends around Calgary were full of medical supplies. Their charity now has more than 700 donors and volunteers.
A Ukrainian-Canadian, Dr. Semkuley has strong connections with Alberta's large Ukrainian community and visited poverty-stricken western Ukraine after Canadian donors alerted them to poor local conditions. Entering the country just after the fall of the Soviet Union, the couple found deep poverty that they said the international community was ignoring.
According to Ms. Neweduk, what sets the Semkuleys apart is that they do not just give money, but have spent nearly half of every year for two decades near Myanmar's borders with Nepal and Thailand and in Ukraine providing medical training to locals and keeping projects focused.
"They don't just walk into an area and drop off supplies, they return and build long-term relationships. They want to teach people how to help themselves," Ms. Neweduk said.
Speaking to The Globe and Mail last week from Thailand, Ms. Semkuley said the award belongs to the charity's long-time volunteers. "Volunteers come and volunteers go, but that core group of people has always been there to stand behind us, listen to our complaints and challenges and then push us to figure it out," she said.
The couple keeps a low profile, and some of the volunteers say that does not do justice to the work ethic they maintain while helping refugees.
"Dr. Myron is … a workaholic, from dusk to dawn. This isn't a vacation," Medical Mercy Canada executive director Sonia Brennan said. "It isn't for the faint of heart."
Kim Blakey, a registered nurse who worked at a Calgary hospital, says she got to live out every nurse's dream of volunteering overseas while she was with the couple in the Myanmar border regions.
"They're dynamos," she said of the Semkuleys. "They live their lives according to their convictions of caring and sharing, and they don't stop."
Balancing Dr. Semkuley's hard-nosed approach to managing projects, she said Ms. Semkuley is known as "Mom" by all for taking care of volunteers and keeping the odd nurse from wandering off shopping.
Medics the couple trained when they started are now training the next generation. The Semkuleys have no plans to stop.
Justin Giovannetti