Every morning on weekdays for almost 20 years, Andrew Smith wakes up at dawn. He drives to a senior center in Brooklyn and loads a refrigerated truck with hot meals as the sun rises over New York City.
Smith is a delivery driver for Riseboro, a Citymeals on Wheels community partner. Her job is to deliver a hot meal – and a sense of security – to 92 elderly people who live at home every day.
Smith is responsible for a small part of the 20,000 meals that Citymeals offers daily, but each meal is critical to the survival of the recipient. Without meals, many of those served could not stay in their own homes.
The hunger of the elderly often goes unnoticed and those who suffer from it are often not seen, hiding in their homes due to mobility problems. Unable to shop or cook due to physical limitations, they depend on city meals.
Smith has developed such an intimate knowledge of the people he serves that he can schedule births according to the medication schedules of some people on his way. At his first stop, at 93-year-old Dorina Eduarte’s house, he offers a warm “M’lady” along with 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,” said Smith.
The pandemic caught the attention of the elderly, who are the most vulnerable to the virus. For many seniors, a trip to the supermarket can be fatal. People aged 65 to 74 are 90 times more likely to die from Covid and people over 65 represent eight out of ten Covid deaths.
The pandemic has worsened America’s already terrible hunger problem in America. Before the pandemic, there were about 5.8 million hungry elderly people across the country. Since the pandemic began in March, that number is believed to have increased rapidly.
National statistics have not yet been compiled, but there are figures for New York City. Before the pandemic, one in ten older New Yorkers was food insecure, but now that number has risen to one in five, according to a study by FoodBank NYC.
Since March, Citymeals has delivered 2.5 million meals to elderly people living at home in New York City. It delivered more than 3 million in the entire year 2020, an increase of 64 percent over the previous year.
Beth Shapiro, executive director of Citymeals, says the nonprofit has not missed a single meal delivered since the pandemic began. She says it is a tribute, in part, to the legion of volunteers who volunteered to help, doubling the number in previous years. Eighty thousand hours of volunteering were recorded in 2020.
Shapiro says his group gets 12% of its $ 25 million annual budget from the city. The rest is collected through donations.
“I think the social safety net is very limited,” said Shapiro. “We must not go hungry in this city or in this country. And certainly the elderly must not go hungry. We would not be there without them and we have systems that can take care of them.”
Back in Brooklyn, Andrew Smith is unfailingly cheerful. He says he was able to win over even the most skeptical seniors with persistent kindness. It took him three days with a woman, he says, but she is now looking forward to seeing him. “You know, even if it’s not a big day, you say, ‘Have a great day’, because at the end of the day it will be a great day because he has finished a meal.”
Smith is not only the only source of human interaction for many of his clients, he is also the only person in a position to notice if something is wrong. If a customer looks mentally confused when he is normally lucid or takes longer to answer the bell than usual, he will notice. And in the worst case, if someone doesn’t answer, they’ll call the right people to make sure the person is okay.
“If she [comes to the door at] at normal hours and the next day she will not answer, something is wrong, “said Smith.” She may need your help. “
Covid has also created other challenges.
Before the pandemic, Smith saw his customers at the door of his apartments and handed them food. Now, because of social detachment guidelines, Smith and the other Citymeals delivery drivers are not allowed to go to each other’s doorsteps. Smith’s clients need to leave their apartments and meet him outside their buildings for meals.
Some, like 89-year-old Hector Ortiz and his wife, find it difficult to walk up and down the stairs to their third-floor apartment in Brooklyn. “My legs are bad,” said Ortiz
Smith presented a solution, which he had already used for customers with mobility problems.
On a cold morning, Ortiz cranes his window out of his apartment and waves to Smith downstairs. He lowers a rope, which Smith ties to a plastic bag containing the meal of the day, meat stew.
“The invention works!” said Ortiz. “The food is great and Andrew Smith is even better.”
Smith now uses the rope system to bring food to Ortizes and several other customers every day. He will probably have to use it for some time.
Citymeals is the largest of 5,000 independent Meals on Wheels organizations across the country. Shapiro says that they are all trying to figure out how to keep meeting an ever-increasing need.
“It won’t end tomorrow,” said Shapiro. “It will not end in six months with a vaccine. There will be long-term implications for what we experience. And I think there will be more elderly people in need of food than ever before. ”
As to why she does this job, Shapiro says he sees it as a moral obligation. “The people we are feeding have built this city. They built the country for us.”
It is something that Andrew Smith sees every day when the sun rises.