Newfoundland honours woman for volunteer work [Video]

ST. JOHN’S, N.L. –

A retired nurse and teacher in Newfoundland was honoured this week for her volunteer work, which included more than two decades washing the hair of bedridden hospital patients.

It was a stay at a sanatorium for tuberculosis in the 1960s, when she was forbidden from washing her own hair, that led Mary Kennedy Keiley to vow she would someday help patients in similar straits.

And just weeks after her 1994 retirement, she arrived at the front steps of St. Clare’s Mercy Hospital in St. John’s, N.L., carrying shampoo and a plastic washing tray. She returned every Saturday at 9 a.m., shampoo in hand, for well over 20 years.

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“I don’t take any credit for starting it or doing it, because I loved it so much,” Kennedy Keiley, 89, said in an interview this week. “I …