|
|
|
|
||
|
||
|
|
||
| SEARCH | SUBSCRIBE | ||
 |
Old & Hungry in a Booming CityBy: Heidi Evans In this richest of cities, in these richest of times, tens of thousands of elderly New Yorkers do not have enough to eat or eat so poorly that their very survival is at risk, a Sunday News inquiry has found. At soup kitchens and food pantries alone, more than 1 in 10 seniors is turned away without food each month. There is also a one- to two-month waiting list in several areas of the city for the meals on wheels program — which delivers one meal a day to older people who can no longer shop or cook for themselves.
And most alarming, poverty among New Yorkers 65 and older is at record levels, according to a new analysis by the Community Service Society. The report found that in 1998, 22%, or 216,000, of the 970,000 New Yorkers over 65 were living at or below poverty level — twice the national average. For an old person living alone in New York, that means getting by on $651 a month or less; for a couple, less than $821. A stunning 40% — or 384,000 older New Yorkers — live on less than $15,000 a year. After paying rent and medical bills, there is often little left over for food to eat, let alone eat well. "It's one of those dirty little secrets that there are lots of elderly who go hungry each month," said Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) "Despite the efforts of the federal, state and city governments to see that they are fed, many fall through the cracks. It's shameful." Although state and federal studies as recently as 1994 have put one in four seniors at nutritional risk, no one knows the true extent of hunger and malnutrition among New York City's elderly. They are the largely unseen victims of a crisis that is only growing worse. As seniors live longer, especially if they are far from their families, the public and private agencies that help feed them increasingly fall short of meeting their needs. New data paint a painful portrait. A survey released last week by the New York City Coalition Against Hunger found that of 74,000 hungry people turned away from soup kitchens and food pantries in January, more than 8,000 — 11% — were seniors. That number was up from 6,800 seniors in January 1998, and up from 5,300 in 1997. "If I get desperate after I pay the rent, I can stretch $10 to eat for the week," said John Bohac, 75, a retired clerk, as he sat in the basement of St. Francis Xavier Church in Greenwich Village, lunching on franks and beans with dozens of other seniors and homeless. Bohac, whose eyes are starting to fail, added: "I eat breakfast at McDonald's, come here or to a senior center for lunch and just have cake for dinner." Many older New Yorkers get their food through an informal and vast network. The able-bodied poor show up at the more than 1,100 churches and synagogues that run soup kitchens or give away groceries donated by Food for Survival, a mammoth food bank in the Bronx. Some 15,000 ailing New Yorkers get a meal delivered to their door by the meals on wheels program, a public-private partnership that started in 1981. Another 38,000 seniors, most of them retirees in good health, pay $1 to have breakfast or lunch at city-funded senior centers in their neighborhoods, while others are taken care of by their families.
That leaves tens of thousands of the city's hard-pressed elderly — invisible, unaccounted for, living most of their days without the proper food to stay healthy. "So many of our elderly are gradually sinking into malnutrition," said Marcia Stein, executive director of Citymeals-on-Wheels, the private arm of the city's home-delivered meals program. "Just imagine being alone and sick in your apartment, and maybe you can't speak English. Are you going to have the initiative to figure out where you are supposed to go to get a home-delivered meal?" The state Department of Aging estimates that 30% of the elderly who need home-delivered meals in New York State get them. Wo Shun Chung, a 91-year-old invalid who shares a small, dank room with a stranger, is one of the lucky ones. Five days a week, Fooktie Fung Yung climbs the 34 steps of a Chinatown walkup to bring Chung her meal of fish, bok choy, rice and fresh fruit. If not for this meal, Chung, who has two sons she doesn't hear from, says she would eat just rice and cookies. Tears stream down the old woman's face as she asks Yung whether she can help her get an apartment of her own. Her roommate, who works during the day, is abusive, she says. She shares a refrigerator with three other families. "'You are better than my children,' some of them say to us,' said Po-Ling Ng, who runs Project Open Door, a crowded Chinatown senior center nearby that packs in 250 seniors for lunch and prepares another 90 meals for elderly shut-ins such as Chung. "Sometimes we use our own money to buy them little gifts, or a cake." In Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, the sign on Margaret Halbfinger's apartment door instructs the meals on wheels deliveryman to "Please Ring Bell Hard!" "This, my dear lady, is a lifesaver," the 93-year-old widow says as she is handed a hot roast chicken lunch and a cold meal for the Sabbath the next day. "I am completely not well. If I didn't get meals on wheels, I'd starve to death." This summer, Halbfinger lost her 62-year-old son to a long illness. She cries easily and is often too depressed to eat. It was her granddaughter who noticed that she had lost too much weight and called meals on wheels for help. When asked what she does for the other two meals of the day, Halbfinger, who weighs 100 pounds, said, "If I'm lucky, I have a piece of herring and tomato that a neighbor will bring me. "The problem is, the people I know are all older people, they are all sick, and I can't ask them to shop for me. Other times, I'll have an egg. But truthfully, a lot of times, I don't think of food." Malnutrition among the elderly is getting worse, and the problem could explode. In 20 years, one of every five people in the U.S. will be over 65, compared with one in eight now. Already, the oldest old — those over 85 — are the fastest-growing part of the population nationwide and in New York City. From 1980 to 1990, the number of people 85 and older in the city increased 36%, from 75,402 to 102,554. How the city and the country will deal with this is not clear. "One of the great challenges that ... large cities have is to reach those people in need who are isolated. ... These are the people we are constantly striving to reach by extending our network of neighborhood agencies," said Herbert Stupp, the city's commissioner for the aging. "If we don't have institutional, structured ways of protecting people in old age, the costs are staggering," said Dr. Robert Butler, president of the International Longevity Center in Manhattan and one of the nation's foremost experts on aging. "It is much better to prepare for old age financially and avoid the advent of hunger and disease. Because after it happens, it's much more expensive. For a society and for our city, not doing it is like slashing your own tires." The problem is already here. Evidence abounds that many older New Yorkers are living on very little food or without adequate nutrition. Carmen Cotto, director of a food pantry at Pentecostal Church He Is Shalomin the Soundview section of the Bronx, turns away 80 seniors a month. "We have a special line for the seniors, letting them in two at a time, and still we have to send old people away without food," said Cotto. "It is heartbreaking. They come in their wheelchairs, some with canes. You know they're not eating unless they get food from here." In parts of Brooklyn, such as Brighton Beach and East New York, home-delivery program directors say they can take on a new client only after an old client dies or is put in a nursing home. "The wait list is disheartening and creates a great deal of anxiety among the elderly," said David Stern, executive director of the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged, which prepares, packs and delivers 1,100 meals a day for Brooklyn and Queens homebound seniors. "We are squeezing in urgent cases every week. But many people give up and don't apply later," said Stern. One person on the waiting list is a 76-year-old Spanish-speaking man who suffers from severe arthritis and can't stand up long enough to cook for himself. He has coffee for breakfast, a bag of potato chips for lunch and dinner at a Flatbush, Brooklyn, restaurant until his Social Security money runs out. "I feel pity for so many of our elderly," said Jose Albino, who as director of North Brooklyn Mobile Meals serves more than 400 of some of the poorest and frailest people in East New York and Starrett City. The program has a two-month waiting list. "If the delivery vans are running a little late, the phone rings. Many of our clients are sick and can't take their medicine until the food comes. "For holidays, when we are closed," added Albino, "we will bring emergency packages a week before with tuna fish, crackers, apple sauce, soup, juice, cookies and milk. Many times our clients will call for an extra box two days before the holiday and tell us they already ate everything." A look inside an older person's kitchen often tells another common story: The refrigerator has little in it, and the freezer is jammed with small containers of milk, wrapped slices of bread, even entire unopened entrees. Dr. Laurie Jacobs, head of geriatrics at Montefiore Medical Center, said seniors' appetites are often suppressed by medications and by depression. Others are failing mentally and don't remember to eat. They are also a product of their time. "Many of our elderly grew up in the Depression, so they hoard the food," she said. "They are saving for the rainy day, but I tell them, 'This is the rainy day! It's important for you to eat now.'" Dr. Jeffrey Nichols, head of geriatrics at Cabrini Medical Center on the East Side of Manhattan, added: "We spend a lot of time juggling around what medications the frail elderly can afford to buy and still have money left over for food." Malnutrition is especially high among elderly who are hospitalized — and can double the length and cost of their hospital stays. Even physicians could use more training to recognize warning signs of malnutrition in the elderly. Dr. Howard Fillet, a clinical professor of geriatrics at Mount Sinai Medical Center, explained, "Doctors still have problems recognizing that the cute little old lady in the hospital bed with pneumonia is little not because of aging, but because she is malnourished." How can malnutrition among the elderly be reduced? Some experts say the answer is as easy as providing more money to overburdened programs, while others suggest the problem is as deep-seated and intractable as poverty itself. For home-delivered meals, Stein said, more money is needed for "big-ticket items" such as expanding kitchen capacity and getting additional vans to deliver the meals. Funding for a door-to-door survey in neighborhoods where English is not spoken also would help get the word out that the home-delivery service exists. But the real problem may be what experts don't know. "We don't even know what the unmet need is," said Stein. "More people are living longer, they're living alone, especially women, and they're living in poverty." "The horror of this is that you can't solve a problem that you can't precisely identify," said Judith Walker, executive director of the Coalition Against Hunger.
"The emergency food network, while incredibly generous and well-meaning, is made up of volunteers and religious people who think it's a reflection on them if they have to turn people away, so they tend to understate the problem and not make noise about it," said Walker. "As a result, we don't truly know how many elderly people are falling between the cracks." New York City funds 9.4 million meals a year in senior centers and 4.5 million home-delivered meals. Some 71% of the Department for the Aging's $219 budget comes from city tax dollars, making up what the federal government has cut over the years. But medical experts and advocates for the elderly say it is not enough. The city, they say, needs a strategy to prepare for the coming age wave. "We have this huge aging boom coming down the pike, yet there really is no serious planning for services, no vision — it is just a year-to-year struggle for funds," said Bobbie Sackman, director of public policy at the city's Council of Senior Centers and Services. Florence Pannell of South Ozone Park, Queens, has a blunt appraisal of what the future holds.At 73, the widowed grandmother of seven eats lunch for $1 every day with friends at the Theodora G. Jackson Senior Center. She'd rather be working at the dry cleaners, a job she held for 30 years, but can't because of her heart condition. Most of her Social Security check goes for rent. Her children send her "a little something" when they can. But she's not complaining. "We got to get old. Nobody wants to, but what can we do?" said Pannell. "They just have to make better arrangements for us." Angels in the Meal Vans If Terrence Cunningham could sit down to lunch with each of the 750 homebound elderly he and his small army deliver meals to, he would. He's that kind of guy. As coordinator of one of the largest Meals-on-Wheels programs in the city, the big-hearted, teddy bear of a man is one of Brooklyn's quiet heroes, making sure that those who can no longer do for themselves are getting a good, hot meal and a friendly visit six days a week. "If I am short a worker, I will go out there to pack the food and deliver it myself," says Cunningham, who came to New York in 1982 from Kingston, Jamaica. "These seniors are the most important thing to me, and their meals are the most important thing to them. I don't mind shlepping out." Cunningham started delivering meals for the Jewish Association for Services for the Aged in 1987. He became the assistant coordinator of the Brighton Beach program in 1993 and landed the top job in July, overseeing a kitchen and delivery staff of 22 people that gets all those meals delivered between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., rain or shine. The job has its sadnesses, for sure. But there are light moments too. Like the time Ada Chibnick implored him to find a bird in her apartment that she was sure was suffering. "I looked around and realized it was her smoke detector that was giving the chirping sounds," said Cunningham. "I disconnected it and told her to get the super to replace the batteries. She was happy." Cunningham, 49, credits his 78-year-old mother for his compassion. "'Jim Dandy to the rescue' is what we call her," he said. "No matter where a person was from, she reached out to them." But like many unsung heroes, Cunningham is more comfortable giving praise than getting it. There was the time driver Jose del Valle surprised 99-year-old Harry Freilich with a cake on his birthday. And the many times his drivers have stopped to call in if a client doesn't answer the door so Cunningham can call a relative or 911. "We are like a lifeline," he said. Erma Lowenstein wouldn't argue with that. The 79-year-old Midwood woman, who has arthritis and is visually impaired, is one of Cunningham's first clients from his delivery days. They still keep in touch. Nourishment, she will tell you, comes in many forms. "There is the food, but there is also the nourishment of kindness," says Lowenstein. "The meal comes in, but the bell also rings and a man who remembers you comes in to visit. Terrence was very special and still is." Where to Turn
|
