Community provides hot meals for residents of local senior community

WILMINGTON, N.C. (WECT) - New Hanover County staff and community partners helped provide 540 hot meals and non-perishable items, hand sanitizer and other resources to residents of Robert R. Taylor Senior Homes.

“We’re grateful for their commitment to keeping our community #SafeHealthySecure,” said New Hanover County in a Facebook post.

Involved groups include the NHC Emergency Management and Health and Human Services departments, the NHC Office of Diversity and Equity, Port City United and the NHC Senior Resource Center.

Robert R. Taylor Senior Homes is a Wilmington Housing Authority apartment building for residents aged 55 and older.

This comes after the seniors living in the facility went without water for a week because of a pipe that burst.

Staff from the facility passed out water bottles to the residents during the outage, but Myrus Sawyer, who has lived there for more than a decade, said she and other residents are grateful to all who helped them out with donations.

“We thank everybody for what they did and donated and helping us get ourselves back together because it was a crisis to us,” Sawyer said.

She says there were several other organizations, including churches and businesses, who donated as well.

Sawyer says going forward, she hopes there will be more communication provided to residents about any issues. She says she and her neighbors are thankful to have water restored and to be able to return to a normal way of living.

“We hope that the next time this happens, they feel like they can talk to us, because we are not children,” Sawyer said. “We are residents that pay our rent ... so we need to be talked to as adults and whatever’s going on, just tell us and see if we can work together on the problem.”

Copyright 2023 WECT. All rights reserved.