"If somebody falls, I like to pick them up," says a North Battleford woman recently honoured by the Saskatchewan Ukrainian community. "I want to help. That's what my mom and dad taught us."
Anna Prystupa was one of seven recipients of the 2014 Community Recognition Awards for meritorious contributions to the Ukrainian community and Canada. Her awards were in the categories of Cultural Preservation and Development and Volunteerism. The Ukrainian Canadian Congress - Saskatchewan Provincial Council hosted the awards in Regina recently. A further three individuals received National Builders Awards.
Zennia Yuzik, who was born in North Battleford and now lives in Cudworth, was also an award winner under the Leadership and Cultural Preservation and development categories.
This year, a special award, Newsmaker of the Year, was presented to Premier Brad Wall and the Government of Saskatchewan for unwavering support of the people of Ukraine and the Ukrainian community of Saskatchewan. Anna had an opportunity to meet the premier and shook his hand.
"He was cute," she laughs. "He tried to talk Ukrainian. I couldn't understand all the words he said, but he tried."
Born Anna Klimchuk, she and her siblings grew up on a farm six miles north of Hafford. Their parents both came from Ukraine as small children. In fact, her father had been a mere two years old and her mother a baby still in her mother's arms, only a few months old, when they sailed to Canada.
Her grandfather Klimchuk first arrived in Canada in 1908, and paid $10 for a piece of land, all bush, to begin farming. He and his wife had seven children.
When her father Joseph was 20, by arrangement, he married Anna's mother, Maria Demyon, who was 17. Maria came from a Whitkow area family with 10 children.
"We were blessed with a good set of parents," says Anna.
Her family had been involved in the founding of the local Ukrainian Catholic church, known as the Albertown church. Her family attended, and Anna, who belongs to the All Saints Ukrainian Catholic Church on the block where she now lives in North Battleford, learned from her parents to be open-minded and accepting of others. She is happy to attend services at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church as well, at the other end of the block, and believes everyone has a choice to worship in whatever church is best for them.
"We all pray to the same God," says Anna. "That's the way my dad was."
Anna grew up with a sister, Sophie, who has passed on, and her brother Ray, who now lives in Calgary.
She took her early schooling at Lancaster School about two miles away, and graduated from Hafford High School. She grew up speaking Ukrainian and English, and also studied French.
She was the first of the three siblings to marry. Edward Prystupa of Mayfair had been away to Ontario to work in the office of a mining camp there, became ill, and came back to Saskatchewan to end up in the Saskatoon Sanitorium with pleurisy. There he came to know Anna's sister, Sophie, who had spent time in the same sanitorium for tuberculosis. Anna's own health was sturdy.
"I was sort of a bounding type," she says.
Anna and Edward met in Hafford shortly after he was discharged and had come home to Mayfair.
They married and moved to North Battleford. Anna's parents had moved there from the farm already, and they insisted the newlyweds move in with them.
"You may as well have this bedroom," they said, in a gesture that would come to be one Anna and Ed themselves would mirror throughout their own marriage.
Within a few years, Anna's father had built them a house, the one she continues to live in today.
"He was a good farmer," she says. "They used to build their own houses and their own churches. They didn't have any certificates, they had it all there." She points to her temple.
Her husband, says Anna, used to run a grocery store and also worked as an automotive parts person. Having completed a variety of post-secondary programs, she worked in a number of roles, including as a teacher's aid and a business manager accountant, and eventually began working for the health district. She became the human resources manager, retiring as that department's director in 1992.
"I enjoyed working at the hospital," says Anna. "I took a course in human resources, on how to work with people."
She is a self-professed people person.
"I love people," she says.
As human resources director, she became a good listener. If someone had a problem, she tried never to knock them down, but to lift them up instead.
This also translated to her life away from work, and she and her husband began helping others by opening their home to nurses, missionaries and immigrants
"We've had lovely experiences with people," she says.
In fact, Anna, whose husband passed away in 2001, still opens her heart and home to others and is presently hosting a busy young woman doing missionary work in the Battlefords.
Because she and Edward were unable to have children and had decided against adoption, they were able to offer their home to many others.
"We just filled it up," says Anna.
In one instance a woman of colour from England needed a home in order to work as a nurse in Canada but no one seemed ready to take her in except Anna and Ed Even today, Anna gets teary-eyed when she relates the words her husband said when she talked to him about it.
"He said, 'She's a child of God,' and we took her in and she became the director of nurses," says Anna.
Eva Lane came to live with them and was like one of the family, she says.
"She still calls this home," Anna smiles.
After accepting there would be no children for them, Anna and her husband also decided to travel the world.
"We got totally hung up on travelling," she says.
They didn't follow the usual tourist trails, either, she says. They liked to see how people really lived.
They've travelled England, Scotland and Ireland, Europe, the Americas, Australia and even Brazil, where they actually have relatives. They went to Hawaii three times, they loved Poland, and they visited Ukraine three times, including the area their families came from.
They went on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, Lourdes, Fatina, Israel and Rome. They even had two audiences with the late Pope John Paul II.
"We had a full life."
Anna has done some travelling with a friend since her husband passed away, but not as much as before, and she hasn't been to Ukraine without him. However, she follows the news closely as the country of their heritage goes through difficult times, and has spent many hours on the phone talking with a cousin, a retired doctor, in Ukraine about events happening there.
She lays the troubles at the Russian leaders' doors, not the Russian people.
"We had Russian people back home," she says. "They were nice people."
Russia is the only country she and Ed never visited, except for the Russian area of Ukraine, and when they visited Kharkiv, where a massive statue of Lenin had stood since 1964, Ed declined to have his photo taken beside it. When it was pulled down by activists this past September, Anna said a relative of hers was quoted on television.
Anna's Ukrainian heritage has been the touchstone around which her community life has revolved.
She has always been involved with the church. An active member of the Ukrainian Catholic Women's League of Canada since 1956, she was instrumental in bringing the All Saints North Battleford branch under the auspices of the national UCWLC.
She compiled and prepared a Hymnal for the 50th anniversary of the church, and she embroidered and donated a five-piece altar cloth in memory of her parents and sister Sophie.
In the Ukraininan Canadian community, she has participated with the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, worked as a youth co-ordinator and was the conductor of choirs, carols, dramas, Ukrainian dancing and community concerts, taught pysanka classes to children and adults, Ukrainian cross-stitch and ceramics.
She also taught mandolin classes. Growing up, there wasn't much interest in the piano, just mandolins, violins or guitar. But when she moved to North Battleford, she decided to take piano lessons from a friend. At her first recital, her husband was asked if he was there to see his daughter, she laughs. He was the only one who had come to see his wife play. She was the only adult in the recital.
In addition to preservation of her cultural heritage, Anna also made time to volunteer in the greater community with organizations such as the Christian Women's Organization, Battlefords Horticulture Society (she loved to grow award-winning roses), the Hospital Ladies' Auxiliary, Battlefords Union Hospital Retirees Club and with various nursing homes. She was also the secretary for the committee that published the Hafford history book, A Walk Down Memory Lane.
Throughout it all, she continues to enjoy her relationship with her two neighbouring churches and is happy for anyone who lives with faith, regardless of denomination.
"I can only support one church, but I'm open to other churches."
If anyone questions her attending services in another church or not disapproving of marriages between religions, she says, "God is there, too. That's exactly what I tell them."
