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Council needs help

To the Editor,

As we make our weekly grocery lists this week and wonder what to do with leftovers crowding our refrigerator, let us not forget those seniors and disabled among us in Osceola County who do not even understand those issues because their refrigerators are almost bare and they never make a grocery list.

The Osceola Council on Aging has been forced due to fiscal cuts to establish a Waiting List for Meals on Wheels. That translates to seniors in wheelchairs or walkers trying to make a peanut butter sandwich or warm a can of soup and calling it dinner. Could you cook a meal without standing up?

It seems like only yesterday that the Council on Aging was crowded each morning with senior volunteer drivers anxious to deliver their routes and see the waiting faces of their regular clients. Perhaps it cost them $2 a week for gas to deliver a few days each week. Most of those wonderful, generous volunteers have had to forsake this daily activity when the cost of gas went to $10 or $12 a week and their own Social Security has not gone up to compensate. The list of clients has grown with the downturn of the economy and the aging of our residents. There are still volunteers but the demographics have changed drastically. The council has solicited generous corporations to allow employees to deliver Meals on Wheels during paid working hours and many younger unemployed are doing what they can to help as well, but the staff of the Council has had to fill the gap.

We need the entire community to be made aware of this pitiful situation. Men are still paying $300 for a suit and women are buying $150 shoes and having weekly manicures and pedicures and our unseen seniors cant get a hot meal or a pint of milk every day because there arent enough dollars to provide these basic services. These arent people who have squandered their money. Most have had illnesses which wiped out their savings, have no local families to see to their needs, have outlived their peers, and are too proud to yell help when they need it so badly.

So, on their behalf I appeal to you. If you are a stay-at-home mom or temporarily unemployed and can donate an hour and a gallon of gas one day a week, let the Council know youd like to deliver. If you are an employer who can spare even one employee or more as little as one day a month, your help is needed. The needs are so great and the funds are so short. The councils No. 1 priority is providing nutrition to those who cant properly feed themselves.

Kissimmee, St. Cloud and Osceola County have some of the most generous people on earth. I believe they simply dont know how much need there is for their generosity through donations of time and money to the Council on Aging. You dont have to win the lottery to do good works for people. $5 buys a hot delivered meal. Save one shopping trip and use that gas to deliver a route once a month. Good things start in small measures. Think of those frail seniors who cant stand at their doors and plead for your help as you speed by. They are really there..... behind those closed doors.

Pat Scarborough

Kissimmee

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Letters to the Editor for April 6, 2013