It was 92 degree outside but I was very peaceful and happy inside.

Past Saturday, it was my first time volunteering with Meals on Wheel project under New York Cares Organization. This project hand-delivers meals to homebound elderly New Yorkers. One in four elderly New Yorkers is living alone, too poor to buy food, or too weak to shop and cook.

We started the food delivery at 10.30 am in the West Village area. To make the volunteer’s life easier, we were paired together because there was more food than one person could carry. Also, to make sure that if something happened during the delivery, they could help each other out.

Under the Health Department regulations, hot food need to be delivered within two hours in order to make sure that the food will still be above certain temperature and safe enough for those seniors. So the number of the seniors who would receive food was designated from an ability of the volunteers to deliver within 2 hours.

All of our elderly we delivered that day lived on the Fifth Ave. We delivered to 7 seniors- 5 females and 2 males.

I was paired with a young white lady who has moved here for a year from California. She is an editor for two magazines. I noticed that her left hand was deformed and she barely lifted up the food containers.

I was so impressed by her devotion.

Both of us walked down the Fifth Ave. with three big red bags on our shoulders. We looked like a Pizza Hut delivery boy and girl.

The bags were pretty heavy and the weather was brutal but we found ourselves enjoying our food delivery.

All of the elderly we delivered food lived in the very nice building. We guessed they must be living in the rent control apartment. That’s why they could afford to live there.

Most of them were at least in their seventies and barely walked. One male senior was so overweighed that he barely lifted himself from a chair so we went in his apartment and just left the food in the kitchen.

The saddest moment for us was the elderly number four who lived on the 11th floor.

When we got there, the door was opened. Both of us knocked at the door said hello for 5 minutes but no one came to the door. So we decided to walk into her room. The room was clean. The furniture was old. It looked very lonely.

We walked to every room while saying hello. Still we could not find anyone or any signs of any living in there.

Finally, we saw this fragile old lady sitting on the bed; her back was against us. We said hello twice but she still did not hear it. It seemed to me her mind was wandering somewhere. Then I saw her holding an old box with full of black and white photos in her bony arms. I was so sad. I thought her mind was visiting the past. She might be missing someone who she loved dearly, someone who has left her with some reasons and someone who she wished they were there with her right then.

Finally she realized that someone was in her room after our concert effort of saying hello. She was soaking wet with sweat and barely walked to the door. She did not understand what we were saying because the ability of her listening has tremendously declined.

So we decided to put the meals on the table and closed the door for her just to make sure that no one would walk into her room without her knowing.

We walked out of her room without a word.

Our project went on. We finished around 12 pm.

Since it is summer, most of NYU students who are regular volunteers there went back to their hometown or went for vacations. A staff there asked me if I could help them delivering food every Saturday until September because they did not have enough volunteers and some elderly did not have enough food.

Since I really like and always want to volunteer in this project, I enthusiastically said yes.

When I finished delivering, I could not help but wonder if these elderly had any kids at all. Perhaps, I am Asian. Our family bond is very strong. It is our noble obligation to take care our parent when they are old. This was why I was saddened by those pictures of lonely elderly living by themselves.

I feel their loneliness and I know they need helps badly.