By Allie Ward
For the roughly 80 people per week who rely on the service of Hamilton Mobile Meals for food, the potential for a road-closing blizzard is a nightmarish, yet all-too-real possibility this time of year.
The Nottingham Women’s Club has, for the last 15 years, done its part to ease a bit of that anxiety.
Once a year, as they did Jan. 9, members of the Hamilton Square social group gather in a back room of the First Presbyterian Church on Nottingham Way and fill brown paper lunch bags with canned soups, packages of crackers and desserts. Eventually, 70 bags stood on a table, loaded with enough sustenance to tide Mobile Meals clients over until someone can reach their home with food.
The NWC calls these edible contingency plans “Blizzard Bags.”
“The people that deal with Mobile Meals are usually housebound or elderly and [the Blizzard Bags are] our way of giving back to the community and helping out,” NWC president Shirley Novak said. “I’m sure it brightens their days a little bit.”
The Blizzard Bags can be used any time the weather prevents Mobile Meals volunteers from delivering the normal hot meals.
Angela Korchma, a NWC member for 48 years, said the bags fit right into the club’s emphasis on supporting those in the community.
“There a lot of starving people, and the people with Mobile Meals generally cannot get out of the house to buy their own food so this sort of helps them out,” she said.
The NWC also works with the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen and HomeFront, and makes cookies for Mobile Meals clients every December.
Eileen Eversheim, Mobile Meals executive director, said her customers have come to rely on the Blizzard Bags.
“They know exactly why they’re getting it and they appreciate it,” she said. “The number of thank you notes is surprising because when you see the condition of some of these people, you think ‘just how possible is everyday life for them?’”
The NWC assembles the bags, which Eversheim collects and distributes to volunteers for delivery. Whether chronically ill, convalescing or permanently homebound, most Mobile Meals clients receive everything from the outside world.
Last winter, Mobile Meals had to cancel service four times due to bad weather. And that’s not counting the times where clients have asked volunteers not to come out of concern about road condition. Eversheim said Mobile Meals volunteers do everything they can to help clients, and they hope clients’ families step in when Mobile Meals is unable to deliver.
But should that not occur, the homebound have the Blizzard Bags to fall back on.
“What [the NWC] is doing is putting in a human touch,” Eversheim said. “They treat these people like people, and they’ve never even met them. It speaks volumes about what kind of women they are.”
Club members (front) Kay Mascherin
