Pontrilas postmistress honoured for untiring services to rural communities

A Herefordshire postmistress has stood out in this year’s Queen’s Birthday Honours’ List which included many “unsung heroes” of the coronavirus pandemic.

Sonya Cary, Postmistress of Pontrilas Post Office, has been awarded a British Empire Medal in the list for services to her local community in Pontrilas and 22 other nearby villages.

People from much further places come to her Post Office, where she also runs a shop, café, gym and weekly lunch club for the local community and those who don’t have family or other pastoral support.

“It feels surreal to receive this honour. The community will be bowled over by the news,” Cary commented.

With so much to do, she has not taken a day off in two years, but the lockdown has been particularly stressful, she added.

“We had to adapt what we could offer as the need was even greater to stop isolation and malnutrition. Many elderly men are not good at looking after themselves. We serve 23 villages in Herefordshire and during the pandemic we were also getting requests from over the border in Wales for lunch and prescription deliveries,” she said.

Cary runs her branch with a team of volunteers alongside a social enterprise as part of the national charity ‘C.A.R.E. CIC’ which works among the elderly to help them combat loneliness and malnutrition.

The profits from the Post Office are used to fund services and activities that support older residents to continue living independently in their own homes.

“The Post Office is at the centre of what we do. Without the Post Office we couldn’t have been able to provide the lunch club and gym,” Cary said.

“People don’t think of what we offer as care, they think about it as a Post Office with social centre and gym attached. Once we were able to open those facilities again our elderly people were much happier as they could socialise in a safe place.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic Pontrilas Post Office has operated services seven days a week, and provided a wide variety of services, including grocery deliveries to the vulnerable and Sunday lunches to isolated people, which are still available to collect.

Cary even recruited a Post Office clerk so that she could focus on the community work.

Other services that supported the community during the virus outbreak included a telephone wellness service for people to ring if they want to have a chat; weekly activity packs and quiz; prescriptions deliveries for people who are shielding and Zoom sessions by the gym to help keep people active.

“Sonya works tirelessly for the people who visit her Post Office and there is an amazing range of activities that she organises to enrich the lives of elderly people in this very rural area of Herefordshire for people who would otherwise suffer from loneliness,” Nick Read, chief executive at the Post Office, commented.

“An annual Christmas lunch has been a wonderful highlight of the calendar for pensioners for the past few years. The regular activities that Sonya has organised have helped to really lift the spirits of elderly people.”

The community café re-opened in June for lunches on Tuesdays and Sundays and the gym re-opened in July. Cary is now waiting to see the traditional Christmas day lunch can go ahead.