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It was another virus, another time. AIDS was ravaging New York.
The year was 1985, a scary era in the city, scary in large part because no one knew how easily the virus was transmitted or who might be getting infected next. But it was deadly. There was no doubt about that.
A hospice worker named Ganga Stone paid a visit to a patient named Richard Sale and made what in hindsight might sound like an obvious discovery. Richard was too sick to cook his own meals. Moved by compassion, Ganga prepared some food and brought it over. That day, a beautiful idea was born. What he’d received, Richard said, was more than meat, starch and vegetables. As he saw it and millions soon would, it was a generous delivery of God’s love.
Volunteers were recruited, cooks and delivery people. A couple of local restaurants signed on. God’s Love We Deliver, as the group was called, set up in a kitchen at West Park Presbyterian Church on the Upper West Side. The Gay Men’s Chorus contributed a walk-in freezer. David Dinkins, then the Manhattan borough president and later mayor of New York City, presented “Little Blue,” the group’s first van. In 2001, the mission was expanded to include people living with serious illnesses beyond HIV/AIDS. By 2011, the daily meal count hit 4,000, and there was no turning back. Twenty-five million meals have been delivered over the years.
But as another mysterious virus tightens its grip on New York, can the lessons of AIDS be applied just as well to COVID-19? Or has God’s Love We Deliver finally met its match?
Not so long ago, no one could say for sure. The whole idea, after all, is that a food delivery isn’t just a food delivery. It’s an opportunity for so much more: A human connection. An emotional lifeline. Face-to-face contact. Nutrition of an entirely different kind. But with a deadly virus floating everywhere, an infection far easier to catch than the one that caused AIDS, would volunteers still show up at the God’s Love commissary, now in SoHo. Would others fan out across the city and ring the buzzers at sick people’s homes? Would masks, gloves and travel-size Purell bottles make everyone feel safe?
“Some of the volunteers aren’t able to come in anymore, some of the older people and those with health conditions,” said Mindy Liu, a Manhattan resident and veteran of the advertising industry who is a six-year, two-day-a-week God’s Love volunteer. “But at the same time, we’ve gotten a lot of new volunteers, which is terrific,” including quite a few New Yorkers whose schedules are suddenly more flexible in this work-from-home era.
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Strict safety precautions, she said, are now the rule in the busy God’s Love kitchen and on the kitting line, where volunteers assemble meals according to each client’s dietary needs. “There’s tape on the floor, keeping everyone six feet apart from each other. We used to be elbow to elbow. And of course, everyone’s wearing masks now. It seems to be working out well.”
One thing she misses? “Before COVID, some of us used to grab lunch after our shift. It’s hard to say when that might return.”
The delivery routines have had to be altered, as well. “We can’t do it exactly like we used to, not with this new disease everywhere,” said Norma Grant, a 69-year-old retired elementary-school teacher who lives in Brooklyn has been volunteering two or three times a week for the past 25 years. No deadly virus is keeping Norma at home.
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She’s still scooping soup in the God’s Love kitchen, but her Wednesday deliveries to the Upper West Side have been suspended for now. “The van driver is doing it alone,” she said. But the warm connections she’s made with her regulars are not easily abandoned. She’s still calling every week to check on them.
“It’s a lot of people who live by themselves or else they have a home-care person,” Norma said. “They confide in me. They tell me how they’re feeling. They talk about the problems they’re having with the home-care person. Whatever it is, I listen and try to be supportive. For a lot of them, I’m the only person they have to talk to. I wouldn’t feel right just disappearing on them.”
There are so many differences between the two diseases, COVID-19 and HIV/AIDS. AIDS has been around for more than 35 years now. COVID’s lifespan is measured in months. Who’s most vulnerable, medicine’s response, the public stigma faced by patients—nothing’s precisely the same. And yet love can be part of the cure for anything.
“When I started volunteering, we were in the midst of AIDS,” Norma Grant said. “This is like coming full circle in a way. We learned a lot before. We’re learning more now. But it’s still the personal connection as much as the food.”
Ellis Henican is an author based in New York City and a former newspaper columnist.
