Today I joined
Rick Nakama and
Mark Tam in delivering food to senior citizens through
Lanakila Pacific’s Meals On Wheels program. Rick and Mark usually go every Monday to deliver food on their usual route through downtown and Liliha area. There are 99 routes throughout Oahu that services senior citizens that have the greatest need in low income and rural areas. They are always in need of volunteers! So if you have some free time and want to help a great cause sign up! They have some saturday routes open right now!
Here is the entrance to where you pick up the food to deliver..
All the orange bags that the volunteers pack the food in! This guy really wanted to be in all my pictures. Haha! But sadly it came out blurry..
Make sure to count all the food before you leave so you don’t have to come back if you are short a meal..!
Here are Rick and Mark putting all the food into the car.. they look so happy!
Great team work!
Here’s me consulting the route directions and all the addresses to the places we are delivering to.
Here’s our driver! But I have no idea what he’s doing in this picture..
*Okay I found out what he’s doing.. He left a comment on explaining. http://lalalinzy.com/events/meals-on-wheels-adventure/#comments
I was the navigator! Made sure we delivered to all the right places.. and the right amount of food. It’s an important job.
Mark was our food protector/runner! But I have no picture of him since he was being camera shy.
So Mark and Rick told me that it usually takes them only 1 hour to complete the route. However, today we ran into some interesting situations…
First off.. there were road closures everywhere!! So we had to make a couple of detours. We were stuck in this traffic for awhile. Ahh!! We even considered having Mark run out of the car and down the street to deliver the food so we wouldn’t have to wait anymore. Haha.
Then we ran into Ricky Li waiting at the bus stop!! Haha like his pose…
He took a cool picture of us waving at him… =) (credit pic: Ricky Li)
Delivering food! The people were really nice..
This man was so cute… He was waving to the camera.
This is what Rick does when Mark and I deliver the food. He watches the car and tweets!
Then we ran into more road blocks!! Ahhh!! Mini transformers coming to attack us! (That’s what Rick called them)
And then came the rain!! haha!!
But despite all the delays and roadblocks we made it back to return the bags!
Tried to take a group picture in front of the sign but my head blocked part of it… whoops.
I had a lot of fun today delivering food. I think what makes it so great is that not only are you doing something good but you’re having fun driving around with your friends as well.
Check out Lanakila Pacific’s Website for more info and follow them on twitter!
Here’s a video of another incident that happened during the delivering. One of the elevators in a building was broken so we walked up 19 flights of stairs. There was a lady that was waiting in the lobby for 20 minutes for the elevator so that’s why we decided to take the stairs.
I didn’t edit it so watch it if you’re really curious and want to hear us talking trash about Rick for a good 5 minutes while climbing up all the stairs. haha. Also lots of blair witch action going on to make it more “real”. =P
It was a fun adventure! Hope more people get the chance to do this.. =)
Also stay tuned for part 2 of our day… lunch at a new restaurant called Jin Din Rou!
