The service event I partook in was being a driver for a Meals on Wheels route on Saturday February 9th. My route took my group around the Downtown Columbus area with the exception of a couple homes that were about ten minutes outside of the downtown area. This relates to International Affairs in a couple different ways, some of the meals we delivered were to elderly immigrants, but on a larger scale, I volunteered my time to help a cause that fights one of the worlds biggest issues. Poverty.

What exactly is Meals on Wheels? 

LifeCare Alliance is a local nonprofit health care agency that merged with Meals on Wheels of Madison, Marion, Logan, and Champaign counties(Ohio). This merger allowed for Meals on Wheels to have a greater and more organized outreach to the population they support. The goal of Meals on Wheels is to improve or maintain the health of impaired elderly by providing nutritious meals, a daily check and reporting system, and a social contact. Its often said that this program is “More than just a meal”. This entire program runs off of individual donations, government grants, and the help of volunteers. There are employees that help to secure funding, make and package the food, and organize the volunteers. Essentially, how they operate is by giving volunteers specific routes to follow with a checklist of items and special directions for each delivery there is.

What exactly did I do? 

First, through one of my classes, I had a group assigned and was with two other guys. We arrived at 10 am and signed a release form and I also had my ID scan as proof of validity. After that, our group along with five-six others were taken to another room where we were given instructions as to what exactly we were doing as well as route selection. After this little training session, we proceeded to go outside and pick-up the food that corresponded to our route number and loaded it into my car. We had to make eight stops, and our group decided since there were only three of us we would all go into the houses for safety reasons, but also so we could all experience what this program was about and who it served. One of the houses we delivered a meal to, the woman actually had us trying to fix her T.V. and seemed liked she really wanted us to stay longer as she kept bringing up new topics of discussion and we happily obliged. Part of the reason for Meals on Wheels is to provide social contact, so that is what we happily offered.

Takeaways 

I had a lot of preconceived notions due to what I have heard others say about their experiences, but most of them were broken. Every single person we visited  was extremely sweet and grateful towards us, but before delivering, I was led to believe that many people would be grumpy and non-thankful, but that was far from true. A belief I had established myself was that all these homes would be in ghetto unsafe areas, but it turned out to not be necessarily true. While some homes weren’t in amazing locations, they were still somewhat nicer than what I would have expected. This is a service program that I could see myself doing again in the future as it was a truly enriching experience.