[ad_1]
Every morning of the week for almost 20 years, Andrew Smith has woken up at dawn. He goes to a Brooklyn senior center and loads a refrigerated truck with hot meals as the sun rises over New York City.
Smith is a delivery boy for Riseboro, a community partner of Citymeals on Wheels. Her job is to provide a hot meal – and a sense of security – to 92 homebound elderly people every day.
Smith is responsible for a small portion of the 20,000 meals Citymeals delivers daily, but each meal is essential to the survival of those who receive them. Without the meals, many of those served would not be able to stay at home.
Hunger among the elderly often goes unnoticed, and those who suffer from it are often invisible, hidden in their homes due to mobility issues. Unable to shop or cook due to physical limitations, they depend on Citymeals for food.
Smith has developed such an intimate knowledge of those he serves that he can time deliveries to meet the drug schedules of some of them on his route. During his first stop, at the home of Dorina Eduarte, 93, he offers a hot “M’lady” accompanied by a hot meal.
She lights up when she sees Smith, saying, “He’s my friend.”
“Most of the time, I’m the only one they see,” Smith said.
The pandemic has brought to light the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to the virus. For many seniors, a trip to the grocery store can be life threatening. People aged 65 to 74 are 90 times more likely to die from Covid, and people over 65 account for eight in ten deaths.
The pandemic has exacerbated the already serious problem of hunger among the elderly in America. Before the pandemic, there were an estimated 5.8 million hungry elderly people across the country. Since the start of the pandemic in March, that number has reportedly increased rapidly.
National statistics have not yet been compiled, but there are figures for New York. Before the pandemic, one in 10 older New Yorkers was food insecure, but that number has now risen to one in five, according to a study by FoodBank NYC.
Since March, Citymeals has delivered 2.5 million meals to New York seniors. It delivered over 3 million in 2020, an increase of 64% from the previous year.
Beth Shapiro, executive director of Citymeals, says the nonprofit has not missed a single meal since the start of the pandemic. She says it’s a tribute, in part, to the legion of volunteers who have stepped up to help, doubling the number in previous years. Eighty thousand hours of volunteering were recorded in 2020.
Shapiro says his group receives 12% of its annual $ 25 million budget from the city. The rest is collected through donations.
“I think the social safety net is very thin,” Shapiro said. “We shouldn’t be hungry in this city or in this country. And the old people certainly shouldn’t be hungry. We wouldn’t be here without them, and we have the systems that could take care of them.”
Back in Brooklyn, Andrew Smith is still in a good mood. He says he’s managed to win over even the most skeptical of old people with lingering kindness. It took him three days with a woman, he says, but now she can’t wait to see him. “You know, even if it’s not a good day, you say, ‘Have a good day,’ because at the end of the day it will be a good day because he’s finished a meal.
Smith isn’t just the only source of human interaction for many of his customers, he’s also the only person who can tell if something is wrong. If a customer seems mentally fuzzy when they are normally lucid, or if they take longer to answer the doorbell than usual, they will notice. And in the worst case scenario, if someone doesn’t respond at all, they’ll call the right people to make sure the person is okay.
“If she [comes to the door at] the normal time and the next day she doesn’t come to the door, something’s wrong, ”Smith said. She might need your help. “
Covid has created other challenges as well.
Before the pandemic, Smith saw his customers at the door of their apartment and handed them their food. Now, due to social distancing guidelines, Smith and the other Citymeals delivery drivers cannot come to everyone’s door. Smith’s clients must leave their apartments and meet him outside their buildings for their meals.
Some, like 89-year-old Hector Ortiz and his wife, have difficulty walking up and down the stairs to their Brooklyn third-floor apartment. “My legs are bad,” Ortiz said
Smith found a solution, a solution he had used in the past for customers with mobility issues.
On a chilly morning, Ortiz cranes his neck out of his apartment window and waves to Smith downstairs. He lowers a rope, which Smith ties to a plastic bag containing the meal of the day, the beef stew.
“The invention works!” Ortiz said. “The food is great and Andrew Smith is even better.”
Smith now uses the rope system to route the Ortizes and several other customers every day. He will probably have to use it for a while.
Citymeals is the largest of 5,000 independent meal-to-home organizations across the country. Shapiro says everyone is trying to figure out how to continue to meet an ever-growing need.
“It doesn’t end tomorrow,” Shapiro said. “It doesn’t end in six months with a vaccine. There will be long-term implications of what we’ve been through. And I think there will be more elderly people who will need food than ever before.”
As to why she is doing this job, Shapiro says she sees it as a moral obligation. “The people we feed built this city. They built the country for us.”
It’s something Andrew Smith sees every day when the sun rises.
[ad_2]
Source link