Ontario

On any given weekend you might find Oshawa, Ontario's Rob Weir catching a pass from former National Hockey League legend Darryl Sittler, attempting to deke around hall-of-famer Marcel Dionne, or ducking and dodging the elbows and slashes of the Hanson Brothers of Slap Shot fame.

Swirling around the ice with former pros is an unlikely place for a guy like Weir, who didn't even start playing hockey until the age of 20, but he's got a good reason. Weir's the program coordinator of the Heart & Stroke Foundations' Hockey For Heart series of charitable hockey tournaments across Ontario. It's his job to play hockey with the pros.

"It's the greatest job in the world," says Weir, 40, with that same sense of awe as a 10-year-old autograph seeker by the side doors of the Air Canada Centre. "I'm literally getting paid to play hockey with [former Toronto Maple Leafs great] Wendel Clark."

Getting to share the ice with the likes of Clark came with a cost, though. The whole reason the Hockey For Heart tournaments exist is because Weir witnessed his own father Roger Weir have a heart attack on the ice at the age of 46 while playing a game with him in 1993.

"I was sitting on the bench, looked down at the other end of the ice where the play was, looked back at my dad and saw that he had fallen over and instantly knew that something wasn't right because I knew it wasn't from something that had happened during the play," Weir recalls of that tragic night.

As Japan continues to pinball between almost incomprehensible disasters, the world is stepping up to help. And Canada is no exception.

In addition to the federal government — which has pledged an array of expertise and technical assistance as well as the Canadian Forces — homegrown humanitarian and relief agencies are in high gear, deploying teams, fundraising and otherwise assisting in any way possible.

“We have made our complete resources available,” John Saunders, director of disaster management in Ontario with the Canadian Red Cross, tells Samaritanmag.  “Internationally, we have two mobile field hospitals that are complete surgical units that can be deployed on request from the Japanese Red Cross. And we’re basically on standby at this point for any human or material resources they may require.

“The Japanese Red Cross is a very robust emergency management program with over one million volunteers trained in disaster response,” Saunders continues. “They also have over 50,000 individuals trained to assist in emergency medical teams — so doctors, nurses and medics who are specifically able to be deployed for emergency medical help. All those resources are being engaged.

“Once those resources are exhausted, that’s when the international teams would step up to supplement the strong existing Japanese team. Right now, we are financially assisting them in the costs of relief programs such as bottled water to the millions without it, sheltering operations and medical assistance.”

Seana O'Neill was sitting on her dock on Clement Lake in Wilberforce, Ontario, in the early summer of 2002, when she realized that once she returned to Toronto for work her Haliburton-area cottage was going to sit vacant for weeks. Hence, the idea for Cottage Dreams, which lends cottages to cancer survivors.

"My mom is a two-time survivor of breast cancer, and we had a cottage growing up on Lake of Bays in Muskoka, so we spent a huge amount of time there. It just made sense that when I had my own cottage, and going through the cancer scares with my mom, that we could do something with it," O'Neill tells Samaritanmag.com.

She decided to look into lending her cottage to survivors of cancer, as a way for them to get away with friends or family and celebrate survivorship, and see if other cottage owners would be willing to do the same thing.

"I tried to get rid of the idea, because it didn't fit into my world to do anything like this, because I was going back to the film industry, but it wouldn't leave me," she says. "So I started looking into it, through contracting a lawyer, contacting a cottage rental agent, and contacting my insurance broker saying, 'I've come up with this idea, and I have narrowed it down to a plan. What do you think?'"