Every Monday through Saturday, volunteers visit a number of Ottawa kitchens before lunch to pick up prepared meals and deliver them to those who are elderly, have disabilities, or are recovering from an illness or an operation. Each day, these eight kitchens become a gathering place for people with a specific purpose in mind: to provide food to clients of the not-for-profit agency Meals on Wheels.
10:40 a.m. Inside the kitchen of The Good Companions Senior Centre on Albert Street, workers and volunteers are already well into the daily cooking process on the morning of Nov. 6. (Photo Zhuyin Fan Centrentown News)
10:43 a.m. Seventeen minutes left before volunteer drivers picking up food. The process of food preparation is almost finished. (Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
Volunteer Marry Harrison puts the sealed trays into their temporary home: a heated box to keep the food warm. (Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
Kitchen volunteers put hot water bottles in the carrying bags to ensure the food retains warm before arriving the final destination. (Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
10:46 a.m. With only 4 minutes until drivers will arrive to transport the trays from kitchen to home, Harrison energetically sorts the food into its proper bag – the brown bag for soups, blue for desserts, and black for meals. (Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
10:50 a.m. Aaron Brown, a member of the kitchen staff, pushes a cart weighed down by fully-sorted meals to the office lobby for volunteer drivers to pick up. (Photo Zhuyin Fan Centrentown News)
10:50 a.m. Volunteer drivers arrive on time for route delivery. Most of them do a route twice a week. (Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
10:51 a.m. Krista Gerard reviews a checklist of her responsibilities as a volunteer driver. Today, she has a diabetic diet meal, she needs to make sure the special one is in her carrying bags. ( Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
10:53 a.m. Gerard is ready to go. Centretown area has 13 delivery routes, the agency assigns each driver two or three routes. (Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
11: 07 a.m. Meals on the way. Jo Buss has been volunteering for Meals on Wheels client service for three years, sometimes she plays the driver role. (Zhuyin Fan, Centretown News)
Friday, 9:10 a.m. Lisa Wilson (left ) said the relationship between client and volunteer is strengthened every time she drops off a meal, and that is why she has continued volunteering since joining MOW’s Board of Directors. (Liam Leonard, Centretown News)
Bruce Muise, who has been volunteering at Meals on Wheels for seven and a half years, loads bags of frozen meals into the back of his car for delivery. (Liam Leonard, Centretown News)