When love and sharing replace the Christmas gifts

Photo Elisa Cloutier
Ms. Brissette (centre) celebrates Christmas surrounded by her 27 children in the area of Saint-Anselme. The children will give small gifts to each other.

Elisa Cloutier

Sunday, December 17, 2017 01:00

UPDATE
Sunday, December 17, 2017 01:00

Look at this article

It is a Christmas eve special, far from the mountains of gifts and father Christmas, that will live the 27 children with disabilities what it is called now the “mother Teresa” of St. Anselm, while the cardinal Gérald Cyprien Lacroix will travel there to recite the mass.

“The secretary [of the cardinal] called me in July to set the date of our new year’s eve, that he does not want to miss,” said Louise Brissette, who will host the December 19, in its immense field of 17 rooms, renovated and expanded many times since his arrival in 1989. The devoted wife, who lives only to gifts of all kinds, has adopted 37 children with disabilities in the course of his life. Of this number, 11 are deceased.

Patients with different disabilities-physical and intellectual — severe in several cases, children aged 14 to 40 years old also participate in a living nativity scene, in addition to providing a show of their own, in front of hundreds of relatives and friends of the family.

“Not an orgy of gifts “

Then, during the traditional dinner on 24 December, the children participate in a gift exchange with the five dollars they earn each week in exchange for chores that are assigned to them.

“It is really depending on what they need, this is not an orgy of gifts. It can be a cup, for example, if there is one who has broken his own “, says Ms. Brissette. “Christmas, here it is more a question of the value of love and sharing. These are the children that can really give the sense of love “, she said.

By entering in Brissette, hard not to be impressed by the attitude of the children, big and small, who help each other, regardless of their differences.

But most of all by the quiet disarming of Ms. Brissette, who receives The Journal in the midst of Holiday preparations, between his meals for some 30 noon meal and the evening.

Sometimes you’re out of breath ? “No,” replied spontaneously that has 11 children with down syndrome, some with cerebral palsy other spina bifida, and a boy with a syndrome of Apert severe, which has no fingers or toes and needs to be fed.

“This is my Antoine. His parents already had six children, and one time they come they are no longer able, ” she says. It is, moreover, as well as most of his children came to her, tells the story of the woman who gets the help of four or five psychoéducatrices, servants and volunteers, according to the needs.

Children of the Good God

“The doctors say [to the parents] that their child will be a vegetable and not do anything. They are poor “, indicates that which they offer each day of therapeutic baths and sessions in a hyperbaric chamber to improve their cognitive abilities.

Well aware of her age, Mrs. Brissette no worries, however, not of the future of his children. “We are the children of the Good God. He gave them to me as long as I can take care of it, and when I can no longer do, he will find another world, ” she says.