The Mayo family members including Joan and Davinder Mayo were part of the huge crowd that gathered at Paldi on Saturday, June 29 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of the community, located midway between Duncan and Lake Cowichan.
Although its founders were Sikhs, originally coming over from the Lower Mainland, the population grew to include many immigrants from India, and many people of other nationalities. The small town has steadily lost population as work in the forest industry declined and families had to move to find new lives elsewhere but the special community and its historic Sikh Temple have remained dear to the hearts of the many families with connections to the area. Three days of feasting, reacquainting themselves with old friends, telling decades-old stories, and marking the day with a special flag raising and evening of entertainment, made for a celebration that will not soon be forgotten. Cowichan-Malahat-Langford MP Alistair MacGregor said, “the fact that we are here today celebrating 100 years shows the importance of this place and how interwoven it is with the Cowichan Valley as a whole. If you go all over B.C. and all up and down Vancouver Island, those communities were built on the forest industry and it was through the hard work, the struggles of those people, those early generations that really carved a place out of the wilderness for themselves. They set up a beautiful community like Paldi, and I think it’s just incredible that we have so many people coming here today to recognize the efforts of those people who thought forward, who struggled to make this community in the wilderness and how special this place is. We are here today celebrating 100 years.” Davinder Mayo told the crowd that since they realized that there would be quite a few people coming to the event, “it was suggested possibly we should cater this instead of having our ladies cooking. That lasted about 10 minutes.
That got shut down right away. Our ladies have been cooking all week, about 50-75 of them in that kitchen every day for this. I’d like to thank our ladies because there’d be nothing here without them.” He also thanked the rest of the many, many volunteers who came out to make the massive event possible.
