VOICE FOR EVERYONE | Share your voice with KSHB 41's Grant Stephens
It starts early, with dozens of meals packed up, then packed out by volunteers.
The meals are a lifeline for hundreds of older, often disabled people that the KC Shepherd Center's Meals on Wheels program serves.
"So this is really important, this is their life," said Roxanna Swaney, director of Meals on Wheels at the Kansas City Shepherd Center.
The primary function of the program is of course delivering meals, but Swaney says it has a second, nearly just as important function.
"Really, meals are like the entree, forgive the pun, into what we really have to do," she said.
She says that second function is a welfare check on their clients — something of particular importance during a heat wave.
Bill Kalahurka is a vounteer delivery driver.
"For maybe a good part of them, we're the only human contact face to face they have all day," he said.
He's been that contact for roughly 16 years.
"For lack of a better word, a daily friend," he said. "A daily visitor — it's much more than just giving out a meal."
He says each delivery is a chance to make sure clients have enough water and that they're keeping cool.
It can make all the difference.
"In a very real sense we're an extension of their immediate or extended family," he said. And if you do this long enough you become a family member to these folks."
—
