Making a Difference: Meals on Wheels

The kitchen at the Waynesboro Senior Center is busy weekday mornings preparing food for the local Meals on Wheels program.

And then it’s up to volunteers like Brenda Mawyer and Mary Groah to get the meals out to seniors who rely on the hot food to get through their days.

Mawyer and Groah are members at Fishersville Baptist Church, which provides a good number of volunteers to the local Meals on Wheels program.

The two volunteer together once a month, delivering meals to seniors in and around Fishersville.

“I really enjoy it. I enjoy getting out and meeting people. I know a lot of them, too,” Groah said.

“We enjoy being together. We go to church together. And she doesn’t drive. And her husband just died in March, and mine died five years ago. So we do this together, and then when we’re done, we go out to lunch. We have a good time with it,” Mawyer said.

Meals Coordinator Linda Roetto oversees an operation that gets food out to more than 150 local seniors daily.

“People don’t understand what the need is until they go out and see what the situation is. In some cases, it’s more severe than others. But when you know that you’re lending a helping hand to those folks, it makes you feel good,” Roetto said.

The volunteers provide another valuable service to local seniors.

“It’s kind of like a check-in system on these folks,” Roetto said. “There’s been several times that volunteers have gone out to deliver meals, and they’ve found that maybe someone has fallen and been down for a day or two. We’ve had that instance happen, where maybe someone had fallen and broken a hip and couldn’t get up.”

Mawyer ran into one of those situations herself a few months ago.

“I found a lady who had fallen out of the bed. We finally got a door open and called the rescue squad. If we hadn’t been there that day, I don’t know long she would have been there,” Mawyer said.

To Roetto, it’s hard if not impossible to put a dollar value on what the Meals on Wheels program means to the community.

“It really makes a big, big difference to the folks that are receiving from what we do. They wouldn’t get it if it weren’t for us. If you want something to make you feel good about your own personal purpose in life, this can do it,” Roetto said.