Evy Mages/FOR THE WASHINGTON POST - Regina Peterson, 83, greets students delivering food to needy senior citizens in Howard County. “Oh, this is wonderful!” she said.
So in 2007, she organized parents, teachers and children at Pointers Run Elementary School to bag and deliver groceries to low income seniors at Morningside Park Apartments in Jessup. The experience was eye-opening for her daughter, Jenny Mandl.
“Honestly, when I was little, I thought money just came out of the walls,” Jenny, now 15, tells me. “I’d been to New York and seen homeless people. But that was all I understood about stuff like poverty.”
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The key to this approach is for the kids to do more than fill a bin with canned peas and boxes of cereal. By handing the food to people in need, they get a more intimate look at what people who struggle might look like (see: Lily’s observation), and they get that infectious sense of satisfaction that comes with giving.
Each year the program got bigger and involved more schools. There are now nine schools involved, along with some churches and Scout groups. From the start, the focus has been on seniors. Almost 16 percent of those 65 and older are poor, once their medical expenses are taken into consideration, according to a U.S. Census report released this month.
“I know seniors who were struggling with food and medical payments, so they started taking their really important medicine every other day,” Rosenthal says.
Grace Adams, 72, says she hasn’t been that desperate yet. A former live-in nanny, she gets her medications for free. But the bag of food that comes on the 15th “lets me sometimes save my money to spend on something special for myself. Like lotion,” she tells me.
Babatu Sekou, 66 and a combat veteran, says his steel company pension was cut it half recently and his military benefits barely pay his bills. He’s delighted to get the food each month.
In the lobby, I see him slump a little after the departure of the giggling kids, with their carts and squeaky voices and metal mouth smiles. It was quiet when they were gone. Just the squeak of a walker passing by us.
“That’s the part I really love,” Sekou says. “All the kids coming in here.”
E-mail me at dvorakp@washpost.com.
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